Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 36: Habit Tune-Up: Scheduling Life Admin, Finding Time for Practice, and High-Tech Metric Tracking

Episode Date: October 15, 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.I also officially announce my new Time-Block Planner! Available for pre-order everyone you buy books. Find out more about the Time Block Academy event I'm holding for those who pre-order at calnewport.com/blog.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover:  * Trello versus Workflowy for task management. [9:08] * Integrating life admin into your work day. [12:54] * Finding time for deliberate practice in an unpredictable work day. [18:46] * Rekindling a reading habit lost to distraction. [30:10] * High-tech metric tracking. [36:46]Offer links from this episode's sponsors: * Optimize.me/deep * ExpressVPN.com/deep * Purple.com/deep10Thanks 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.

My biggest struggle is not losing focus from the distraction of this encroaching backlog of Life Admin, as you've previously referred to it. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions, habit tune-up mini-episode. Now, the format here is straightforward. I answer audio questions from listeners on how to tune up their productivity habits in a period in which our professional lives are increasingly disrupted. And before we get started with today's episode, I do have exciting news. I know listeners of the Habit Tune Up mini episode are like me, for the most part, productivity geeks.

You know I talk a lot about time blocking as part of my capture, configure, control, productivity philosophy. and you have heard me make oblique references to a upcoming time block planner. Well, I want to make those oblique references concrete today. I want to officially announce my time block planner is available on November 10th. You can buy it anywhere that you buy books online, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. The backstory to this planner is basically, I got tired trying to hack together what I needed for my productivity systems using existing notebooks that I would hand format every day.

And after one of these notebooks brands changed their paper quality at some point not too long ago to something I didn't like, I finally got fed up and realized, why don't I just design my own planner that delivers me exactly what I need for the style of time block planning that is at the core of my productivity philosophy. And that's the time block planner. Real quick preview, how it works is every day you have a two-page spread. So there's a ribbon to mark the current day. You open it to the ribbon. You have a two-page spread. On the right-hand side when you're looking at this planner is the time-blocking grid. Already pre-formatted, you have solid lines for the hours, dotted lines for the half hours, four columns

so that you can make a time block plan in the first column. If you need to repair the plan, you move over to the next column. If you need to repair it again, you move over to the next column. If you need to repair it again, you move over to the next column, those columns are there. It's incredibly fulfilling. I got to tell you, folks, when you have the nice, I'm using right now, like a 0.7 millimeter pilot,

smooth ink pin and the ink over those blocks, those light gray blocks to do your blocks. I don't know why it's so fulfilling, but it really is. So you have your time block grid. on the left-hand side, on the left-hand side, you have a capture space, ideas task. You need to capture something that comes to your mind during a current block. You don't want to break your concentration. You can capture it right there in the notebook.

No need to turn on a computer. No need to go into a program that could otherwise be distracting. Crucially, above that capture on the left-hand page, you have a daily metric tracking space. I talk a lot about the importance of tracking metrics. There's a question in today's episode about tracking metrics. There's the spot. I've been using a separate Moleskin notebook, a weekly planner notebook to do my metric tracking. I'm so much happier now to have that in the same notebook as my plan because there's certain metrics I actually record during the day.

And then for serious Newportian productivity geeks, the most important feature on that left hand page is a checkbox labeled shutdown complete. No longer do you have to say the phrase, schedule shutdown complete, and earn the ire of all. within earshot, you can now simulate the same psychological benefit of a clear shutdown by putting a way-to-fulfilling X in a box next to the phrase. All right, that's the basic mechanics of the planner. There's also weekly planning pages every seven days. You get weekly planning pages for your freestyle productivity, daily planning, weekly planning. There's a long introduction where I walk you through exactly how the planner works and gets the philosophy behind time blocking with advanced tips. Anyways, I love it. The thing is great. It's beautiful to look at. It's a little bit larger than normal planner so that we have enough room for the time block columns. It's got a nice dark blue cover with a subtle black grid pattern on it. Anyways, the whole thing is great. I've been using it for a few weeks now. I have my advanced copies, and it's everything I hoped it would be. So anyways, that's coming out on November 10th. Now, I figured again that the productivity geeks who listen to the habit tune up podcasts were probably going to buy this anyway.

So I wanted to be able to give you something, some sort of thank you for testing out this planner. So we're doing a bit of a pre-order style campaign. The details of this I'll put on my website. Just go to calnewport.com slash blog. If you already subscribe to my mailing list, you'll also get this sent to you via the mailing list. You can find these details in both places. But essentially, we have set up a special email address at Penguin Random House. and you just forward your receipt from whatever online retailer you use.

And if you've already bought the planner, already pre-ordered it, no problem. Just forward your receipt. And the marketing team at Penguin Random House will confirm the receipt and enter your name into the database. And what you will get is right away, they will send you a link to this video I made, where I will show you the planner, and I'll walk you through some sample time blocks to show you what the pages look like. So give you a preview of what to expect. But more importantly, it will get you access to. a live event that I will be doing on November 13th.

We're calling it Time Block Academy. It's only going to be people who pre-ordered the planner. Will be sent the link day of to attend. And I'm going to do advance super geeky Q&A on time blocking. We'll have the planners in front of us at this point. Everyone who pre-orders will have their planner by November 10th. We'll have the planners in front of us. I'll share screens so you can see me working in the planner.

You'll be able to ask questions live. You will also get access to a survey so you can submit your questions in advance. That's going to be a fun productivity geek event only for people who pre-order. All right. So if you are interested in those thank yous for pre-ordering the time block planner, you can look for the details at my website, calnewport.com slash blog or in your email inbox if you're a subscriber. Now, as for the podcast itself, remember speakpipe.com slash

Cal Newport. That is how you can submit the audio questions that we use for the habit tune-up many episodes. Also, as always, I thank you for ratings. I thank you for subscriptions, and I thank you for reviews. With that in mind, let's briefly do this episode's spotlight review. This is an actual five-star review from iTunes. This one was written by Med Stud 2, a name he probably regrets using as a username at this point. Notice I guessed a he. It's going out on a limb there. All right, this review is titled Outstanding. From the author of DeepWork, So Good They Can't Ignore You, and Digital Minimalism comes another bestseller, a podcast ripe with advice and actionable items to become a superstar of productivity

and to engage in a deep life. This podcast, along with the books, is life-changing. Thanks, Cal. Well, thank you, Med Stud too. Try out the time block planner as well, and you will really be off to the races. I also want to think before we get started, one of this week's sponsors, Optimize. I have been talking about Optimize recently on this podcast. This is a subscription service in which you get access to the world famous philosopher notes. These are summaries of some of the 600 of some of the best self-help books ever written. These notes are written by the philosopher, Monk and CEO slash founder of Optimize my friend Brian Johnson. You also get access to over 50 101 masterclasses, including one featuring me on digital minimalism and a daily video called the plus

one that brings wisdom for living better into your inbox. If you are looking to use the internet to make your life better, take the time that you would be spending on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, invest it into Optimize, and you will see a big difference. If you want to get a 14-day free trial, just to see what this content is like, and I highly recommend it, you can do so at Optimize.me slash deep. Again, that's Optimize. Dot me slash deep. All right, let's do some questions.

Hey, Carl, great fun of your show. I have a question regarding something I heard. In a recent episode, you mentioned that you use Trello, but also that you use Workflowy. And I transitioned from Workflowie to Trello recently, and I was curious about the reason why you keep on using both applications. Thank you. Well, I would say both applications do a good job of solving the same problem, which is giving you a low friction way to not only capture obligations on your plate, but to organize them in a way that makes it easy

to get a gestalt of the status of the various things on your plate. There's other tools to do this well also. Now, the backstory as to why I use both is that I had been mainly on Workflowy, which I really love Workflowy, which you can find at Workflowee.com. I really like the simplicity. is very low friction. It's just indented list, basically, right? So you just press

enter and you get a new item on a list. You press tab and you jump over to a nested list and then you can collapse the nested list. So if you have like a project you're working on, it has a lot of tasks under it. You can just tab over, make an indented list and then collapse the list when you're not working on it. So that can play the role of columns and Trello. You know, you have these different lists. The other thing workflow we had, which I like was tagging. I love the low friction way. It occurs as opposed to like a slightly more involved interface style tool like Omnifocus, as we talked about last week,

which also allows you to tag and create views, but the interface is a little bit more complex. So you can just throw a literal hashtag onto a task you add in workflowy. You just put hash sign. And a tag, that becomes linked. And you click on that, it'll just show you everything that has that tag and nothing else. and so like when I use workflowy I'm trying to figure out what I want to work on in a given week

I might tag all those things with hashtag urgent and when I click on that I just see the things that I wanted to work on that week. So I really like that workflow. I enjoyed it. I started using Trello in some professional circumstances because I was sharing the board with professional collaborators. That's kind of the short answer. So then I got in the habit for Georgetown-related stuff.

using Trello and using the shared task boards to coordinate with the people I was working with on various projects. And that was useful. And then for those projects, the ability to attach files was useful, the ability to do a little bit more detailed things on the cards like task lists on the back of the card

or have a lot of text, like did I copied from an email. That became pretty useful. And so I just ended up with this somewhat arbitrary division where my household life admin style task for and workflow, because those typically don't need to be shared, but they also don't need like files or checklist or complex amount of information.

And my work things ended up on Trello. I could move the household task to Trello. It would probably be okay to move a lot of the work stuff, the workflowy. So the fact I use both is just a legacy, sort of like a legacy decision that's not actually that thought through. So either or both are fine.

I highly recommend both of those tools. So I mentioned the word life admin, or phrase I should say, life admin in that question. So let's do a whole question actually on the role of life admin in a busy workday. Hey, Cal, I've been following your advice for years, and I found it especially useful as a student. I have a job now in which I'm really fortunate that I have the flexibility and autonomy me and how I structure my day and what goes into it as long as I'm hitting my deadlines for work,

even if this includes sometimes errands or emails or like other things that aren't necessarily my vocation. So if you were to give someone advice for tackling, like I said, this backlog of admin and just initially getting these systems in place and under control, would you recommend working on it during the workday and gradually making progress, say on like a Monday, Wednesday, say Friday, one hour at a time or outside of work where it'll get done in larger chunks but might be encroaching on quality leisure time. Well, first to give credit where credit is due, I got the term life admin from a book called The Art of Life admin by Elizabeth Eamens. I think this is a book I actually blurbed. And so I think Elizabeth did a good job of using a

terminology to capture the large amount of obligations in planning and execution that is required to keep your life outside of work functioning, especially if you have a house, especially if you have kids. So I think it's a good question. I would summarize the question this way. Do I integrate life admin into my workday or do I keep them separated? Now, I think my answer is going to depend on how autonomous is this job? So you, you, You mentioned in your question that you do have a lot of flexibility that as long as you are hitting your objectives, no one really cares how or when you do the work. If that is true, if you are truly in a results oriented work environment, then I would recommend time block planning your work,

so you know exactly what you're working on, weekly planning your week, so you know on what days you need to make progress on what, and then when you get to each day, you're time blocking so you know exactly what you're doing with your time. And I would have to be able to be. And I would probably just aim to get after it and be done my early afternoon and then give yourself a nice block for sort of longer form life admin, et cetera, and then be done with that by early evening. So I would have some separation. Now, I think a lot of people right now whose jobs on paper do have autonomy. So like let's say you're working from home, maybe because of the pandemic, you have extra flexibility because there's kids at home, maybe doing distance learning or homeschooling, whatever,

right? So maybe you have autonomy in the sense that it's not like you have to work on certain things or certain times or that if you're unavailable for an hour here or there there, there's going to be a problem. But at the same time, a lot of people in these situations, it might be a problem if you're not reachable after one or you're not reachable after two. You know, that's just too long of a gap. So if that's the, if that is your case, If that describes your reality, then I would probably recommend you could integrate some life admin blocks into your time block schedule and treat it with the same mindset you treat your other work blocks. I'm working on this, then I have this meeting, then I'm checking email, that I'm

pushing on this memo, and then I'm taking an hour to go to this store and knock off these three things to mail on the way, and then I have a couple hours to whatever, finish a report, and end the day with some email. So the advantage of integrating some life admin throughout your day into your time block schedule is that you're still visible later in the day. If you have an email block near the end of the day, you're still going to get back to people. You're not really putting it in people's face that, you know, hey, I only really need to work four or five hours to get things done.

Once I'm actually time block planning, once I'm actually doing capture, configure control, once I'm actually getting after it, this job doesn't take all my time. Maybe you don't really want that secret to get out. And so you integrate some life admin into your time block schedule in the day at early evening. Now, again, you're still not going to encroach into family or leisure time here because when you end your work day, you've already gotten done a lot of your life admin as well. So I think both of those things work. The key, I think the key in here is A, the time block planning. So if you're controlling your time and say, great, I'm going to take this hour to do this life admin.

That's a completely different psychological challenge than just your sort of work. and then you sort of go over and start doing some household stuff, and you have a whole phase shift in your mindset. Time block planning helps to reduce those type of phase shifts. You're just executing. What am I doing this block? What am I doing that block? Your focus is on hitting your blocks,

not am I in work mode or am I in life admin mode. Weekly planning is also important. Weekly planning your life admin, as I've been talking about recently. The introduction to some recent episodes where we were talking about household productivity, this was an idea I proposed, you weekly plan your life admin to make sure that the big rocks

actually have times put aside. You say like, yeah, Tuesday I'm going to take the car to get its emissions inspection and I am going to finally go through this mail sorter on Wednesday. And so you sort of know what big chunks of life admin can get done when, you can integrate that with your schedule. So basically that's why I would advise. If no one really does care when you work, time block plan your work, do your life admin, be done.

If they do kind of care, just throw in those blocks and treat them like any other types of administrative blocks. That will unleash the power of time block planning on your life admin, and you'll be surprised by how much more you're able to get done in your life outside of work. All right, let's move on now to a question from a law partner. Hey, Cal, this is Mike. I am a partner in a top 100 law firm here in the United States. My question for you is, how do you incorporate principles of deep work and deliberate practice into a profession, which is frequently unpredictable and requires a lot of just-in-time learning? Just to elaborate a bit, I focus my practice on insolvency work,

and the work that comes across my desk or that comes to me is always in that realm, But so very frequently throughout the day and throughout the week, I am hit with a lot of unique or discrete issues that require a quick deep dive into some narrow area of the law and requires a lot of just-in-time learning. This experience broadens my horizon and overall is good, but at the same time, I find it difficult to do deliberate practice, so to speak, or deliberate learning in areas where I really want to grow my practice. So what advice do you have for someone in my position? Well, first of all, Mike, I'm always happy to hear from lawyers who are thinking about things like deep work, because I've long maintained law is one of these fields in which there is simultaneously huge advantage to optimizing your cognitive performance while at the same time the structure of the work is set up to be unusually harmful in terms of accomplishing that goal.

A lot of lawyers work under a constant communication model where being responsive to clients, billing at seven and a half minute increments, being responsive to partners creates a situation in which their cognitive capacity is permanently decreased. Now, I think one of the reasons why, especially high billing law firms, this is not necessarily a high priority,

is like, okay, if cognitive capacity is decreased, it just means people work longer hours. If we work longer hours, we make more money. So I do kind of understand the incentives are against it, but I always appreciate hearing lawyers who take cognitive performance seriously and really think about the relationship between how they structure their work and what they get out of their brain. So the first thing I would say, before I get to the specific meat of your question, which is about finding time for deliberate practice,

is that you have an interesting setup. Your work is such that requires a lot of deep work, but the deep work is unpredictable. And this was the example you gave in the question. And in solvency law, you might not know, as you go into a day, that you're about to spend three hours mastering some nuance or insight or having to do some sort of deep concentration

to produce a response or a brief you weren't planning for it, but just pops up and there you've got to go. you've got to concentrate hard on that. So this is a job that has a lot of deep work. It's just unpredictable. And my aside I want to give about that is that time block planning is going to be crucial for someone in this situation. You need to be able to step back and say, okay, my schedule has changed.

I now need to do this. What is going to be the best way to fix my schedule going forward? You do not want to lose that intention in such a job that requires unpredictable depth because if you lose planning intention, your day is going to fall apart in the aftermath of any one of these common unpreicted deep work intrusions.

And so what I would recommend is one of these things pops up, pops up like, okay, I have to get after this. You know, you do it, you do the deep work, you go all in, and then when you're done, you say, now let me fix the schedule for what remains. Let me try to salvage as much as possible out of what remains.

That intentionality is going to give you a non-trivial epsilon increase and what actually gets done and how many balls are dropped or not dropped, give you an epsilon positive increase. That's going to add up over time. And so you get this, you know, I got a little bit more done in the aftermath of one of these unpredictable blocks. I let a few less balls fall through the cracks after particularly bad ones.

Multiply that by five days. Multiply that by four weeks in a month. And you're going to be doing way better than if you let your schedule destabilize. So as a long-time listener and reader of my work, you're probably already. doing it, but I just think this is a great case where the intentionality embedded in time block planning is going to really help. And from a psychological perspective also, I just want to emphasize, don't think of it as being bad that you have this unpredictability in your schedule. That's just what the nature is of your work. So success in your field, it's not a flaw, it's the nature of it.

So success in your field is to be able to lock in on these unpredictable things as they pop up without losing control over everything. You do that well, that will be, you know, that will be what it means to be successful in your field. That is the challenge. And it sounds like you're up for it. All right. So what about the non-urgent, deliberate practice, the meat of your question? The stuff that you want to learn to be better at your job in the future, the new law that was passed, now you need to master it. A new nuance in, look, I'm making up legal terms here. So new nuance in case law, you know, relevant to your field. You want to get on it. I want to read this law journal. I want to read this case. I mean, I don't know what lawyers do,

but I think I'm in the orbit of the type of work you're talking about. It sounds like to me, what you need is a deliberate practice routine. That is first thing, pretty early in the day. It doesn't have to be every day. Just a routine where, you know, you start your day early. As I've referenced before, you're Tom Cruise in the firm where he shows up early at the Memphis law firm to practice for his bar exam

and that's when you get your deliberate practice done before you have to do this schedule shuffle that's going to happen again and again. Because I think the problem you're most likely encountering which is why you're asking this question is there's only so much, it's difficult, right? It's difficult to keep unrelated blocks of depth in your schedule, especially if they keep shifting.

So if you're like, well, I was going to do some deep deliberate practice on this case, law at noon, but something unexpected popped up. And now I'm going to have to try to shift that to another time. And then something else pops up and you have to shift that a little bit later. By the time you get there, you just don't have the energy left to do it. So my suggestion is it's what, two days a week, three days a week, maybe it's Saturday morning, Wednesday morning, and Monday morning, however you want to do it. You just block out that time first thing before the chaos begins. You do your deliberate practice and it's just routine. And you accrue into background

an increasingly large aggregation of knowledge on important fields, which increases your career capital, increases your effectiveness. So given the reality of your work, that's probably what I would suggest. So just to summarize, get the deliberate practice on non-urgent but important things done first on a regular schedule,

preferably with a ritual so your mind can shift into that mode for unexpected deep work demands. That's fine. Drop things and get after it. Just make sure that you fix your time block schedule when you're done. I want to take a moment to talk about another one of this week's sponsors of the Deep Questions podcast, and this is Purple, makers of the world famous purple mattress and purple pillows.

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and you can get three months of ExpressVPN for free. That is EXPR-E-S-S-V-N.com slash deep to protect your data. Go to expressvpn.com slash deep to learn more. Now, this next question is one that may seem at first as if it falls outside of our narrow confines for this mini episode format on just work productivity questions. But as you'll see in my answer, I think it does have some interesting overlap with that world. Hey, Kyle. This is Sunny from San Francisco Bay Area. I have a question about rebuilding a reading habit. I used to like reading and I used to read two to three books per month at list. However, since Netflix and YouTube walked into my life, reading got boring, and I lost my reading habit. After listening to your podcast, I deleted

the Netflix app, and I also set up the recommendation free YouTube plugin, and it's been very helpful. But honestly saying, reading still feels a little boring and not not reading as much. I mean, I still buy a lot of books, but finishing one book still feels quite hard. What could be the first step to rebuild my reading habit and take the joy of reading back. And how could I stick with that habit? Any suggestion will be appreciated. Thank you so much. Bye. Well, I like this question because I like your goal to reestablish a reading habit is going to prove a lot of dividends for you. A, it's a high quality leisure activity. B, it's cognitive calisthenics. G grappling with long form content is very good for your brain. It gets your brain sharper. It gets your ability to focus improved.

It gets your ability to reason critically sharpened. So one of the reasons I'm talking about a reading habit habit tune up mini episode format today is that this is going to help your work. If you're reading more, you're going to be better at your work. So I think that is good. There's also other benefits to reading in the last week's deep questions. length episode. I talked about how long-form consumption of information is the key to moving from exposing yourself to some information to actually knowing about something. So if you have philosophical, political, ethical, theological, ideas, or points or stances or points of view on which you want to actually build your life and direct your actions, the best way to do this is to consume

long-form content like from a book. And I suggested in that episode you read the best things written about the idea, you read the best critiques of the idea, you read about the best alternative to the idea, you let those things clash, your roots of understanding will go deep, and you'll come away from there actually knowing more about that topic. And you can ever get just exposed yourself to some information about it on Twitter or on Facebook or just seeing a YouTube video or how people are talking about things. So reading is really at the core of a lot of important things. And so I'm glad you are trying to get back into this habit. You are also absolutely right to note that it's a habit you can get in and out of, just like if you have not been

running, when you go out to run a 5K, your time's going to be bad. All right, so we're going to have to do some work. And after a while, your time will be better again. That's what we're going to do here. You've lost the habit of reading. It sounds like internet-based distractions have diminished that comfort with concentration. Your brain's out of shape. Let's get it back in shape. What I'm going to suggest for the near future, let's say the next one to two months, is the two chapter rule. I want you to read two chapters every day.

And I want you to track this wherever you track your daily metrics. I do this. I write the word chap, C-H-A-P-C-H-A-P colon, and then I write next to it how many chapters of books I read that day. And all I want you to do is hit two every day, no matter what it takes. Then we're going to work backwards from that goal to figure out how to actually get there. But that's where I want you to start. Now, if you're not tracking metrics, you should be.

Actually, our next question will get deeper into that. But an easy way to do this. Hint, hint, is with the time block planner. I have a daily metric tracking space on that for exactly this reason. But anyways, you want to do two chapters a day you want to track that. where are you going to find time for that? Well, you can have some routines or rituals. A lunch break reading session is a good one.

A first thing in the morning reading break is a good one. A happy hour reading break is a good one. It's a good activity right before bed. So you can have some regular times where you read, but you also might want to try time blocking or reading block in your day. You have an eight-hour workday and you're putting various time blocks,

we've got meetings, you're doing emails, working on this project. Just find a half hour and their time block it for reading. That alone will get you to your two chapters. Now, this is the second reason why I'm including this question in a habit tune-up mini episode is because I think this is a case where leveraging the tools that we have optimized for work productivity

can actually help you with this broader cognitive goal. Once you're in the mode of time blocking, once you're in your workday, you're going from block to block and trying to execute, your brain is in a mode of, of what I want to do is hit my blocks. What I take pride in is hitting my blocks. Here's what I'm doing next, let's do it.

Here's what I'm doing next, let's do it. You can basically hijack that mindset to get your reading done at first. All right, I have an email block, let's do it. Working on this memo for an hour, let's do it. Reading a chapter for a half hour, let's do it. And you're going to do that much easier than if you're just in your evening

and you're just relaxing and you say, I could read, but you know what, someone's texting me and I want to go on Netflix and maybe tomorrow. So that would be my final advanced strategy. might start by time blocking at least one of these chapter readings every day, then maybe trying to find a ritualized time like lunch or like bed or like morning or like happy hour and what you read the other one. But just hit two chapters a day, have at least one of those be a kind of complex

nonfiction book. The other thing can be a little bit easier. That's really enough. If you do that for one to two months, you're going to find your difficulty concentrating on books is going to go down, that you're going to add extra reading time outside of those blocks and that your ability to concentrate is going to go up, your ability to build deep knowledge of topics, not just being exposed information, but knowing something about it, you'll be able to do that. It's going to be the foundation for a lot of good things. And this simple discipline of two chapters a day, using those tools I've just described to help you get there, that's going to be what lets you lay that foundation both effectively and efficiently. All right, we have time for one more question.

We've been talking a little bit about metrics and a few of these questions, so why don't we let this last query be specifically on that topic? Hi, Cal. This is David in Central Scotland. I am thoroughly enjoying all your discussion of productivity dragons and productivity hydra. And if I am a tall representative, then this podcast will hopefully be making you something of a sales midas. Now my question relates to your suggestions surrounding the tracking of metrics. This is something I've experimented with myself over the last 18 months or two years, though the implementation has always looked different from what you describe.

Now, using something like a spreadsheet or an app or even a plain text file with a shell script enables one to look for trends in their recorded data, look to see how we're making progress, what is going well, what isn't going well, what isn't going well. Do you see any value in this slightly more complex way of recording and tracking metrics? Or do you think that the complexity in itself would be a potential distraction with limited benefits? Keep up the great work. Thanks very much. Well, I think first of all, I'll have to say I'm a little bit worried. My memory of the King Midas myth is that things do not end up all that well for Midas. So I don't know what subtle warning you're trying to give me here,

David, but I'm listening and I'm sweating. Now, as for your actual question, I think this notion of using a digital format for metrics that allows you to plot or otherwise quickly summarize trends is not a bad one. I know there's a lot of people within the life hacker movements or within the quantified self-movements which overlap like to do this. They often send me charts. They'll show me their deep work hours over time, or they'll correlate deep work hours with other metrics from their life to try to find interesting connections. These type of days I do less, these type of days I do more. I think all that could potentially be interesting. So let me talk the other side here a little bit. I first want to note that simply writing down your

metrics, even if it is just on paper and something like my time block planner, it has a benefit, even if you never look out of it again. This is something I wrote about way back in my very first book, How to Win at College, which I wrote while at college. And in that very first book, I had something in there about tracking metrics. And one of my big ideas here was just, if your mind knows, at the end of the day, I'm going to write down, did I do X, how much of Y was accomplished? Your mind is more likely to do more X and do more Y before you get to that point. It does not want to be confronted in black and white with having to put down zero X,

or very little Y. I think, for example, with deep work hour tracking, one of the more common metrics that my readers and listeners follow and record, Just knowing you're going to write down your deep work hours is often enough to motivate you to get going with some deep work hours when you might otherwise try to defer. The second thing I'll say is I've noticed in my practice, and I've tracked metrics in various things, I was using, as I mentioned, a Moleskin weekly planner, which is a planner that only gives a very little amount of space for each day. So I find it to be not that useful for most things, but for metrics, it's fine. and now I'm, of course, in the last couple of weeks, I've been using my time block planner now that I have advanced copies to work with and it has a metric space. I found that it's pretty easy to review.

In either case, you just flip through a few pages. What have I done this month? What have I done this week? Whatever granularity that you want to review this information. And you see pretty clearly, oh, okay, you know, my deep work's low. Or it's good, but it goes down some days. Or if you're tracking steps like I do. huh it's just these occasional days with very little what's going on in those days and the human brain does a pretty good job of sophisticated algorithmic analyses no programming involved third i will say if you're recording this information you remember it a lot more than you think so even without review just a fact that you had to write down a given number every day for the last few weeks you have a good overall gestalt sense of what's been going on with that number because you're revisiting it every day so it's as if there's a

track in the record player that is your mind, that's being grooved with this information. And it's kind of used to thinking about it and keeping track of it. And so, I mean, that's all to say, just to argue the other side here, that even a simple paper metric tracking habit can do a really good job of getting you to do that work and keeping you up to date on how well you're doing that work and to help you identify trends. Now again, with that being said, I think a more advanced digital system that allows you to digitally generate reports, to find insights you might not otherwise intuitively had, is a really cool idea. And as I've mentioned, I know people who do it, they send me some of these analyses. So I think here it all comes down to friction.

How much friction is there in using a digital system? And given your own personality or affinity for digital systems, is that friction going to be prohibitive or not? Those are the two factors that I think makes the difference. So if you have a very low friction digital system, right? So if you are a Danny O'Brien-style early 2000s life hacker who uses Emac max macros and text files to keep track of everything and you're in there all day long jumping around really efficiently with keystrokes, then it's probably very low friction for you also to track your metrics in there. In fact, it might even be lower friction than actually having a separate planner. Similarly, if you're someone who likes that type of hacking,

if you're like 2003 Merlin Man and really on board with Quicksilver, the younger among you can look that up, then you might just get a kick out of having these custom keystrokes on your Mac keyboard that brings up this window where you can hit, you know, type in your metric and press enter, and it goes right into Omnifocus with the proper context and tag that you can find it later.

Some people really like that. that. Like Merlin was a Mac guy. And that was really cool. And he was excited about the idea that the Mac could unlock more productivity in people, unlock more potential, which was a big, a big focus of the Mac back in that time before when it was still sort of a niche computer. And that'll lower the friction because you like using those tools if you're that person. So if you're in one of those circumstances, then yeah, the friction is low. It's not going to build up much. Then, hey, you might get some interesting insights. You should use it. On the other hand, if you don't normally store stuff on digital tools, If it's a little bit of a slog for you to go into and load up Excel and go to a saying and enter a new row and type in the date and type in your metrics or what have you, that little bit of friction.

If it's something that you don't normally do, if you're not the sort of person who loves that type of quantified self-digital life tracking, that friction is going to be a problem. That friction is going to build up. And then on the day where you're a little bit tired or you're running a little bit behind, you're not going to do it. And you don't do it for two days. You say, well, this is not something I do. And once it's something that you don't do, psychologically speaking, it falls off your radar. The habit dissipates. So, you know, it's an easy question with a tricky answer.

If you're at all worried about this, and this is not just talking to David, this is talking to anyone out there. Paper is very, very low friction. It works well. That's what I'm saying. If, however, you like the idea of digital metric tracking, if you think it would be cool to get reports, if you deal with these type of tools all day anyway, so there's not like some extra friction, it's not like you're going over and turning to crank and opening the computer and going through a lot of passwords just to get to the tool, then you might give it a try. But if you find yourself falling off the habit, that just means the friction was getting too hot, fall back to the lowest possible friction alternative like a notebook. That's going to get you 90% of the way to an optimal

habit. All right. So that is all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions to send your own audio questions into the Habit Tunup mini episode. You can do so at speakpipe.com slash Calnewport. Do you want to find out more about the time block planner and the special event that I'm holding for people who pre-order? Remember, you can find those details at my website, calnewport.com slash blog. Thank you to our sponsors, Optimize Purple and ExpressVPN. And I should be back Monday with the next full-length episode of the question.

and until then as always stay deep