Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 319: Reclaim Your Time

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Why can you never seem to find enough time to make progress on the non-urgent but important priorities that can move you closer to the ideal of the deep life? In this episode, Cal reviews three common “time destroyers,” and for each offers solutions to fight back. He then takes questions and calls from his listeners and ends with a discussion of Amazon and the bureaucracy mailbox. 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: Reclaim Your Time [3:43]  - Is Agile compatible with slow productivity? [34:20] - How can I better structure my days as a master’s student with a job? [36:37] - How often and in what medium should I check my calendar? [42:43] - On days when I have no time, does reading for 20 minutes actually do anything? [46:52] - Will slow productivity make me less ambitious? [52:16] - CALL: Different types of Deep Work [58:04] CASE STUDY:  A teacher’s shutdown ritual [1:03:55] CAL REACTS: A Bureaucracy Mailbox [1:10:24] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy-latest-update-on-amazon-return-to-office-manager-team-ratioThanks to our Sponsors: drinklmnt.com/deepgreenlight.com/deepexpressvpn.com/deepshopify.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the 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 cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work, HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, how long do we just spend on technical equipment issues in the studio? 35 to 40 minutes. 35 to 40 minutes, yeah. And now, Jesse, you can't see it because we don't have video of the opening, but Jesse is now talking into a diminutive version of our mic. Fortunely, we have multiple mics and multiple ways of doing this.

But here's the secret kids, if you're going to run a podcast studio. There's a lot of equipment to do it professionally. And the thing about equipment is that it breaks. Once you say that's the theme of us running our studio is that stuff just breaks. Well, you have a really good hunch for it all because you have your maker lab. So I look at it. I'm like, oh, man, you look at it and you have like a plan. Yeah, like I understand like what does what and what connects to what.

doesn't help us when it just stops working. Like our lights, which should work basically forever. What's our life in this studio, like a year and a half? Yeah, like two years. Yeah, I've got to send them all back. Now we have our sound processor. We use DBX 286S sound processors before our sound board, and one of them is just stopped working.

And so we're bypassing that. So I'm sure everyone is noticing now when they hear Jesse's voice, You're saying, hmm, your compression settings, your DSR and noise gating sounds different that I'm used to with Jesse because we're bypassing the DBX-286S. And if you don't know what that means, congratulations. It's all nonsense. You were able to troublesuit it really quick, though. Yeah. I mean, you switch some cables when you have a sound chain, you isolate what's not working, right?

So we isolate the, it seems like the sound presser is not working. We plug in my mic instead. It's still not working. We plug your mic in the mic. processor. It does work. There we go. We know what's the problem. I think I'd be good. In another life, I'd love to be like a sound technician or like an HVAC guy. I love the like, it's a complicated piece of machinery that does a clear thing and you want it to work and you kind of troubleshoot it. I'd be a good troubleshoot. Actually, from the past episode when you got your HVAC on the second

floor replaced. Yeah. Oh yeah. We got our nice new carrier, Infinity. Work pretty well. The report on that is it can keep up until we get to about 97 degrees or above in high humidity. But even then, so it'll lose ground in the early evening on those days, but then it'll catch up by bedtime. There you go. All right. So there's your, we need some theme music for this. Here is your completely lack of interest, unrelated, non-sequitorious technology update with Cal and Jesse. We actually do have a real show today.

we're going to get technical, we're going to get into weeds on time and time management, go over some ideas that I think are important early in this year. We got some question calls and case studies from you, our listeners. And then in the final segment, I'm going to react to a piece of advice that a well-known executive at a well-known company gave. So it's sort of like a bonus piece of advice for distraction and time management, and we'll run it through the Cal Newport ringer and see if we like it or not. All right, sound like a good plan. Jesse, let's get started with our deep dive. So one of the biggest complaints I hear from people when it comes to the struggle to live and work deeply in an increasingly distracted world is that they don't feel like they have enough time to accomplish the things that are really important to them. Maybe, for example, you want to master some sort of difficult new skill in work, which would then allow you to switch over to freelance work, which would then allow you to work eight months a year and take the other four months and travel the world and surf.

or maybe you're trying to get back in your non-professional life into excellent shape. You want to start competing again in amateur athletic competitions, but you just don't have the time, these key moves that could really unlock a deeper life. You just never feel like you have the time to actually get them done. Today I want to talk about how to fix that problem. All right. So what I'm going to do is identify three, what I call time destroyer. So forces you might not be aware of that is sapping your ability to find time for important priorities in your scale.

schedule each week. We'll explain how they work and then offer concrete advice for how to combat them. All right, let me just say before we get going, a lot of these ideas actually come from my new book, slow productivity. If you haven't gotten this book, you probably should because it goes into more detail on a lot of stuff we're talking about. All right, time destroyer number one, overhead tax. See, one of the biggest things that's making your schedule difficult is not the work you're doing on your projects and commitments. It's the administrative overhead generated by those projects and commitments. Now, what I mean by administrative overhead is the emails, it's the instant messages, it's the meetings, it's the quick check-ins that surround your work on your projects and initiatives.

these are the things that grab your time in a way that is much more destructive than just say concurrent hours spent cranking on a particular problem. So when you have enough overhead tax, so you're working on enough things that you're generating overhead tax, when you have enough overhead tax that it crosses a certain threshold of your day. So a certain percentage of your time now is just servicing projects instead of working on them. there's a threshold I call the excessive overhead threshold when you pass that disaster follows your work becomes mind numbing it becomes fatiguing and it becomes exhausting so if you have a sufficient amount of overhead tax in your day and you pass the excessive overhead threshold it becomes very difficult to make progress on non-urgent but important priorities all right so we have to make sure that you do not cross the excessive overhead threshold a lot of ideas about what you can do about this i'll go through this really quickly. Number one, say no to more things. Everything you say yes to brings with it some overhead tax. This aggregates. If you do not want this sum to get past that excessive threshold, you can't add as many things onto your plate. So you have to be more confident saying no to things.

I think we often overestimate in our mind what's going to happen when we say no. We often in our mind's eye, imagine that this colleague who just came to us to ask if we would jump on this committee or whatever had just spent the last six hours desperately wanting, thinking about it, desperately saying, like, what's going to happen? I hope Cal says yes. My whole life depends on this. That, like, when he left work for that work this morning, he said to his wife, like, wish me luck or we really need Cal to say yes to this.

That, like, on the way to work, everyone he saw was like, hey, good luck today getting Cal to say yes to this. So if you say, no, it's going to be some disaster. The reality is he, like remembered to ask you that two minutes before and we'll forget you said no two minutes after. So say no to more things. Two, have quotas for certain types of work that's important that you do and it comes up again and again have quotas. I do this, but I don't do more than this many.

I speak, but I don't do more than one speaking event a month. I do reviews, but I don't review more than four papers a semester. I can join working groups at my company, but I only can be on one working group at a time. So you set quota, so you're still doing the things that are important, but you're not doing too many of them. It's very easy. If you say one of these activities is important, it's easy then to never say no. Because you say, well, wait a second, it's important that I sit on working groups. It's important that I review papers.

So how can I say no? And then you say yes to so many that the overhead tax overwhelms you. So quotas is a way to still do the things that are important, but do it at a level that is reasonable. A big idea we've talked about several times now on the show, and I really detail in slow productivity, is differentiate between projects that you're actively working on versus projects that you're. waiting to work on. So these are the things you've said yes to. But among the things you've said yes to, only designate two or three to be actively receiving your attention, everything else you're waiting on. Only tolerate overhead tax for the active projects. You'll do emails and

meetings and calls and make progress. The other things are waiting. And when you finish one of these projects that you're actively working on, you pull in something new from the waiting list. So you may have said yes to 10 projects, but only two or three of them are generating overhead tax at the same time. So you don't have to say no to people, but you can prevent tripping over the excessive overhead threshold. Now the key is if someone tries to generate some administrative overhead for something that's in the waiting queue, you just say to them, oh, I'm not working on that yet. In fact, you can point them towards your queue. Put it in a shared document. Here's the things I'm actively working on.

Here's the ordered queue of things I'm waiting to work on. you can see exactly where you are in that order, and as soon as it gets to the top of the list, I'll pull it over, and I'll let you know. We can have calls and meetings and we'll take care of it, but I only do overhead on the stuff I'm actively working on. So it's a way that if you can't say no, you can still reduce overhead tax. Finally, here's a new idea. Consider dedicating different roles to different days. A lot of people in their job implicitly have multiple roles that they do. There's maybe some managerial role.

there's a project lead role, there's a role they do with an unrelated responsibility around client management, that you have multiple roles at your job. Professors often have roles as researchers, teachers, and service-oriented department members. These are like different roles with different types of work. Consider dedicating different days to different roles. Wednesday is my day I work on this role. So I'm only dealing with administrative overhead related to that role on this day. A lot of professors, for example, will make the days they teach, days that they dedicate entirely to the teaching role. So they'll answer emails and have meetings and get into it.

But they don't engage in administrative overhead related to their courses on the other days. So by just consolidating administrative overhead to particular days, you prevent any one day from having everything fall on your head. Again, you're kind of hacking the excessive overhead threshold here. You're not reducing the number of things that are generating overhead, but you're preventing all this overhead from, you all at once. All right, time destroyer number two, schedule fragmentation. So we often think that the key resource for getting things done, for making progress on things that are important to us, is the amount of time we have available to do it.

Right. So you would think what matters is when I look at my week and I've already got a bunch of stuff schedules, I should just count up the minutes that are unscheduled. And as long as I have enough time there, I can dedicate that to making progress on non-urgent but important priorities, the stuff that you need to make your deep life deep. That's not the right metric, though. Once you understand how the human mind works, you realize the right metric is actually non-trivially length blocks of undistracted time. That is the key unit that transforms the useful progress.

You give me an hour of uninterrupted time. I can make progress on something. You give me six, ten-minute blocks that are highly distracted and in between other things going on. That's useless to me. That doesn't add up to the same as having 60 uninterrupted. interrupted men is to actually work on something. So the actual, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the If there's an incoming request, we typically think about this as here's the game. There's an incoming request.

The game is one if we can find a time that works for both of us. So any time that is currently free when an incoming request comes in is fair game for scheduling that request. As a result, you're essentially simulating a random distribution of meetings and appointments on your free time throughout the week. It's as if, for example, you put up a big calendar on your wall with a space for every free hour, and you started throwing darts at it, and where those darts hit is where you're putting meetings. You're getting a sort of uniform distribution, the use of statistical term. Well, the thing about uniform distributions is you're unlikely to have lots of long swaths of uninterrupted time, right? Because things are going to be more evenly spread out.

So if you have no constraints about how you schedule things, you're going to really fragment your schedule. and so the free time you do have is going to be highly unusable. So what's the solutions here? One, you have to constrain that spray. Do not make every free minute equally available for scheduling meetings. You need more constraints on it. There's lots of ways to do this. Here's one way.

I don't schedule meetings during the first two and a half hours of the day. Okay, now you know that time will always be free for making progress on thing. Here's another way. I don't do meetings on Mondays. So now you know your Mondays are going to be free. Here's another thing. this type of scheduling, like this type of meeting

I'm commonly asked to do. I only do these on these afternoons. This type of thing I'm often asked to do. I only do them on these days. Right? Another way to constrain spray, and this is another idea from slow productivity, is the one for you, one for me model.

For every hour of time I schedule for a given week, I will immediately find another hour to schedule to protect. Therefore, there can't be any more than a 50-50 ratio of free time to schedule time, and more importantly, because you're scheduling free time blocks of equal duration to the meetings you just scheduled, they're not fragmented. If I schedule a 90-minute meeting, I'm protecting a 90-minute uninterrupted free time block. So it right away gets rid of the

fragmentation. You can, of course, adjust that ratio. You know, for every hour of meeting, I do 30 minutes of protected time, or you could go the other way for every hour of meetings. I do two hours protected time. It just depends on how much free time you need for your job. The final thing I'd recommend here is post-meeting processing blocks. So it's not just about is the time of a large block of time free. It's also how undistracted are you during that time. A big source of distraction is I had this meeting till 3 o'clock. I have another meeting at 4 and I'm trying to work on a non-urgent but important priority in between. A common problem, is I go straight from that three o'clock meeting into that free time to try to work,

but there was a lot of things discussed in that meeting that need to be processed. There's things I committed to do. There's tasks I need to get on my task list. There's follow-up emails I need to make. And that's just sitting in my head pulling at my attention while I'm trying to work in this one free hour I have on something that's non-urgent but important. Even worse, let's say you stack three of these meetings in a row back. to back to back. And then you have some free time and you're going to make progress on an important

project there. Well, if you've stacked these meetings back to back, the commitments and information from the first meeting stays in your head as you move to the second meeting, which those commitments then mix with those first ones as you move to the third meeting. And now by the time you're leaving these meetings, your brain is calling uncle. It's like, oh my God, there's all of these things we're trying to keep track of, I'm so stressed. And you know what you're going to do? Your brain's going to go, let's just go check email. So the easiest thing you can do to reduce the distraction impact of meetings is to add 10 to 15 minutes on your calendar to the end of every meeting. So typically you don't need a full hour for meetings.

Just tell people us to do 45 minutes, make the last 15 minutes of processing blocks. You can just easily schedule the full hour. In the last 15 minutes, that processing block, take care of everything you just discussed. Any follow-up messaging you need to do, do it right then. Any tasks that need to get scheduled, put them into your task system. Any new deadlines that has generated, put them on your calendar. you want to close every open loop spawned by that meeting before that schedule time is done. This greatly reduces the distraction impact of these meetings and allows you to make better use of the time that remains.

All right. Time Destroyer number three, Hivemind Collaboration. So one of the biggest generators of non-focus, so one of the biggest generators of distraction, is the need to, keep checking in on ongoing conversations. That I have five different collaborative projects underway where we're trying to figure things out. It's relatively time sensitive, and we're figuring this out with back and forth email messages or back and forth Slack messages. Once I have an ongoing time sensitive back and forth digital message exchange, I now have to check those channels all the time. Because I need to see your next message in time to respond to it. So you can respond to that, and I can respond to that, and we can finish this issue before the day is over.

And now you've destroyed your ability to make work on important things. Because every time you have to check that chat channel or inbox, you're inducing a context shift, you're seeing distractions that are unrelated to what you're working on. Your brain is going to go in 10 or 15 different directions. It's going to run out of steam quickly. All right? So we can reduce some of this with our first idea, which was reduce the number of things you're working on. So there's just less of these less things generating email. Sure.

We can protect time like we just talked about. But three, for the things that remain, the work that we are doing, it is ongoing. It is an active project. Find better ways to collaborate that don't require unscheduled messages that you have to read and respond to quickly. You have to think about unscheduled messages that require responses as a productivity poison. It's the same as someone coming in and making you take a shot of whiskey in terms of what is the impact going to be over time on your ability to actually concentrate and do good work. You really have to think about it that way. All right. So how do we get rid of unscheduled messages

to require urgent responses for the products that we have to work on? Well, here's a few ideas. Number one, I talk about this all the time. You need office hours. You need regular time most days. Your phone is on. You have a Zoom room open. Your office door is open. Anything that requires a moderate amount of back and forth, something that's going to generate like four messages that You're going to have to exchange back and forth that day. Just help the person grab me whenever it's convenient at my next office hours. I'm here and we'll figure it out, right? This is not about reducing the total amount of time you spend talking about things, right?

Because you have a whole hour, let's say, put aside for office hours. And you have, let's say, four conversations that are tackled in those office hours. The total amount of time it would have taken to maybe send emails back and forth for those four things might be like 10 minutes. But now you're putting aside a full hour. But that trade-off is absolutely worth it because the cost is not how long does it take you to write the four email messages that was required to coordinate this without office hours. The real cost is the context shifts required surrounding those emails. The 25 times you had to check your inbox waiting for the message to come back. The 20 minutes it takes to get your concentration back after each of those checks.

This adds up for much, much more time than just having a concentrated hour where you take care of a lot of back and forth all at once. If you work in a team, have docket clearing meetings two or three times a week, 30 to 45 minutes. The whole team comes together. You say we have this shared document, which since the last meeting, when anything came up that was relevant to this team, questions, who's working on this? Oh my God, I'm worried about this. Hey, a client wrote about this. What are we going to do? You add it to the shared document that I call a docket.

At the docket clearing meeting, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Just go through this document, everything. Can we handle it right now? Let's do it. Can we ignore this? Let's ignore this. Does someone need to take this? All right, put it on your task list right now. Done. You go through until that docket is clear, then the meeting's over. This is not a generic standing meeting. This is not a generic checking meeting. This is not of like, hey, how's everyone's kids doing? Let's like drink some coffee. It's let's clear this docket as fast as possible. This now allows you, everything that you put under that docket and handle that docket clearing meeting would have otherwise generated a non-trivial number of these unscheduled back and forth messages to require responses. So again, we're We're squashing that productivity poison. Finally, this is an idea that goes all the way back to my book Deep Work, process-centric emailing.

When you have something you need to do with someone else, you need something from someone else. The temptation in the moment is what's the quickest thing I can do right now to get this off my plate? And that's typically writing like a pretty vague, fast email, that, yes, in the moment, temporarily takes that off your plate, but does not solve the problem. Like there's a report that you need to submit to a client.

You're going to need to get some feedback from someone else. In the moment, you're like, I just want to, I have so many things I'm doing. I want to get this off my plate. You might just be like, hey, can you help give me feedback on this send? Well, there's a lot more emails to come, right? And they'll be like, well, yeah, what do you need? You're like, okay, well, what do you think about this? And they'll like, hey, what's going on with this?

And they'll, like, hear some thoughts. Like, what about over here? We're now like 10 or 15 emails back and forth. but this thing has to go out by Friday and it's Monday, so you're going to have to check your inbox pretty furiously to make sure it gets done. The alternative is process-centric emailing. Take a beat and say,

I'm going to figure out how we should collaborate on this. And I am going to describe in my initial email to you, this is how we are going to collaborate on this, and it's going to be a process that I'm going to design to try to minimize unscheduled messages. Takes more time to write and send that message, but you might save yourself 50 to 60 inbox checks down the line because of it, which is a huge cognitive burden.

So let's go back to this report example. A process-centric email might be like, okay, here's what's going on. There's this report. I got to get to the client. I got to get to it by Friday. There's these sections that I don't know all the details, so I'm going to need your help on this. Here's what we're going to do.

I'm going to write a draft of this report, and I will email you this. draft a report by Tuesday close of business. I have time on my calendar when I'm going to write it. You don't need to reply to the email. You'll just have it by Tuesday, close the business. Go through and here are the type of edits I'm looking for.

X, Y, and Z. Okay? For this type of edit, here's what I need from you. The replacement numbers. For this type of edit, what I need from you is like a definitive word, don't say, cut this, don't put this in. And finally, I need whatever. If I'm missing a key point that you know about,

I need you to just add that text directly to the document. Okay? Work on this Wednesday. Work on this Thursday. I'm going to assume whatever version of this document is in this, put in the shared folder,

I'm going to grab that at the close of business Thursday. And I'm going to do my final edit. I'll polish and submit. Okay? That's the plan. I think this will work well. I've spelled this out step by step with bold headers. If there's anything, like,

if there's something about this, not going to work or whatever, just give me a call. Boom, sit. So now you have specified a process by which you're going to get the information you need. The coordination of when this is ready, when people are going to get it, this is all just worked out with timelines and schedule, so there's no actual messaging that has to be done. And you're now going to get from here to that report being submitted without having to receive a single message. This process is now going to generate zero inbox. You know, you're sending the file to the other person in this case. that's process-centric emailing.

And the key is make it easier to just run with the project than it is for them to change it. So that's why you give a higher friction release valve. Like, well, you can call me, you can call me or call me during these times

if you need to change things. And most people will be like, no, no, okay, shoot, what do I have to do? All right, fine, let me just do that. Right. Process-centric emailing. Again, we often count the wrong things. we count the time required to write that message and say,

I don't want to spend that time, but we don't count the massive cost of having to check our inbox 15 times for an ongoing conversation that will happen if we don't write that message. So we have to think about unscheduled messages that require responses as a productivity poison. All right, so here's how you get your time back. Let's just summarize these real quick. A, you've got to minimize overhead tax.

If your overhead tax crosses an excessive threshold, your ability to do anything but react and be strapped. rest is impossible. This is a critical, critical threshold. So you have to reduce what you're working on, consolidate what you're working on to keep that tax under the threshold. Two, you have to defragment your schedule. If your schedule is too fragmented, you just don't have enough undistracted time to actually make progress on what matters. So you have to start protecting time, and we talked about a lot of different strategies for doing that. And you've got to clean up time by doing things like post-meeting processing. And finally, you have to resist the hyperactive hive mind

style of collaboration. Ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messaging is a terrible way to coordinate or collaborate. You want to avoid that like poison. Office hours, doc clearing me, process-centric emails. You should be willing to do almost anything. Maybe I have to walk across fire and fight an alligator. If that's what I have to do to prevent this from having to just be emails back and forth all day, you should seriously consider doing that. That's how much you should fear having to have unscheduled emails be something that you have to deal with all day long. So that's how you find time, right? It's not always a dramatic change has to happen to your circumstances. Your same job with your same responsibilities can have a vastly different

subjective impact on your sense of free time to make progress on non-urgent things, depending on how you approach it. Work on those three time destroyers, and that schedule is going to feel way more expansive. There you go. Time destroyers, Jesse. You're big into schedule fragmentation in terms of dedicating writing time in the mornings, right? Yeah, that's a big thing I do is I protect writing time in the morning. I just don't do things in the morning. And then once you have a rule, it's pretty simple. Now, here's the thing.

We imagine, like when it comes to things like constraints on when we schedule meetings, we imagine two things that are false. First, people like to imagine the scenario in which everyone else says yes to every suggestion, that everyone else you work with when the boss says, hey, can you meet on Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon? They always say yes. And that you're this huge outlier because you say, well, that time doesn't work, but how about these times?

Here's the reality. People say no all the time. They have busy schedules, right? Finding a meeting time often requires several different options. So it is not unusual or noteworthy that you're saying, well, that time doesn't work, but these times do. It doesn't seem obstinate. It doesn't seem like you're not available.

No one's noticing. All right. Two, the other scenario that people invent in their mind is that the various people who are trying to schedule things on your calendar throughout the week, like, hey, can we meet? Can we jump on a call? All get together. And they have a big whiteboard with a picture of you on it, and there's yarn going from it to other things. And they're tracking really carefully. Like, when did you get a no from Cal? What about you?

And they're staring at this. And they're smoking pipes. And they're like, I don't think he's doing meetings in the morning. And then one of the people stands up and says, how dare you? he and then like another person in the corner sort of like quince from from jaws when he's sitting in the corner says i say we go get them and then they're all going to come and get you that no one is tracking no one knows they're like they're all day long there's meetings and yes no and trying to make things work they don't know they don't see the patterns in your nose they don't care

about how you organize yourself now the flip side of this is don't tell people no one no one cares don't make them care don't oh for god god for bit, don't write a Tim Ferriss auto responder. Don't try to explain your scheduling philosophy to everyone that comes through. Don't preemptively defensively, be like, I don't meet on mornings. And here's why, because you bastards are taking up all my time. Then you're giving someone something to react to. Don't explain it.

Just do it. No one's paying attention to you. As long as you're offering plenty of times to have meetings, they're not going to notice patterns about the times that you say no. All right. Well, we've got some good questions about this type of stuff. But first, let's hear from a sponsor. I want to talk about our long-time friends at ExpressVPN. Going online without ExpressVPN is like forgetting to mute yourself on a Zoom meeting.

Do you really want your coworkers to hear all the trash talk that you're doing about the backgrounds behind them? Or like here you go in and go into the bathroom while you're on the call? So you've got to mute it. But going on the Internet without a VPN is kind of the same thing. You're exposing a lot of yourself to the world. Here's how it works. With a VPN, instead of having your traffic just go into the world where people can see it, people can sniff your packets out of the air if you're wireless or your internet service provider can see what you're connecting to if you're private.

With a VPN, you say, no, no, no, I'm going to mute my traffic by encrypting everything. All the services and sites I'm trying to talk to. I encrypt those messages on my computer. I then send them to an express VPN server, which then unencrypts them and talks to the site and service on your behalf, then encrypts the response and sends it back. So what are the people who are near you, the people who can listen to your wireless connection

or your internet service provider that all your traffic goes through? All they know is you're talking to a VPN server. They have no idea what site you're talking to. They have no idea what service you are using. You gain back your privacy. Now, if you're going to use, A VPN use ExpressVPN as to one I trust. It's easy.

You can set up on any of your devices. You just turn it on and use all your apps and web browsers like normal. It's just happening seamlessly in the background. They have servers around the world. So wherever you are, there's probably a server nearby that you can connect to. They have a lot of throughput bandwidth, so the connections are fast. You don't even know that you're using it. They're very highly rated because it works well.

All right. So you've got to use a VPN. And I suggest that you use ExpressVPN. Again, your phone, laptop, tablet, and more. it'll work on number one is rated number one by reviewers like cnet and the verge so protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash deep that's eXP r-es-svpn.com slash deep and you can get an extra three months free expressvpn.com slash deep all right let's do some questions first question is from the newportian scrum master in episode 318 you discuss how knowledge workers should consider taking

breaks during the week because they're paid for creating rather than cranking. Do you have any insight on how these principles might apply to a scrum agile development team? In these frameworks, the team as a whole sets goals for the end of a sprint. Well, if run correctly, agile should be very compatible with these ideas of having some variation in your day, even being able to take a multi-hour break without it being a problem. right? The reason is when you're doing a sprint and an agile methodology like scrum, you're focused on one thing.

Hey, we're working on adding this feature to the software and that's what we're doing. This means you don't have the seven or eight ongoing initiatives that are each generating their own hyperactive hive mind collaboration, which often ties people to need to be connected all the time. No, no, you're just working on one thing. So you're not tied to I need to be in my inbox or chat channel all the time. dealing with 10 things. But if you're just working on one thing, how many hours a day can you actually, like, really be working hard on that thing?

And it's not eight. In my book, I think this was in my book, A World Without Email, I talked about this methodology called Extreme Programming, where you pair program, you sit two people at the same monitor and it's full out concentration, and they can only get like five hours of work max. And at first, they talk about these organizations, how their new employees have to go home and take a nap. It's that mentally exhausting. Like if you're really giving something your full insight, it's really mentally and exhausting. So this idea that like from nine to five, you're sitting there locked in writing great code is just not realistic.

So if you're sprinting, so you're only working on one thing and this thing is hard, you're going to have to take some breaks to tight rate your concentration. It really shouldn't matter if like two hours in here you're not working on it. Now, if your sprints are so tight that there's no time to do that, then your sprints are too tight. like a good sprint we should we're all working on this thing we're working on it hard it's not taking up every hour of the day because that's impossible then we get it done and we move on to the next thing so i think agile done right should be very compatible with some of these slow productivity ideas what do we got next next question is from joe i'm working on my thesis holding a student job and learning the local language as i'm not a native i also have to do household tasks i find planning

my day is a major challenge. My supervisor are scattered and so things can be unplanned. I also find that after 6 p.m., I'm usually too drained to study or focus on any additional task, including cooking dinner. How can I better structure my days? Well, Joe, you need to move your thesis work to first thing. This tends to work very well. Do two to three hours. First thing, this might have to be early if you have a student job that starts somewhat in the morning, but just two to three hours every day. You want the compound interest of persistent effort is what you're looking for here. You want to avoid the typical sort of pregraduate student mentality of work as something that happens and big inspired burst at night. That's not going to work.

You're not an undergraduate anymore. So three hours, first thing in the morning, even if this means you have to do 630 to 9.30 a.m. Make very persistent progress. with your disorganized supervisor, have a weekly meeting set up, and you take the reins of organizing these meetings. You come to your advisor, here's what I'm working on now. I'm going to deliver you this draft by this meeting, and then here's the notes I need from you for the next meeting. You basically just have to organize their life for them. This is common with academics.

Like sometimes you have to just organize their life for them because they themselves are too disorganized. So you want to take out the critical path, just waiting for the supervisor to be more organized. So you're working in the morning, you have your job, then you need a really crystal clear schedule shutdown complete, shutdown ritual. Work is done. Now I'm in non-work time. You've got to treat that psychologically very different. I invented the shutdown ritual in response to working on my doctoral dissertation because it really

has a way, just being in the middle of such a complicated long project, it really gets its hooks into your mind and all your mind wants to do is keep thinking about it. So it's really important to have the shutdown ritual. Now your evenings are just non-work time. And what do you want to do with your non-work time? Well, I guess you could just sit around and do nothing. But what you're going to find is if you've really shut down your work, like, I don't know, like, I'll make an interesting dinner today.

Or I'm going to go, like, for a walk, or I'm going to, like, tackle this task today. You get kind of like a clean slate when you psychologically transition from work to non-work time. There's a classic book about this, Arnold Bennett's How to Live in 24 hours a day, which came out in the early 20th century. where he basically argues you have eight hours of work, you have eight hours of sleep, treat your eight hours in between as like you a different life, like that you're a gentleman patrician that just has landed, you're a landed gentry and you just have to, you can control what you want to do with your time. And like treat it not as recovery from work, but as like your time to whatever, read poetry. You know, he had, he had pretty a kind of elitist idea as what to do at that time. But you treat that time. If you can shut down your work, that's like really interesting. time. You can do some chores, you can do some restorative stuff, you can do some exploration, and really keep, I would say, balance those two things really well in the evening. Chores plus things that are restorative and interesting. And that begins to really change your sense

of the evenings to like something again that's like regenerating and rejuvenating you and not just psychologically as this time to recuperate. Because honestly, work on your dissertation, student job, this is not the salt mines. It's also not, you're not like in one, the Apollo mission trying to save Apollo 13. Your mind will be okay. You're not exhausted beyond all repair if you do that. The final thing I want to warn you against is do not descend down the rabbit hole of what I call the dissertation hell mindset. There's a whole sort of online subcommittee for, for various reasons that I have a lot of theories on, but I want to get into.

For various reasons, they want to recast the process of what. working on a doctoral dissertation as some sort of almost like impossibly demanding traumatic, terrible experience. And they egg each other on online about how terrible it is. This is death for motivation. And it's also misguided. It's not that hard. All right? Trust me, there's much harder things in life. There's much harder jobs. So avoid the whole dissertation helm sort of subculture out there. It's like this, you're working on this. It's a few hours. day, take your time. You don't have to finish it this month. You know, it's going to take the time it's going to take. Compound interest of accomplishment. Get that done first. Do your job.

Shut it off. Treat your evening is like a completely different life. Balance, restorative and regenerative and fun with chores. I think you'll be fine. I think you'll be fine. I used to, Jesse, I used to go down that rabbit hole back when I was writing just for students. And there was this really strong online dissertation health community. And there's so many weird things going on psychologically with these people. I mean, they had to somehow cast this thing. And most of these were people who were like full-time doctoral students writing a dissertation on like no particular deadlines or timescales.

I mean, this is like probably the easiest year of all their life to follow, compared with the difficulties of like a real job, a family, health issues, whatever. And it would just insistently try to recast this. as if they just arrived at the gulag, you know, and like it's survival every day. Or like they're trying to, you know, again, save Apollo 13 from, if they don't figure out how to like get the carbon dioxide scrubbed, Jim level is going to die or whatever, right? I mean, it was a whole crazy subculture. So these had to be on blog because it was all blogs. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm assuming, you know, I don't use social media, so I don't know. I'm assuming if this is probably worse. Yeah. And it's probably on TikTok, which is probably worse. But yeah, back to those blogs. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Raphael.

I have two questions about the calendar. First, what is the best frequency to check it? And second, what is the best tool to do it? Desktop screen, phone, or print it out? I mean, use an electronic calendar. When you check it, you just look at it. Like, there's nothing tricky here. Tools not going to help.

You're checking your calendar. There's two major occasions on which you're checking your calendar. The first and most frequent is when you're building your daily plan. So if you subscribe the multi-scale planning, you are every day, you're building a plan for your day. I suggest doing time block planning where you're actually giving every minute of your day a job, as opposed to going through your day in a reactive method. Hey, what's next or what do I want to work on next? I keep my daily time block plan on paper.

I mean, I sell my own time block planner. I use that. I have boxes full of them, okay? But you can do it on whatever format you want to use it on. So when you create your daily time block plan, you are transferring things on your calendar onto that plan. So any meetings or appointments that are on your calendar, you are drawing physically onto your time block plan, and then you're blocking all the remaining time as well. So you're checking your calendar when you do that. Also, when you're doing your daily plan, the other thing you're going to check for on your calendar is deadlines.

I'm often a heavy user. I use Google Calendar of making use of all-day events, which just show up at the top of your day, not. is like on a particular time. I use those for deadlines and reminders. A deadline for getting this done today. I have like a book quote due today. Make sure the deadline for filing the reimbursement forms is today. So when I'm building my daily time block plan, I see those deadlines on my calendar so I make sure in my daily time block plan I've blocked off time to deal with them. I don't need to see my calendar again for the rest of that day because I now run my day off of the daily time block plan. The exception of course, if during the course of your day,

let's say you're checking your, you have a block, you're checking your email and you're trying to set up a meeting with someone. Well, yeah, then you'll go to your calendar to find what time's available. But I transfer from my calendar to my daily time block plan. I run my day off of that. The other context in which you're going to check your calendar is every week. When you make your weekly plan, you look at your calendar for the whole week to get a sense of what time is free. During your weekly plan, one of your primary goals is to try to put aside time on your calendar for important initiatives that aren't already on there. So you're like, okay, I really want to make progress this week on my book.

Where do I have free time to work on my book? Why don't I protect that now on my calendar by putting pre-scheduled appointments to work on my book? Now that time is protected, and when I get to those days and build my daily time block plan, I'll see them and integrate them automatically. during your weekly plan, you'll probably be frustrated that your schedule's too fragmented, so it's also a good time to try to defragment your schedule. So as you look at your calendar for the week ahead, you might be like, you know what? Thursday morning is great.

Like, I don't have stuff until noon. It would be a great time to, like, tackle this big, important project, except I have this, like, coffee out of office across town at 10 a.m. That one thing is making Thursday morning unusable. I'm just going to move that coffee. I'm going to move that coffee to drinks because now I've unlocked four consecutive hours and I can get this important thing to see my strategic plan, get this done, right? Or you say, I got these three meetings.

I could probably consolidate those because it's the same people. We set them up at different times, but it's the same people, and it's eating up this afternoon. Why don't I just tell the people, let's just make the first meeting a little bit longer, and that's going to free up a two-hour block there. I kind of need that because I want to fit this other thing in there. So your weekly plan, you're not only surveying your calendar, but now you're kind of playing with it a little bit trying to make it better. So you're definitely going to see your calendar at your weekly plan.

You're going to see your calendar every day when you build your daily plan, and you'll see your calendar when you're trying to schedule things. All right. In terms of checking it, how you check it, there's no magic here. It's a Google calendar you look at it. Yeah, that's not a big deal. All right. What we got next?

Next question's from Bob. I'm motivated by your monthly book. updates to read more. I have multiple jobs and sometimes just don't have hardly any free time in a given day. On these days, is reading for 20 to 30 minutes actually do anything? Well, I mean, first I'll say reading is good. So read, have a reading habit. That's what's important. What that actually means in terms of number of pages read or number of books finished, that depends on a lot of things. That depends, for example, on how much free time you have. It also depends on what you're reading, right? Like I read at a much slower rate than, you know, like the typical sort of book club reader that reads primarily, like, what is the, this is like a major driver of books in this country. Like, what novel is like making waves and being recommended as a good novel, right? So like what I call book club readers. It's like everyone in the, all the book clubs in the country are all going to read the vaster wilds because it's been told this is a good book. Like fiction is often much faster.

And you could go through a lot of those books. I read a lot of nonfiction. This is slower. I'm reading a book right now on settler colonialism. This goes slower than reading like the, I don't actually know these, the Emil Henry, Emily Henry book or whatever, right? So don't get too caught up in the number of books. Get caught up in, am I reader, am I not? That being said, here's what I want to say.

Like, I'm a busy, I'm busy, right? I have a few jobs, they have a bunch of kids, et cetera. A lot of volunteer positions. I do a lot of stuff. I read five books a month, right? I don't think much about it. I'm not doing heroic or exceptional efforts to find time to read those books. What are the two things that seem to matter the most for reading quantity for me?

Pick books in the moment I'm super, super psyched about. I have a very eclectic reading list. You hear it every month on the show. It's because in the moment, I say, this is a book. Right now, I'm, like, excited about this idea. So I want to read this right now. I want to know more about this. I'm jazzed about it.

I'm going to read this. When you're excited about a book, you read it more. And this is different, again, I think, than like the book club model, which is everyone says this is the new good novel. So we all have to read this now. Like, that's a different. That's a fine relationship with books, but it's different than the way I do it. I read primarily nonfiction. And it's because I'm interested in this idea right now.

Oh, wouldn't it be cool to know more about it. It's relevant to the things I'm working on. I'm excited about the book. Okay? Two, I don't use social media, right? I know that sounds like it really shouldn't be related, but people vastly underestimate the amount of time that is free that gets devoured trying to help the valuation of Mark Zuckerberg stock holdings.

People underestimate how much time gets eaten up by that. When your default for boredom is like, let me see what's on this screen and it's hyper-palatable, that eats up all the book time. I don't entertain myself that much on my phone. I mean, I punish myself with my phone, at least in recent days, because I follow the Washington Nationals losing four games in a row, and it makes me want to throw my phone out a window. I don't know why I punish myself that way, all right?

Guys hit a ball. But I don't have social media on there. I don't watch YouTube on my phone, right? So my phone is pretty boring. You have more time than you think then. I'm like, I'm just going to read a little bit while I wait for, like, my wife to get ready, we're going to go out. There's like 20 minutes.

Oh, I'm just going to like read a little bit. That adds up. At night, it adds up. If you're looking at your phone at night, that's like two books a month right there. So read stuff that you're psyched about, not that like people say you're supposed to read. And don't use your phone for entertainment. Like, you'd be surprised. You might get a lot more reading out of your time.

It's true. The only thing I do in terms of like thinking about my five books a month is I don't like to finish too fat. Like if I'm if I'm kind of done early, I'll slow down or maybe switch to a bigger book to slow down. Like the only thing I do is actually slow myself down because I, you know, sometimes in the summer I'll read six or seven books, but I don't want to kind of get in the habit of that because I worry that I'm just going to raise like my expectations for how much I'll read. So I'll slow myself down. But I really don't think a lot about I just kind of get there. I guess a lot of the books go by pretty quickly too. For instance, at Atomic, the nuclear war book, that's,

That's a fast book. It seems like, did you read it? I'm in the process. It's fast read, isn't it? Yeah. I read that in one day.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So some of these books do go fast. Some of the more intellectual ones go slow. We'll talk about it in whenever we do the next book update. But there was a, I've been working on this for six months, a 600 page, now it's 550 page,

um, ethics book. And it's just like, like, ethics as in just like literally. I'll get into it later. But anyways, this was all like, read 10 pages a night six months later, like as a meditative act. Like six months later, I was done with that. So some of these books go a little bit, go a little bit slower. Neil Stevenson fiction books, those take me a while.

Yeah, they're fast. The pages read fast, but there's so many damn pages in the book. He does not. That guy likes to write. Man, he gets into him. Yeah, those take a while. All right. Let's see here.

What we got next? Slow productivity corner. Ooh, all right. everyone. Slow productivity corner is where we have one question per week based on ideas from my new book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment without burnout. Mainly, this is just an excuse for us to play our much-love Slow Productivity Corner theme music. Let's hear that music now, Jesse. All right, who do we have today? I got talking my slow productivity voice after the theme music. Who do we have today, Jesse?

Hi. Questions from Krishna. As a creative, I really embrace the principle of working at a natural pace from slow productivity, but I'm afraid that's keeping me from pushing a little harder on getting things done. How can I find the uncomfortable but not drained out spot? All right. Well, Christian, you got to keep reading, right? Because what are the three principles in slow productivity? What's the order in which they're presented? Principle number one, do fewer things. Okay. So yeah, this is about reducing overhead tax. Less concurrent projects means less distraction. You can do more quality work. What's principle number two in the book? Work at a natural pace, what you mentioned here. Like, okay, stretch out how long your expectations for how

long things take. Be comfortable with variations and intensity on different timescales. Busy days, less busy days, busy seasons versus less busy seasons, kind of slow down, give things the time they require. Don't try to be pegged at 10, eight hours a day, you know, five days a week. If you stop there, as you note here, you could feel like you are actually going to be reducing your production. If you stop here, the relationship you're going to develop with work feels sort of antagonistic. It's something to reduce. It's something to slow down. You'll be focused on the negative aspects of work. You need to do these things, because otherwise you're to burn out. But if you stop there, you're going to grow to have this antagonistic relationship

with work, which you're very, I think, sagely concerned about in this question. And where does this end? Well, you're going to end up, like, one of these substackers who, after a while, you're just convinced that, like, any boss in the world is, you know, secretly some sort of like Orwellian Hitler, and we all have to just fume until we can overthrow capitalism. You don't end up in good places. So if you keep reading, you get to the solution to this problem, which is principle number three, which is obsess over quality. And I say in the book, this principle obsess over quality is what makes the other two work. It's what prevents you from falling into a dead-end psychological cul-de-sac of bitterness. It's what prevents you from seeing work as this sort of

amorphous antagonistic force against which you're constantly fighting. It's also what's going to make you much more successful at implementing the ideas from the first two. So when you obsess over quality, the busyness that you're reducing with principle one self-evidently needs to be reduced because it's getting in the way of you killing it. You have like this awesome stuff you're trying to produce.

The business is getting in your way. I'm reducing busyness so I could be better. That's different than I'm reducing busyness because my boss is an or really in Hitler. Principle number two, okay, working at a natural pace. When you're obsessing over quality, that becomes self-evident. You say, yeah, what matters is I'm trying to produce something awesome. I need to give that the time it deserves.

And it doesn't matter if I'm super busy eight hours a day performing busyness is unrelated to whether I really do this thing really well. And I need to be sustainable in my efforts here because it's going to be a long haul to really become a master of what I'm doing. So, yeah, of course I'm going to kind of take breaks. It becomes self-evident. You're working on natural pace not because there's a mustache twisting sort of like Henry Ford character that's like forcing you and you're trying to fight back against it, but because this is going to make it easier for over time to produce stuff you really care about. And finally, when you obsess over quality, your work becomes more meaningful.

Humans love mastery. It's one of the key components of Ryan and Decky's self-determination theory. Humans need mastery. It makes humans motivated. It makes humans happier. So your work itself is going to become more meaningful. At the same time, as you produce things that are better and better, you gain more autonomy over your career,

which means it's easier to work on fewer things because you have leverage. It's easier to work at a natural pace to have busy seasons and less busy seasons because you're really good at what you do and you have leverage. So it's the engine, it's to glue, it's the connecting fibers to the slow productivity mindset. What makes it sustainable, what makes it possible, what makes it actually succeed over time, is if you obsess over the quality of what you do best. So if you get to that chapter, I think you're concerned about,

like, am I just taking my foot off the accelerator? Is this going to make me worse at my job? Those concerns should vanish. I thought about putting that principle first because it's so important, but I really, I think I needed to get at the things. I need to get at the slowing down ideas first before getting to, like, to do this sustainably

and the succeeding doing these ideas, you need to do this other piece. I think if I started with the obsessive, or quality, it would take too long before we got to the actual slowing down. But the flip side of that is you really got to make it through the whole book before the whole thing makes sense. So once you get the principle three, principles one and two become much more effective. I think that deserves, Jesse.

Hearing the theme music one more time. All right, do we have a call this week? Yes, we do. All right. Hi, Cal. This is Emily from Seattle. I'm a big fan of your work. Thanks for everything that you do.

I'm curious to your perspective on different types of. of deep work in the same day or in the same week. So in my situation during the day, I'm an organization development and change consultant. So I'm dealing with leaders and teams in some kind of large scale change. And there's a good amount of deep work with that, whether it's sort of dealing with conflict or, you know, some kind of really intense situation or whether it's just, you know,

thinking really hard about what the next step and the plan is. And then in the evening, I write and play music. And that's a really important part of my life as well. And in my experience, some days I'm able to, to do a really nice shutdown routine from my day job and, you know, maybe eat something or do a little bit of exercise and then get straight into the creative work. And I can do a good amount of deep work there as well. But other days, you know, I just feel like I have done so much at my day job by the time I'm finished and do a shutdown routine. I'm just exhausted. And I don't have any capacity for that

music. And I try to balance it and kind of give myself, you know, permission and space to, you know, take a break if I need it. But I'm curious your perspective on, you know, our capacity, I guess as humans to manage certain amounts of deep work and because they're very different types of deep work if you have any tips or, you know, things that might help me to make time and space for both of them. Thanks so much. Well, it's a good question because it pushes back against Arnold Bennett's model. I talked about earlier in the show, Arnold Bennett, the cultural critic, you know, late 19th century, early 20th century, wrote this book called How to Live on 24 hours a day. And he argued, look, you work for eight hours, right? He was right. He was right.

writing this at the beginning of something like the London, the birth of sort of like the London white collar commuter class. Like it was kind of the first time in history you had people who lived in the London suburbs and would take the train in. They would work in buildings and take the train back. And he was saying, okay, that takes eight hours. Then you have eight more hours that are yours. And you can treat those eight hours as if you were the landed gentry who, you know, would come up with things they wanted to do with their time and read poetry and foxhunt or whatever. And he's like, you're as free as them during that time. Take advantage of it.

Now, put aside, it didn't cross his mind that there could be, like, domestic work to do here because he was writing for men and figured that would all be taken care of. But put that aside, his argument was you should be able to do in your second eight hours a lot of really deep, interesting, personal creative work unrelated to the eight hours you did at the office. And he pushed back on the myth that, like, the office work was going to exhaust you. He's like, no, no, your brain wasn't. wants to do stuff. It doesn't want to not do stuff. I think what he was missing is that jobs weren't so deep back then. You would take the train, you would go to your office. I don't know.

I don't know what you were doing in like 1920s London white color work, but you were probably writing on paper or some things and there were some meetings. And it was, I mean, it would seem glacial compared to today's pace. And the amount of actual like deep thinking that was probably having these jobs was minimal, right? It was like, I'm looking at these spending reports and with my fountain pin, like crossing things off, and I'm going to pass it off the Willoughby, and we're going to have Sherry with lunch. So I think there was a lot more mental reserves than we have today in a job like yours, which is really hard. All right, so I'm in a very similar situation. So I kind of have good news, bad news for you. I'm in a similar situation in that I have

kind of multiple things I do that require deep work that I try to balance through. All right. I do exactly what you do. Like I have found when I have non-professional deep work, the very best way to transition from work to non-work is psychologically, shut down routine, batten down all the hatches, close all the loops, followed by physical, some sort of big exercise. So you have psychological transition, physical transition. That's like the best you can do. And I try to do that almost every day. I exercise at the end of my workday. That's when I do it.

it's the best transition I know. I clear the chemicals out of my body. I re-energize my body. I change my mindset. It's a transition type of ceremony. Works fantastic. After doing a really clear shutdown, shutdown routine. So I do the exact same thing you do.

Here's the bad news. I also have the same issue where sometimes I just don't have it. And I just need to take the foot off the accelerator for the evening. So again, you said, like, you know that's true. just okay. I want to reiterate, that's just okay. My theory is often what's going on here is not cognitive fatigue. I mean, often what it really is is, you know, you have, but I think there's like sicknesses. Your body is always kind of fighting stuff off and it's kind of successful, but like some

days it's less successful or your sleep wasn't, wasn't great. Like often I think if you do the right routine and you don't have the energy for the music, it's not because it was like extra hard deep work at work, but like these other things were going on as well. Like I'll, if I have like what feels like too much deep work during the day, what's really happening, what's really affecting my evening is that I couldn't get my arm around enough of the shallow work because of that. And I do my best to close the loops, but I feel sort of behind and that's kind of stressful and that drains me.

So there's all sorts of subtle reasons that can pull your ability to do a second shift of deep work. So I think you're doing absolutely the right thing. Be organized during your workday. close loops, do exercise, and then do your best with the time that comes after. And it's okay if some days that's deeper than others. It's all about the long game things are adding up. So it's like good news, bad news. Good news is I know exactly what you're talking about.

Bad news is I don't necessarily have a magical answer. All right. We have a case study here. It's where people ride into the show to talk about their personal experience, putting the type of things we talk about here into action in their own lives. If you have a case study to share, you can send them directly. to Jesse at Jesse at Calnewport.com. Today's case study comes from Omar.

Omar says, I am a high school teacher and would like to share how much the shutdown ritual has been helping me. This is relevant to our call. I usually time block my days and already know what to work on during the time I am not teaching. During the day, I collect tasks or ideas

in Cal's time block planner or on my working memory.txte file. I actually use Apple Notes Quicknote so that I can quickly jot down notes on my computer and get it out of my way. Every day I protect 15 minutes at the end of the day to do a shutdown ritual. I cannot express how many times my brain is trying to tell me to keep working at home or that I should start planning for the next day's lessons.

By shutting down, I know I have everything under control and it gives me a huge sense of relief. I know all my tasks on Trello are accounted for. Know if I have anything urgent come up and know exactly how much time I have in the week to prepare lessons. It has helped me immensely to be able to enjoy my evenings better. Omar, I appreciate that case study. Shut down rituals make a difference.

It is exhausting to have work in the back of your head while you're trying to do other things. And do not overestimate how exhausting that is. To really close all the open loops. To trust there's nothing you're keeping track of only in your head and that your plan for the rest of the week will work and it's written down and you'll get back to it in the morning and to be able to say shutdown complete or check that shutdown complete checkbox in my time block planner. It makes a huge psychological difference. I absolutely swear by it. Right. So this is a great case study.

Shutdown rituals matter. My new thing is what we just talked about on the call is, if possible, add a physical element to it as well so that the shutdown routine gives you first a psychological cleansing. And then you can get a physical chemical cleansing by going for a run, working out at the home gym, working out at the gym near your office before you come home, even just going for a long walk, right when you get home. give yourself that physical cleansing as well, and then you're really ready as much as you can be for the evening. All right, we have a final segment coming up here. I want to react to something I found on the internet this week, but first, let's hear from another sponsor. I want to talk in particular about our friends at Shopify. Look, if you are selling things online or in a store, the technology used to do these sales absolutely matters.

this is where Shopify is so important. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. It's the number one checkout on the planet. Let's think about businesses you may have heard of that use it. Kodapaxi. They use it. Feastables, you know, they use it. Thrive cosmetics.

They use it. Like these are major brands. But you know who else uses it? Like really small business. businesses, big businesses, medium-sized businesses. I came across it just the other day. I was ordering, because I guess I need to own this. I finally bought my own set of academic regalia. The things you wear, I have to go to Fall Comuncation this year. The site I ordered it from you Shopify is such an easy checkout experience. I recognized it right away.

So Shopify is what you should be using if you are selling something. They have their shop pay feature boost conversions by up to 50% because it makes it so easy for people to check out, the information is remembered across sites. It's fantastic. That means way less carts go abandoned and you make more sales. So if you're growing into your business or your commerce platform, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your store in their feed and everywhere in between.

I just made that up off the fly there. I like it. Yeah, I just rhyme. I'm quite good at just kind of coming up with these type of things. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that all of these other big brands, as well as small brands use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep,

but you have to type that in all lowercase for it to work and for you to get the deal. So go to Shopify.com slash deep to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash deep. Let's also talk about our friends at Element. I'm a big fan of Elements. Zero sugar electrolyte mix. You just add the water. It gives you the stuff you need,

especially after you've been dehydrated through like sweating or speaking a lot without the junk. Without the sugar, without all the weird additives. I actually, this is true, Jesse. Yesterday used my last element packet. And when I went down the basement to get the new box, realize I'd use my last box.

So I have just ordered the day I'm doing this ad read, had to order more element because I use it after my workouts. I use it after days where I'm giving a lot of speeches or doing a lot of podcasting. And I do it in the morning, if I'm particularly like not dehydrated, not feeling well. I throw in, you know, my element electrolyte mix. I really do use it. I really do swear by it.

They have this new product coming out, which I'm excited about, element sparkling, which now allows you to get that same, Electolite experience, but in a bottle, already bottled for you in a can. With each can, you can take a sip against sugar and stimulant loaded drinks and turn to tide towards health. Element sparkling right now is only available to Element Insiders. So you can find out if you're an Element Insider at their website DrinkElement.com,

but it will be launching more broadly soon. So get your free sample pack. a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase if you go to drink element.com slash deep. That's drink element L MNT.com slash drink. And if you're an element insider, you'll have first access to element sparkling, a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Your free sample pack with any drink mix purchase at drink element,

LMNT.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment. All right, this is where I like to react to things that readers send to us. This article came into my interesting at calnewport.com email address where people send me things they think I'll find interesting. I brought it up on the screen here if you're watching instead of listening. So this is a message from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy that was being sent to all Amazon employees. This was on September 16th that they sent it.

All right. So this is a look inside the CEO of Amazon talking about what's going well, what they need to work on. there was a single idea in here that I wanted to highlight. So a big thing he's worried about if you read this is that as Amazon grows, there's more managers. And there's more managers and more layers. And this can kind of get in the way of actually taking action. And so what they want to do is they're actually cutting back on managers. They're trying to reflatten things.

So there's less hoops you have to jump through to get approval for things or to actually take action on things. One of the things he's doing, I'm going to read this now, I want to highlight to help support this effort of making the company more agile. All right, so here's him writing. By the way, I've created a bureaucracy mailbox for any examples that any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary processes that's crept in and that we can root out. All right?

So it's like very easy to report. It's like a tip line. See something, say something. like unnecessary process or bureaucracy so they can be more relentless about getting rid of it. I like this idea for the following general reason and then I'm going to give a specific variation on it. The general idea I like here is

knowledge work organizations in particular have lots of implicit processes by which work unfolds. But I say implicit because they're not written down anywhere. They're not named. They're not discussed. Like the hyperactive hive mind workflow model where we work, work out through ad hoc back and forth messaging. That's a choice, but it's not really named and discussed.

It's just implicit that this is how we do it. Informal personalized workload management. Just ask people what you need when you need it. It's up to them to push back when for whatever, when they finally feel like they have too much work, and they just have to kind of do that, forget all the sort of interpersonal dynamics or asymmetric power dynamics there. It's just everyone should manage their own workload.

So you just ask what you need from people. your workload is your business, it's up to you to say no to people if you don't want more work. That's another process that's implicit, but it's something that we do. So anything that tries to bring more transparency and scrutiny to process, I think is important. When you have to actually name, describe, and defend the hyperactive workload, high mind, you begin to see there's some creeks there. When you have to actually name and define and defend personalized workload management, you begin to say, you know what, maybe there's better ways to do this.

But you don't get to these better ways until you've actually named and talked about the ways that are actually happening right now. And in the absence of naming them, we just think of like the way we work as being synonymous with work. We have a hard time having the professional imagination to see that it could be different. Here's a change I would make, though. In a lot of organizations, especially that aren't as big as like Amazon, the issue is not bureaucracy. The issue is not the hoops they have to jump through. The issue I always point out is attention destruction, right? These like unnecessary contact shifts.

What are the things that happen during the day that require me to change my attention from what I'm working on to other things? What are the things that happened during the day that reduced my ability to do the, like, the two or three things that I do their most valuable to the company? It's like an attention destruction or attention poison mailbox. That's what I would want. Like, hey, CEO, I had seven, non-urgent email conversations

I had to kind of keep up with today, and I could get nothing really done. No hard thinking could actually happen. Like, hey, CEO, I'm averaging four meetings a day. My average, like uninterrupted, max-size, uninterrupted time block per day

now is like under 60 minutes. And yet my primary job is to write white papers, and it's really making that hard to do. That's what I would want reported. And I would want my CEO to see again and again report after report of like my God, my people's ability to just put their mind to the work of producing value is being heavily diluted.

What do we do about this? And then solutions come in. You have to have this mindset of there's existing processes. Here's what they are. They're bad. Here's alternatives if you're going to fix this problem because the solutions are almost always less obvious, more complicated than what we do by default. We aren't going to stumble into the better way of doing this work. We have to sort of move the whole, if I'm going to use some physics analogies.

We have to move the whole configuration of our work system to a different phase, right? We're going to have to make an energy quantus shift, and that requires a lot of energy input to shift to this new stable condition. It's just the same, and I'm sure you're all thinking the same thing right now. It's just the same as like electron orbit levels. I know you're all thinking that. But it takes a certain amount of energy, right? Often non-trivially to sort of move an electron to a next orbit level, but then it's in a stable, once it's a state. there, it doesn't take energy to maintain it. It's stable there. So like the switch from

one stable configuration to another takes a lot of energy input. Most of knowledge of organizations are in like a particular somewhat degenerate stable configuration. They can't just easily move out of. It's typically based on like low friction and flexibility and risk reduction. But there's other configurations that if you can move to, other ways of working and collaborating and talking and meeting and and communicating and workload management. There's these other configurations that if you could just get your organization there, they'll also be very easy to maintain and they're better. You're going to produce better work and people are going to burn out less.

But to get there, someone has to put a ton of energy into that system. And you're not going to do that unless you know exactly what you're doing right now and what's wrong about it. You're not going to do that unless you get the 500 messages in your attention poison mailbox you set up a CEO and you're being drowned in this, you realize like, oh, my God, this is terrible what we're doing. You've got to know and name the problem. You've got to understand this magnitude before you're willing to put in the magnitude of attention and energy required to fix it. So I think it's a cool idea what's going on in Amazon. I would adapt it to focus less on

bureaucracy and more on attention destruction. But I like this general approach. You don't know what to fix if you're not talking about what you're currently doing. All right. Speaking of fixing, I think we can fix the fact that this podcast is now. ready to finish i don't know if that makes sense jesse it's not as good as my improv in the shopify ad right just you know you know just riffing i was just riffing just riffing just riffing i guess i burnt out on that ability there anyways that's enough for today uh thank you everyone for listening or watching we'll be back next week with another episode 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 that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some of the deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.