Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 32: Habit Tune-Up: Tracking Deliberate Practice, Getting Over the Fact Work is Hard, and Taming the Emotional Rigors of Depth

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

In this mini-episode, I answer audio questions from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Tracking deliberate practice initiatives. [8:21]* Helping an overwhelmed teacher. [12:33]* Dealing with hard work. [23:54]* Shutting down when you have too much to do. [29:26]* Taming the emotional rigors of a deep work habit. [37:28]Special thanks to our sponsor Optimize. For a 14-day free trial go to optimize.me/DEEP.As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing or leaving a rating/review.Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

But I struggle with the emotional regulation side of things. More specifically, managing disappointment when I do not or cannot stick to my deep work schedule. And also managing, to be frank, the highs of a great session. I'm Cal Newport. And this is a Deep Questions Habit Tuneup mini episode. In this format, of course, we take audio questions from listeners, specifically on the topic of tuning up their productivity habits in this current moment when our professional lives are increasingly disrupted.

I'm recording this morning, as always, in the Deep Work HQ, and I'm doing so on a brand new audio setup. So I actually have a reasonable mixing board, which means going forward, I can if I need to, have multiple people in person, and we can all record into the same system, I also have a more reasonable audio processor going on. So you may notice a slight improvement in sound quality,

but more importantly, I've just given myself some functionality here that's going to be useful going forward. So the tech hardware geek in me is immensely pleased by all of the superfluous flashing LED lights that now surround me in my HQ studio. Now, before diving into this week's questions, I wanted to mention something that's been on my mind recently in the world of productivity. And that is this idea that we do not spend enough time thinking about household productivity. I think this is a major gap in productivity thinking is how do we make sense of, organize, and execute in an effective and low-stress manner, the overwhelming number of ever-shifting, often urgent obligations relevant to owning a house,

having kids, keeping your car running, keeping your own health in check. The raw amount of tasks that these type of household obligations generate is massive. I don't think we think enough about it. I think we think a lot about, okay, I need to be productive in the workplace, and then when I'm done with work, I'm just relaxing, but you're not really relaxing because we still have all these household obligations. And when they're handled haphazardly, it's a bigger source of stress than I think we realize. It's also a large source of consequences because there are many of these household obligations

that get lost in the chaos of everything we have to do that actually have consequences if they don't get done. A dentist appointment long delayed leads to cavities deeply grown. a parking pass not renewed leads to an expensive parking ticket and so on. So anyways, this is just something I've been thinking about is that I'm surprised that we don't have more serious thinking about productivity systems customized for household work because I think it could actually have a large impact on the quality of people's lives. Now, some people have touched on this.

Laura Vandercombe, I think, has written well about this if you read her book 162 hours. She takes a pretty close look at household-style work in addition to just what happens in the office. Arguably, in getting things done, David Allen says the same system applies to everything in your life. So at home is a context that's just as valid as at phone in the office. So it's not as if this topic has not been touched on, but it's something that I'm thinking about. I'm trying to overhaul now the systems that my wife and I use to try to keep up with everything generated by having house and cars and kids and running a homeschool and all the other chaos that's going on right now. So I will keep you posted. But I think this is an exciting topic. I think there again, there's a lot of stress reduction and positive, direct positive benefits to be gained by trying to innovate how we track and review, organize, and execute these type of non-work tasks. All right. So that's something that's on my mind. We'll get back to that as I have things to report, but for now, let's turn our attention to the questions. Now remember, if you want to

submit your own audio question for the Habit Tuning Up mini episode, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Calnewport. If you want to send me feedback, you can do so at interesting at calnewport.com. I recommend that everyone sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. I write weekly articles and send out updates about things like my podcast. And of course, I appreciate all of the reviews and ratings and subscriptions, which has really helped this podcast remain highly ranked, which I, of course, greatly appreciate. And before going into our very first question, I want to lastly introduce you the Deep Questions podcast brand new sponsor, Optimize. Now, Optimize first came to my attention years ago, when I came across a video review of my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You,

it was conducted by Brian Johnson, the founder and face of Optimize. This review was so good. I mean, it was so insightful. It got right to the core of what that book was about that I ended up getting in touch with Brian. And over the years, we've actually become quite good friends. So what is this Optimize network that he has created? Well, it's a subscription service.

and at the core of this service is you get access to what are known as philosopher notes. You may have heard of these. These are six-page condensed reviews of important books, books that can help you live a better life, that are all written by Brian, who lives this enviable monastic style lifestyle where he reads and thinks and writes these fantastic summaries of the book. So you have over 600 of these philosopher notes and growing available to it. optimize subscribers. The service also gives you access to what are called 101 masterclasses. These are video courses taught by top experts on topics core to living a better life. I know about

these because I have filmed one of them. There is a digital minimalism 101 featuring years truly there as part of the optimized network. You also get with the optimized service these plus one videos every single day. It's Brian coming right into your inbox, video giving you one compelling idea about how to make your life better. If you're interested in the idea, it will point you towards philosopher notes for books that elaborate on the idea. And quite frankly, this is a service for cultivating a deep life. When it comes to distilling wisdom from some of the smartest and most influential books in the history of self-development, Brian's at the top of his game. He really is one of the best in the world at doing this. So if you're

serious about living a deep life, give serious attention to optimize. Now here's the good news. You can get instant access to all of this with a free two-week trial if you go to optimize. Me slash deep. Optimize.m.m.m.m.m.m. If you subsequently decide to subscribe and you use the coupon code deep, you will then get 10% off the cost. So give that a try. Do the two-week trial. Maybe take the time that you would normally dedicate to zoning out on social media, rededicate it to optimize, read some philosopher notes, watch your plus ones, maybe do a 101 or two. See how it makes you feel. I think you will be hooked. All right, so let's kick off today's mini episode with our first question. Hey, Cal, my name is Adam. I'm a graduate student in Longon. I'm a graduate student

and longtime reader circa 2013. The podcast is the perfect companion for your writing, and I'm recommending it to everyone. My question concerns the intersection of my weekly review, deep work goals, and deliberate practice. Every time my weekly review is completed, where tasks for various projects are listed for each day, I lose focus of my broad goals,

especially for deep work and deliberate practice. I can list my goals for deliberate practice into two to three focuses for school and work, but I feel like a document that's solely devoted to tracking my deliberate practice goals, and their feedback can be outlined, planned, and reviewed, kind of in its own space. Do you have any suggestions for using a weekly plan slash outline,

but also referencing progress on deep work and deliberate practice goals? Thanks so much, and can't wait for your new book. Take care. Well, first of all, Adam, I'm also excited for the new book to come out in March. Just to give you an update on where that is, we have just locked in the copy edit. So the text of the book is fixed. We're moving on to the production stages, so it's exciting to see that process keep rolling.

Though March still feels like a long ways away, I think it's going to be cool when that book comes out. All right, let's get to your question. Where should you keep track of things like deliberate practice goals and your progress on those goals week over week? The answer, I think, is in your quarterly slash semester plans. So we've talked about this before on the podcast, that you really have three scales when it comes to this type of productivity planning. You have the daily plan where you should use time block planning. You have the weekly plan, which you were just talking about, where you look at the week ahead of you, and you move the chess pieces around on your proverbial chess board of obligations.

But then you have the quarterly semester plan, where you're looking at the fall, where you're looking at the spring, where you're looking at the summer in totality. And one of the big things I'm trying to get done over this multi-month period. You should review this plan every time you make a weekly plan. This makes that quarterly semester plan the right place to keep track of things like here is a deliberate practice initiative that I want to unfold, let's say, over the fall, because you're going to look at that every time you make your weekly plan. You can also update it every time you make your weekly plan. Now, a couple weeks ago, I think I actually went through my quarterly estimate. plans on air. So you might want to go back and listen to that episode. I call them strategic plans,

but I update them in a significant way once an academic semester, so three times a year, fall, winter, spring, and summer. People in the business world sometimes do this in the business quarters. Same idea. I have a separate one for my life outside of work and my life in work. I treat those as separate magisteria. And in there is where I track. Okay, here's where I'm working on. I have these paper deadlines I'm working on, but also here is like a non-deadline-based, non-project-based initiative. I'm just trying to get better at this. I'm trying to improve this. Here is my goal.

And when you look at that every week, you say, okay, how am I going to integrate these semester quarterly plan objectives into what's going on this week? And, you know, some weeks are going to be able to do a lot of that. Hey, it's a light week. I can make a lot of progress, get after a lot of these big goals. And other weeks are going to be chaos. you're not going to be able to make very much progress at all, but you're seeing it every week, you're not forgetting about it,

you're tracking what's happening in black and white. So Adam, it's a good question. I like the way you're thinking. I like that you have initiatives that go beyond just what has to get done. And instead you're thinking about what do I want to get done to craft a life that is deeper than it is right now. So use that quarterly semester planning discipline,

check them every week, at least once a quarter semester, give it a serious overhaul. You will find it in the, long run, the progress you make on things that you care about will be greatly amplified. All right, let's move on now to a question that comes from the world of teaching. Hi, Cal, my name is Dexter, and I've been listening to your podcast since its inception and following you on your study hacks blog for quite some time now. My girlfriend is an educator here in Montreal. She's a grade six teacher.

And she's looking for some deep work strategies, especially as an educator. She finds herself working pretty much around the clock. I mean, she has an inundated inbox full of emails from her colleagues and from parents. And it seems like the work never stops. Now, what would you recommend, especially as an educator yourself, How would you recommend segmenting her day to be as productive as possible, but at the same time try to carve out a little bit of personal time herself? Thanks.

Well, Dexter, the first thing I would point out is that the issues that your girlfriend is facing are not unique to her. I think we have a real problem with the work environments that we have set up for primary and secondary school teachers. especially in the U.S. context. That's the context I'm most familiar. As I've said on this podcast before, teaching in those environments is a cognitively demanding task. It is an extreme form of deep work. You have to do this very complicated social psychological dance where you're reading the facial cues of many different people, reading the room, reading body language, trying to tell what someone needs is something clicking or something not clicking. in order to have a pedagogical conversation with a child, you are doing immense feat of what neuroscientists called mentalizing,

where you have to simulate the mind of the person you're talking to to try to understand how they're reacting and what they need. I talk a lot about this actually in my book, Digital Minimalism, and I make the point that it is cognitively quite demanding. Furthermore, actually just trying to figure out the material you're going to teach and figure out the best way to teach it to prepare the lesson plan based on all the experience you have of having taught this before and what the standards are and what you have seen work and not worked, all this is intense deep work. And a lot of it, teachers do a lot of this intense deep work.

A lot more than almost any other knowledge work profession where really, let's be honest, a lot of office workers maybe have an hour here or an hour there where they're doing something intellectually demanding and the rest of the time is email, PowerPoint, and meetings. So we need to recognize teachers, especially at the primary and secondary level. We're asking them to do immense feats of cognitive application. And yet we have created these work environments, and by we I mean so the administrations of these schools, have created these work environments that makes it very, very difficult to do this. We began, for example, allowing unfettered access to teachers through tools like email.

that is a huge extra toll on the cognitive capacity of these teachers. It's like having a factory that is physically very demanding. Imagine you had a lot of workers in there. It was an iron mill and it's physically very demanding. You have to have very strong people carrying around slag iron and putting it into the crucibles. And then you just casually added some extra demand. Like, look, we need you guys. We need you to do a bunch of jumping jacks. You know, every hour. So we need you to do some burpees. during your breaks or something like this. You say, well, that's crazy.

This job is already so physically demanding. Why would you add excessive extra physically draining activity on top of what they already have to do? But we don't think about that in the context of primary and secondary school because we don't think about cognitive resources. We don't think about the toll of deep thinking. We don't think about the environment that is conducive for this type of thinking.

So I think that's a real issue. We also tend to treat teachers like undifferentiated task executors and we have this divide where administrators with their ed school PhD sit around and think about like, hey, what new policy do we want? What new standards do we want? What new initiatives do we want? Hey, in the abstract, this would be good.

This will give us this good. And you just drop it all on the teachers. Like, well, the teachers are just these abstract executors. We can just, all we're doing is changing their program. It's like their computer processors and we're tweaking the program. That doesn't work that way. The more things you drop into the cognitive landscape of it, an educator. The more you are diffusing those cognitive resources, the more difficult you're making

it for that educator to do their core activities, effective pedagogy of children, the more difficult you're making it for them to succeed with those efforts. Now, I haven't yet, Dexter got to your specific question about what your girlfriend can specifically do in her circumstance, but I wanted to give this brief rant, but I think it's particularly acute in education, though it is not specific to education. In general, I think a big problem we have in the world of knowledge work is that we do not take seriously the actual brain that does this work. If you are an athlete that use your body to make a living, we care a lot about rest. We care a lot about recovery. We pay a lot of money to have massage therapists in the locker room because, you know, getting the massage on those muscles

is going to reduce your recovery time, which is crucial because we need you to put up 30 points in tomorrow's playoff game. We think a lot about it. In the cognitive world, we don't. We don't think about the brain. We don't think about the cost of context switching. We don't think about the cost of having an overwhelming number of tasks and obligations and queries more so than you can answer, the stress that causes your brain, the distraction that causes to your brain.

We don't think about any of this. In the cognitive world, we are doing the athletic equivalent of giving our athletes cigarettes because whatever, we have a good sponsorship deal with Marlboro. We don't think about the damage that's actually going to do to this. their ability to perform. That's a bit of a rant. The book I have coming out in March actually really gets into this. I introduce this notion of attention capital theory.

And I argue that in knowledge work, we have to think explicitly about attention capital. That is the capacity of the brains you employ through biochemical neurological processes to take information and produce more valuable information. We have to think about how those brains actually function. And if you want the highest return on that attention capital, you actually have to design work environments and work processes and work obligations that are compatible with how the human

brain actually functions. Humans are not computer processors. They don't just blindly execute any tasks you give them. So it's just a matter of giving them the right tasks you want done. It's messy. They're biological. They have human brains actually producing this work. And these human brains function better in some environments and others. Okay, that's my rant. So, Dexter, you can pass on that empathy to your girlfriend. But let's get to her specific problem, what she can do while we're still waiting for the world of knowledge work to get their act together. Well, my answer here is you're going to have to do standard capture, configure, control productivity. You know, if you're in a job that has too much pulling at you, you have to face that productivity dragon.

The way to face that productivity dragon is to actually get your arms around and organize and do the best you can with what you face. You might not like it. You might not have the time you hope you would have, but you will be better off trying to do that than just being haphazard, than just ignoring it, than just running from the cave with the smoke billowing out and hope that you survive another day. It's always better to face the dragon. Capture configure control is the best way to do it. So capture, you really got to make sure she is not storing any obligations just in her head, I would add. Do not let her email inbox is what I would suggest to her.

I mean, I'm hoping you're just going to have her listen to this. This is a little bit of a weird game of telephone decks there that you are going to tell her. You are going to tell her my answer here. So I'm just going to assume that she will be listening to this directly. So my advice would be also do not let your email inbox be a long-term capture system. Have a better place where obligations are clarified and stored. Stuff that comes in over email, stuff that's mentioned in meetings, stuff that you think up on the fly, stuff that just pops up during the classroom,

have good capture systems and then get these things into a storage system that's not your inbox, and it's not just your brain. I recommend using virtual taskboards, tools like Trello, for example, so that you can have these tasks, you can have information attached to the cards, you can move these cards between columns to capture their status. that's the configure step of configure capture control. You can really get your arms around what you have to do and what their status is. And then the control step is control your time.

You need a time block plan daily. Not only is that going to help you get the most out of the limited time you have available. Not only is that going to help you aggressively or strategically carve out time for yourself in a way that's not going to happen. If you're instead just waiting for a moment where you feel like you don't have much to do, it's going to teach you, ironically, given that you. you're a teacher, it's going to teach you about the reality of how long things really take. And that's really important because that allows you to make better plans going forward.

So now when you realize this type of grading takes me two hours, not an hour, now you know you need to start it two days earlier if you're going to make your plan work. So that's the control aspect. That's really the best you can do is you have to have your productivity act together much more than other office workers because your demands are much worse. and because your job is so cognitively demanding, the toll you'll pay, the toll you'll pay if you have lots of open-loop obligations just in your head and not in a system you trust, that toll is going to be larger.

If I'm an average office worker that doesn't actually do that much deep work, it might stress me out a little bit that I'm keeping track of things in my head, but look, it's not going to affect my output that much. If I'm a teacher, it is. So you really have to have your act together. Capture, configure control will get you there. it's unfortunate that you have to do this all yourself. I actually have an article coming out soon

that gets at this question of why did we decide an office work that individuals have to figure out how to be productive on their own? Why is this not an organizational issue? That's a whole other discussion we'll get into later once that article comes out. I'm just saying it's unfortunate

that you have to figure this out on yourself. It's unfortunate that you have a higher burden than other office workers, but this is the reality. You have a very hard job, a very important job, but a very cognitive job. You really have to have your act together in productivity. Capture, configure, control is going to allow you to face that productivity dragon

and make the best out of what you actually have available. All right, so thank you, Dexter for asking that question and Dexter's girlfriend. I hope you found that useful. Excuse the rant in the beginning, but that is a topic that I do sometimes get worked up on. Okay, our next question comes from John. Hi, Cal. My name is Jonathan, and I'm a university administrator. I've been following your work since So Good They Can Ignore You, and I've put your ideas to work in my own professional life to great effect, so thanks. I have a question for you about two kind of broad approaches to improving productivity, and I've heard you talk about both, and I'm wondering if you have thoughts on when each is appropriate to apply. The first is the idea that we need to be looking for ways to make difficult work easier. You know, we need to be working deeply when the task is cognitively demanding, you need to be batching shallow tasks together, that kind of thing, versus realizing sometimes that, hey, work is hard, and sometimes you just

need to sit down and get to work. And so I find myself struggling to know which of those broad approaches I need to be taking at a given time. And I'm wondering if you have thoughts on that. Thanks. So, Jonathan, the way I think about the type of advice I give, like how to set up an environment so that you can actually do deep work when facing a task that would benefit from it. And conversely, how you get more organized about your shallow task so they don't take over too much time so they don't prevent deep work from being possible. The goal for that advice in my mind is not to make work easy. It's to make your work more effective.

It's to produce more and to produce better and to get more satisfaction. to get more satisfaction out of your professional endeavors. But here's the thing. Let's take deep work, for example. Let's say you've done all of the right productivity plays here. You have essentialized and organized your shallow task. You have clearly defined blocks for the deep work. You have rituals that allows you to go into your deep work sessions with very high concentration,

and you have hard rules during those sessions, no distractions, no context shifting. Now that's great from an output perspective. It means you're going to produce more output that moves the needle. But that work session is not going to be easy. It's still going to be really hard, right? You're going to have to concentrate very hard on something cognitively demanding. It's not going to be easy. I mean, think about the professional fiction writers, for example, that we sometimes lionize

because they've rebuilt their entire lives around Deepwater because that's the only way they can actually get their books done. they don't find what they do easy. Staring at that blank page, that's hard. That's hard. And so I would say don't make a distinction between work that's been made easy and then sometimes having to just say, look, I have to get after it. Work is work. It's not meant to be easy.

If it was easy, it wouldn't be called work and let's just go because it's, you know, discipline. Discipline is good. There is no distinction there. Work is hard. I think that's the way to think about it. Work is hard. It can be satisfying, especially in the long run. run. Hey, I'm doing something worthwhile. I'm doing something of impact. I'm making a living.

I'm supporting my family. I'm producing new things that have an impact on the world. All of these things, all of these things can be intrinsically satisfying, but in the moment, they're often hard. I think you're right to point out that the really satisfying craft style activities are usually surrounded by relatively mundane, batched logistical style shallow task. And that's just something you have to do. It's just rough. It's work. I think once you recognize that, it might it might help your psychology here. Now, of course, the problem is, the problem is, is that every once and a while, work is not hard. Every once in a while, you're in a deep work mode and you fall into a flow state and it feels really good and you lose track of time. And that's actually an issue because

it gives you the illusion like, oh, this is what work should feel like. I should feel like I'm in this flow state all the time. I should feel really engaged. But here's the thing. Those flow states are nice, but they're fleeting. You can't count on them, and you should not expect to have them all the time. You're not going to get into a flow state when you're doing shallow work, but shallow work is necessary.

You're not going to get into a flow state when you're doing deep work focused on the deliberate practice of complex skills because deliberate practice is demanding and unpleasant, and it does not tend to induce those type of pleasurable states. And even when you're doing the performance-style deep work task that can trigger flow states, they often don't.

And so I think that's one place we get tricked is because there's some parts of work that are sometimes feel good. But don't let that fool you. It's like having the misfortune of trying out golf for the first time and hitting just a beautiful, perfectly squared T shot.

And then you spend the next 15 years trying to get that high again. I got to get out there. I want to get that hit again. I want to have that occasional moment of a really sweet hit. That can happen with work. So I think, Jonathan, what I would say is, yeah, work is hard, take pride in the difficulty, discipline is freedom, get after it, all of those type of slogans all get at that notion.

Good stuff comes from hard work. Occasionally, your work is going to feel really good in the moment. That's great. Cherish it when it does. But don't chase that. That's going to do its own thing. You are going to do your own thing. You want to be proud of what you are producing.

You don't need to be overjoyed about how it feels. in the moment. All right, so now let's turn our attention to the opposite problem, the issues that arise when you get too excited about your work. Hi, Kel, I'm Satish from Chennai, India. I'm a deep fan of all your work. The question I have is, with all these, I'm getting too ambitious and taking up multiple projects.

So it is hard to shut down and really spend time for leisure, activities, the virtuously sure that you talk about. How do you, do you have any tips to really shut down and do less what we can actually achieve? I'm trying to do that your shutdown complete rituals, but are there any more tips to ensure that we don't take up more than what we can chew? Well, Sothea, this is a good question. You are right to point out that the shutdown complete ritual, is a good starting place.

And just as a reminder to the listeners of how that works, the idea with the shutdown complete ritual is that at the end of your workday, whenever your time block planner tells you that is, you do a review basically of open loops. You look at your inbox, you look at your calendar, you look at the capture systems. You use throughout your day to capture ideas

that pop up so they're not in your mind. You look at your plan for the week and what's going on tomorrow. You make sure that there's nothing loose, nothing that you need to respond to that you haven't, no sort of big assignment that you're missing. You're basically giving your mind peace that it is okay to shut down. And then you have some sort of phrase or activity that you do to indicate that you have done this whole review and it's safe to shut down. So my original thing I used to do and I talk about in my book deep work is actually saying the phrase, schedule shutdown complete. It's, such a weird phrase to say that you're not going to forget it. The idea is that later in the evening, if your mind is thinking, hey, what if we have something to do, should we check our email, are we forgetting something? You know, you're waking up in the middle of the night. Hey, let's look at our calendar. You know, I'm just worried that maybe we're missing something. You can say,

whoa, whoa, whoa, I said that crazy, absurd phrase. I would not have said that if I had not gone through this full open loop review ritual and made sure there were no open loops. So instead of going back and reviewing what I have to do and making myself feel better, I just have to say I said that stupid phrase. And I would not have said that unless I was happy about the state of our schedule. Therefore, no more fretting required. And the idea is over time, this trains your brain to get rid of that reflex stress reaction that's induced by the entirely unnatural obligation demands of modern office work. Now in my new planner, the time block planner that's coming out in November, more on this soon as well, I actually put a checkbox that says shutdown complete. So for those of

you who have been resistant to actually yelling out loud, a schedule shutdown complete, you will have an alternative. You will have a check box that you check off. But it'll be the same idea. I would not have checked off that particular box if I had not done a complete shutdown review. Therefore, I can trust the fact I don't need to think about work. So Sahish style will help. Practice that and do that cleanly. The whole point with that routine is if you do it, enough weeks in a row,

it's like training. It trains your mind not to be as stressed about work. So it's not something that will give you relief the first time you do it, but we'll give you relief the 21st time you do it. That type of idea. All right, now let's move on to the bigger issue. You're saying you're doing something like that,

but you still have the issue that there's just too much going on. So even with a good schedule shutdown, you just feel like you don't have a lot of extra time. So my advice here is to do less. Longtime reader of my website, calnewport.com, might remember that back in the old days, when I was doing primarily student advice, the motto for the website was do less, do better, know why. this was essentially a distillation of my advice for college, high school, and graduate students who found themselves overwhelmed and stressed and having a hard time with school, I would say,

well, this is almost always the key. You're doing too much, do less, but do the things you do better. Really invest into them. Now, this means tactically speaking, sure, have the right strategies in place. And obviously, I had written books and lots of articles on how to be a good study or how to take notes, how to write papers, like get your act together on the actual tactical aspect of being a student, but also psychologically invest in the topics. Go to talks you don't have to go to. Read books on the topics that aren't assigned. Go to scenic or aesthetically pleasing places to actually do your reading. I remember I wrote a blog post around this time called Heidegger and Heffelizen.

Like, yeah, go to a pub-style bar. read time and being. As long as you're not going to be understanding Heidegger, you might as well do so with a pint in your hand. But there is something symbolic. It seems like, I don't know, a sort of British intellectualism to be sitting in a pub with a pint trying to grapple with English philosophy. You know, transform this into something you're trying to do well that's important to you. And then to know why is like have a foundation of motivation. This is why I'm doing this work. This is why I'm investing in my education. This is what I want to do with my life. those three things for a recipe for a very satisfying and successful student life.

This motto, do less do better know why, I think applies just as well to the world of work. It is a recipe for both satisfaction and success. So, Satish, you're probably doing too much. Do less projects.

But do those projects better. Like really hone your craft. really invest psychologically into it. I'm not just working on this thing, but I read about people who work on this type of thing. I'm immersing myself in the world that surrounds this type of project and know why.

I have a clear vision of why I think this type of project is important. Here's how it fits into a vision of my life. Here's why I think it's important to my community, to the world, to my organization, whatever it is, but have your own motivation, do it really well, do less things.

Now, tactically speaking, as I was telling Adam, earlier in this episode, this type of thinking can be codified in your quarterly semester plan. This is where you lay out the bigger term projects or initiatives that you're working on. Go to that plan and do some pruning. You know, get more selective. I just really want to work on these two things.

For my personal life, these are my two initiatives in my working life beyond the work that I have to do in terms of my optional aggressive initiatives. Maybe I'm just doing this between now, and Christmas. Right? Like this is my main project. I want to make progress on this most days, or I have two things I'm doing.

But aggressively prune that back. Put more energy into the things you do. Take more pride in these small number of things you do. Doing less will actually make you feel better. Right? So I think that's good advice for everyone. Do less do better know why. I wrote a blog post about this a few months ago over the summer

where I made this pitch. that idea is more applicable now than it has been before. That idea can be at the core of a deep life, just like I used to say was at the core of a satisfying student life. So I'm glad I have a chance to return to those ideas because I think in a time of overwhelm, in a time of unforced busyness, a little bit of minimalism can go a long way. We're running a little long, but let's try to fit in one more quick question. This also will have to do with some of the, the psychological obstacles involved in building out your deep work habits. Hi, Cal, my name is Grace.

I'm a ten-year business school professor at an R2 school, and my background is in the social sciences. The concept of deep work improved my understanding of how I process my work and think about my capabilities, but I struggle with the emotional regulation side of things, more specifically managing disappointment when I do not or cannot stick to my deep work schedule, and also managing, to be frank, the highs of a great session. After one of those sessions, I get it in my head that I should be doing deep work every day all day. Well, Grace, I don't know if this is maybe just a professor issue, but I got to tell you, I suffer from both of those issues. So, for example,

what you're talking about there about this notion of when you have a great deep work session, it can become frustrating when you are no longer able to replicate that more often. I feel that frustration all the time. I think university life is designed as a sort of cognitive torture chamber sometimes when it comes to productive cognitive work. It gives you these taste of I'm with my collaborators, I'm at the whiteboard, I'm solving big problems. We made a breakthrough in the problem. This is great. This is what I've trained for. My brain has been honed into a deadly intellectual weapon to try to solve these proofs. And then the next day, it's email out of your ears, it's committees, it's filling out merit review forms and reimbursements and trying to do journal

corrections and the funding for your postdoc because money was pulled from the wrong grant and now people from the grad school need to work with, you understand how that goes. And there's nothing more frustrating. And then I get really mad. And, you know, look, when I get mad, I wrote, last time I got really mad about this, the way I let out my frustration is I wrote a big feature piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called Is Email Making Professors stupid because I was just getting so frustrated by this. It's frustrating exactly because the stakes are so high. I mean, I think if I was in an office job that was normal, not like the stuff you and I do, Grace, but like a normal job in which you, I don't know, you're moving paper more

and you're not really expected to do incredibly high in thinking and be like, yeah, it's a job, whatever. I have too many meetings, but whatever, I'm kind of getting it done. But in the academic world, you're asked to do these giant feats of intellectual engagement. And then in the same breath, they make it very difficult to do. So I'm trying to say, I think that frustration is justified. So how do we deal with it? Well, I'll tell you what I've been working on recently. I've been working on making sure that I have a sustainable background rate of depth. And from that, I draw satisfaction. Now, if I can get periods where I have more, you know, like in Georgetown, we don't teach on Fridays. So if there's a Friday with no teaching and no faculty meetings and it's kind of

open and I make progress all day on a problem, that's great. But then I try to see that as a bonus and get my satisfaction slash frustration dampening from hitting a background rate of X hours of deep work every day. I think two, maybe three hours is a good target. I mean, maybe not right now exactly now, depending on where you live and the pandemic and child care and homeschooling. But I'm just saying more generally, outside of our exceptional circumstances, I think for most professors, two hours, maybe three is a good target. Might not be super easy to get it. You might have to use the beginning of the day or the end of the day.

You might have to use an early morning play to get it. But if you feel like you're doing two to three hours of deep work every single day as a background rate, and then you build on that as needed, you know, you're coming near a deadline. You really want to get a journal paper submitted. and you're able to clear out two days and really get after it, that's great. But you have this backdrop. I find that backdrop when I hit it really helps dampen that frustration about everything that happens outside of that. It really dampens the frustration of the rest of my day, overwhelmed with

administrative nonsense that I feel like I shouldn't be, but hey, at least I hit my background rate. That's one thing I've been working on. I sort of fell out of the habit. Now I'm trying to fall back into it. And so I think that is useful. The other problem is way more common, not just in academia, this issue of being upset when you don't hit your schedule. You know, you time block and your time block has this great time set aside for deep work, and that schedule doesn't work. Because something takes longer than you think or you get distracted or you're just fatigued and it just doesn't come together. And so something I emphasize in terms of that frustration, which, by the way, I feel all the time as well, because it happens to me all the time. is that the goal of time control, the goal of doing something like time block planning,

is not to hit your original schedule. It's not a carnival game where if the schedule you set up in the morning, you hit exactly, you get the big stuffed animal. Because that happens sometimes a lot of times it doesn't. And if it's a complex schedule, you're probably not going to hit it because what you're really doing is you're making estimates and guesses about how long things are going to take and what the state of your cognitive energy is going to be at different points of the day.

It's your best guesses, but it's hard to always consistently get those guesses right, especially if you have a lot of those guesses having to happen in a day. So if you have a lot of different switching between blocks, it's hard to get that mosaic to actually fit together tightly. That's fine. What I like to say and what I always have to tell myself is that the goal of this type of time control is not to hit your schedule exactly. it's to maintain a mindset of intention.

The goal is that at any point in your day, you have an intentional plan for what you're trying to do with the time that remains. The fact that that plan might have to change is not a sign of failure. And that's just a sign of reality that it's hard to estimate some task.

It's hard to estimate your cognitive energy. The thing that you want to avoid, however, what you want to avoid is a situation where you say, okay, I got off of my schedule, so now I give up on scheduling for the day. That's the thing that you should be frustrated about. That's the thing you might want to try to avoid. So as long as every time you get off your schedule,

next time you get a chance, next time you get a chance, you go back and fix your schedule for the time that remains. As long as you're doing that, you are successfully deploying time control strategies. By inducing intention into how you apply your time and energy during your professional hours in the day, you're going to get more out of your day

than if you do not induce intention. The fact that the actual plan underlying this intention changes a lot, that's okay. That being said, I still feel that frustration. So we know intellectually that's okay. I think that helps. Emotionally, sometimes it can be frustrating. It can be frustrating nonetheless. Now, in my planner that's coming out in November, the time block planner, I have this

longer introduction where, among other things, I give a lot of strategies for how to build out these time block plans in a way that's a little bit more flexible, that has a little bit more give that allows you to kind of induce some more uncertainty into the schedule so that you don't have to change it as much because I know that is kind of a pain. So you might find that useful. Now, I'll say as an aside, I thought this was funny, but it's cool. When you publish a book, and this is a complete digression, Grace, so my apologies. When you publish a book, one of the things you do when you're getting ready to promote the book is that you sell excerpt rights. So you're like a magazine might say, okay, I want to excerpt something from your book.

And there's like exclusive rights you give to that magazine to do so so that they get the first excerpt. We actually sold excerpt rights from my planner, which is kind of funny. I joked, like I try to imagine, like a magazine is just going to have like a page for my planner, like an empty time block frame. But actually what they were doing, the reason I brought this up is they're excerpting this introduction to the planner. So what makes this planner a little bit different than most planners is that you have like a longest Cal Newport treatise on productivity in the front. And so we're actually sold excerpts from the planner because I get into some of the nitty gritty of how you do this time control in a consistent way. But anyway, stepping back, Grace, basically I share your

frustrations and I have the same issues. So first of all, just that's okay. You and I have a frustrating job. That's just there's a frustrating element to being asked to use your mind at the highest possible levels while simultaneously being given a work environment that makes that as hard as possible. So we've got to acknowledge that. But to summarize what I'm saying is maybe having this background rate of deep work that you build on when you can will dampen some of the frustration. And when it comes to your time control, your time block planning, you're supposed to change the schedule. That's okay. It happens. I hate it too. But at least I know intellectually, that's the system working as it's supposed to.

All right. So that's all the time we have for today's Habit Tuned up mini episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. If you want to submit an audio question for these mini episodes, you can do so at speaktype.com slash Cal Newport.

Thank you also to our brand new sponsor, Optimize. Remember Optimize.me slash deep. Check it out. We will be back early next week with our next whole episode. of the Deep Questions Podcast. Until then, as always, stay deep.