Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 38: Habit Tune-Up: Daily vs. Weekly Planning, Supercharging Home Offices, and Taming Demanding Jobs

Episode Date: October 22, 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: * The difference between daily and weekly planning [10:08]* Fighting shallow work in medicine. [16:44]* On the value of taking off a work day each week. [24:14]* Maximizing home offices. [30:29]* Scheduling deep work with a chronic illness [43:08]* Taming jobs with large hour demands. [49:32]Special Offer Sponsor Links: - grammarly.com/DEEP - indeed.com/QUESTIONS - foursigmatic.com/DEEPThanks 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.

Do you have any recommendations for boosting productivity and setting boundaries and demanding jobs like finance that regularly require more than eight-hour days? I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep question's habit tune-up mini-episode. The format here is simple. I take voice questions specifically on the topic of how to tune up your product. activity habits in this moment in which our working lives are increasingly disrupted. I have a good group of questions put aside for today's episode. Among other queries, we'll tackle how the doctors can try to tame shallow work, how finance people can try to tame just too many work hours demanded of them overall.

We'll get into the difference between daily and weekly planning and even talk about how to schedule for depth. When you have a chronic illness, it means you're not sure in advance how much energy you're going to have. Before getting to these questions, though, I wanted to mention something briefly that was on my mind.

So right before I began recording today's episode, I stopped by the local coffee shop that I frequent here. It's a coffee shop called Bevco, here in Tacoma Park. And it is on essentially the same block as the Deep Work H.Q and only a few blocks from my home. So as you can imagine, I frequent it a lot. They've introduced the ability to order things online with your credit card save. So at this point, I believe they basically get 5% of all of my income.

I should just directly deposit that into their account, given the amount of money I spend there now. But anyways, it's a good coffee shop. I've done a lot of my writing there, actually. A lot of my research and writing for my New Yorker pieces were done there. A lot of the work on digital minimalism was done there. A lot of the work on my upcoming book, A World Without Email, was done there. So it's a good spot for working. Anyways, the point of today's story is that they have this large outdoor seating area.

They've taken over one of the nearby streets and put out tents and tables, but they've had to have a rule that says, laptops because they don't have as much seating outside as they used to have inside. And also with most people in this area remote working, I think people would squat at those tables all day if they're allowed to use their laptops. Now, why this is interesting is people still want to go get out of their house. People still want to get some work done with a cup of coffee. So we have this natural experiment where people are now in my neighborhood being forced to figure out how do I get things done for my knowledge work job without using a computer.

And what I'm seeing, for example, and I saw this this morning, is more notebooks. Like pen and paper notebooks, I'm also seeing more printouts. So people have rediscovered a technique that I've long advocated, which is tackling work in an analog format in an interesting location when possible. So I see more and more people who will bring, I don't know what it is, but it'll be a printout of a report or a memo or what have you, and they're taking notes in a notebook with a pen.

And I am going to guess what they are discovering based on my own experience is that this is actually a really effective way to get certain types of deep efforts done. You have removed from the equation when you're, laptop is no longer allowed, you have removed from the equation one-click access to a myriad of distractions. So your mind does not have to sit there expending 60% of its effort, just fighting off that urge to click that tab or open that app. And because of that, they're probably discovering the people using notebooks now at Tacoma Bevco are probably discovering. There is a presence and a clarity and a piece and a focus that comes from paper and a pin

and printed text in front of you and that's it. Your mind is able to fall into a state of fully present concentration. It is hard to do when it is otherwise surrounded by shining digital bubbles. So anyways, I bet natural. experiments like this are happening all over, all over the country where people are at coffee shops, at cafes, there's no laptop rules for obvious reasons, and they're forced to rediscover other ways of working and remembering what that's like. And I think that's going to be a positive, right? Well beyond the temporary moment of this pandemic, if people being exposed to other modalities of

working, which to me is all part of this larger topic I sometimes called psychological productivity, which is basically productivity that takes into account how the human brain actually operates. Productivity that doesn't just treat the human brain like a generic computer processor, that you just feed tasks and it executes cycle after cycle agnosticly. Now, the human brain is not like that. The context matters, the material matters, the medium matters, the situation matters, what you're doing right before matters, the other distractions of the environment matter. It is a messy organ.

And getting this messy organ to produce clean results of value is an art form. And so this is an example of it. It may seem in some sort of purely optimization technical sense, suboptimal, to use a paper notebook when you have a laptop that has a notebook app, plus everything else you might need. But to our messy human brains, it might help you get a lot more done. or at least get the same amount of work done with a lot more mental peace. So anyways, my hat's off to the notebook workers at Bevco.

I'll tell you what I've been doing there recently. I'm working on an article. I'm at a stage where I have to do a lot of reading. And as much as possible, I have been trying to bring my books with a pencil to have lunch there. And as I eat and wait for my food to work through the old-fashioned book with an old-fashioned pencil, highlight of my week when I get to do that. here is to the return of analog work on deep topics.

Well, let's do a little brief housekeeping. If you want to submit your own voice question for the Habit Tunup mini episode, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you should subscribe to my email list at calnewport.com. You will get my famous weekly article. which I have been publishing since 2007, if you can believe it. It's also where you find out about things like how to submit questions for the

full-length deep questions episodes. You can also find out about things like the Time Block Academy event. I am holding next month for people who pre-order my Time Block planner and so on. So sign up for that mailing list. You won't regret it. And, of course, reviews, rating, subscriptions, making a big difference. We're honing in on 500 ratings of this podcast on Apple. And I got to say, I think it makes a difference.

It helps people give the podcast a try. All right, so we have six questions we want to get to. So the one last thing I want to do before we dive into the questions is give thanks to one of these sponsors that actually makes this show that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible. And I am talking about grammarly. You have heard me talk about grammarly before, and there is a reason. It's because I am very impressed. when we think about grammar checkers in the old days, we think about grammar mistakes.

You used a wrong form of there. You used a possessive when you didn't need the possessive. Now, of course, Grammarly solves that. But the thing that has really caught my attention about Grammally is that it can do more. Their Grammarly Premium product will give you clarity suggestions. It will give you vocabulary suggestions. it will do the type of editing that professional writers get from their editors and from their copy editors to make their pros as persuasive and clean and professional sounding as possible.

Just having no mistakes is not enough. You need clear sentences. You need active sentences. You need to use the right word, something that's not too complicated, but something that's not too simple. I have had professional editors help me with this since I was 21 years old and I started professional writing. And it makes a real big difference. and now anyone can get that professional editor feel in their writing with Grammarly Premium. It works on all your apps.

I highly recommend it. If you can write like a pro, it's going to do very important things for your career. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited about that product. So if you want to elevate your writing, you can get 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at Grammarly.com slash deep. and they tell me you should do this on your web browser, on your computer, and not on your phone. There might be some issues with mobile browsers. That's 20% off Grammarly Premium at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash deep.

All right, let's get started. Our first question is about weekly versus daily planning. Hi, Cal. I'm Yenadairx, an author from Amsterdam, and I would like to be a lot. like to ask you about weekly versus daily planning. Me and my girlfriend, we are now each morning going through our day, so we're time blocking our day, which is working very well. But you also say that weekly planning is also very important. Could you explain why this is important instead of doing your planning each day around your quarterly plan? Thanks. Well, you this is a good question. I am a big believer in weekly planning as a separate discipline

from daily and from quarterly planning. My time block planner, which comes out in November, has weekly plans in it. It's seven days of time blocks, weekly plan. Seven days of time blocks, weekly plan. So as you ask, what do you get by looking at your time at the weekly scale that you're not going to get just taking each day and time block planning the day. Well, I think there's three things here that are relevant. Number one, not all days in a week are made equal. So when you sit and look at your entire week,

you start by saying, what do I need to get done this week? And you figure that out, first of all, by looking at your calendar, and second of all, looking at your quarterly plan. So your calendar might inform you because there is deadlines on there. oh, there's something due this week, or there's something due next week, but it's long,

and I'm going to have to start working on it this week. And your quarterly plan is where you're going to get the push to work on things that are maybe non-urgent but important. You know, I want to submit this academic paper at this deadline coming up two months from now, so I need to be making progress early, and I should be getting some good time in on this research idea this week, that type of thing. Now you look at your whole week and begin to see some patterns. Like maybe you see Monday and Wednesday are really busy.

There's a lot of pre-scheduled meetings and appointments. So Tuesday's really open. Actually, that's my most open day of the week. So let me take this really big thing. And actually, why don't I build a whole day around, like working on just that thing with a shallow push here? And well, Friday, what I'm going to do is that's going to be the right time to make progress here. And you begin moving these things you want to get done around your weekly schedule, like chess pieces on a chessboard. trying to find the best configuration.

And you can do this at the weekly scale and end up with a really optimized week the way things are spread out in a way that if you just wait till each day and say, what do I want to work on today? You're going to miss out on a lot of those opportunities to optimize. You're going to get to that open Tuesday. You say, oh, what do I want to do today?

And you'll do some tasks. You'll do a little bit of work on a big thing. Missing the idea that actually the key to your schedule is going to be making Tuesday all about just nailing this book chapter or whatever, working on research all day. And you aren't going to see that if you're not looking at the weekly scale. Now, the second issue is when you look at your entire week,

you will notice when things are unsustainable. Maybe you know, like, here's what I really need to get done. Given my deadlines, given the non-urgent but important things, my quarterly plan says I should be working on, you're looking at this weekly schedule, like, man, I am zoomed. up to my eyeballs, every day is fractured. I can't make the pieces work. When you see that at the weekly scale, now you can actually potentially make changes. You might be able to say, I'm going

to cancel this, I'm going to cancel that. I know I told this colleague that I would jump on a call with them and I would do a sort of coffee with this person and I'm just going to have to push those off. I don't have enough time in this week to get done what needs to get done. You're not going to have that same insight if you're taking it day by day. Because if you take it day by day, oh, what's on my calendar today? Great. Let me time blocking the time around it. And then you get the Friday,

and you're like, man, I didn't get a lot done this week. The third thing you get at looking at your, from looking at your schedule at the weekly scale is you can put in place temporary heuristics. So I do this a lot. I'll be like, okay, a common example for me will be, maybe I'm on a program committee for an academic conference. I have a lot of papers to review. I might look at my week and say, okay, now seeing that I really need to get through

five reviews this week and I'm looking at the reality of my week and I'm saying, okay, here's the thing I need to do. I don't really have anything scheduled first thing in the morning, so I'm just going to put in a heuristic for this week, the first hour of every day. It's like, to my porch paper review, to my porch paper review. I'm going to do that every day. I can now set a heuristic in my weekly plan. Here is a routine or ritual I'm going to run for this week only. And this is the way I'm going to have enough motivation and rhythm to get enough of these reviews done this week to stay on track. Again, if you're facing each day as it comes, you might not think about this.

You're just looking at that day and you might start with this and then get to that, and then you realize as you get the Friday, like, well, I didn't get a lot of paper reviews done. So this weekly scope is very useful. And it's trial and error. I mean, I identified the weekly scope as being the key adjunct to daily just through trial and error. Monthly doesn't work that well for me. I've tried it before. You're dealing too far in advance.

It's just too hard to make concrete plans for three weeks in the future or four weeks in the future. Quarterly is good for high-level planning. You know, if you're trying to do quarterly style planning too fine of a granularity, you need more give, but if you're doing it once a year, that's not enough. So all of these scales, daily, weekly, quarterly, it's just trial and error. and this seems to be the right recipe. So, Yale, I'm glad you asked about this. And I would recommend to you and your girlfriend

give the weekly plan some serious thought. So if time block planning kind of doubles what you can get done in a given day, if you combine that with weekly planning where you're basically optimizing over the week, that multiple is going to get even larger. When those two things work together, that's when people begin to think

you have a superpower. All right, good question. Let us now turn to a query about the shallowness that threatens to drown doctors. Hi, Cal. My name is Terry. I work with a group of physicians who have a lot of shallow work. They sometimes have 25 to 30 phone calls a day. And would love time for deep work to think about more difficult cases and presentations for their calls. colleagues. Do you have any suggestions? Oh, thanks for the question, Terry. I've done some work with doctors. I've done some work with hospitals on some of these issues. So I do

have some thoughts that I'm hoping will be generally applicable to several different fields, not just medicine. But there's a few things I often tell doctors in this situation. And I have to say this complaint you're talking about is very common. The first thing I talk about,

about is doctors working in a practice are very used to this idea of their shifts being built around billable events. So you have a calendar, it's patient consultation, procedures, whatever it is, but that you have this time and your time can be broken up into these scheduled events that are on a clear calendar, and those are often associated with billing. Well, I often recommend that there should be added into this schedule, deep work or thinking events, treated like an appointment, treated like a procedure. It goes onto the schedule here, it goes on to the schedule there.

That time is then protected. That if I worked in a practice or a group at a hospital, depending on the benefits that accrue from deep work, so thinking whatever research or thinking through new procedures or whatever it is, whatever it is that the doctors you're talking about are hoping to gain, that I would have some standards for, I want to see you accruing at least this many hours of that deep work. Just like you might say, hey,

we expect you to bill at least this many hours of client consultations because we're in that mindset. It's a calendar events are associated with return. You take advantage of that mindset and said, I want to see four hours a week. We expect that of our doctors. and we will protect that among our doctors. You want to do it.

It's our standard. You're allowed to do it. We want to see it. No one's going to push back on you. That's part of what we do in our practice. That's part of what we do in this group. So you leverage this mindset that a lot of medical environments already have of your time being scheduled in a system and those things are associated with return.

You leverage that mindset to both insist on and make possible. a certain amount of non-interrupted thinking throughout the week. So that's one thing I recommend. Two, doctors are often really non-psychologically aware about their work schedules. I think there's, especially in private practice, this real tendency of make this much money per minute, and let's just maximize every dollar we can get. try to fill every single minute. But this is incredibly fatiguing. It burns out doctors. It leads to practices falling apart. It leads to doctors being unhappy. It leads to downgrades to significantly

less time. Like, well, I'm just going to go halftime because this is unsustainable. And I often think you just pulled that back a little bit. So look, the human mind needs breaks. Can't always be in a mode of working on procedures or working with clients. Maybe 10% of your time during the day should be, here's 20 minutes here, here's margin here. Now, I think a lot of doctors just think, well, I guess I want to optimize every dollar I can get, but if you really talk to the doctors, they don't really need that. I mean, it's a good job. They have autonomy. It's skilled. They like helping people. They make good money. And if the offer was, it's going to be 10% less money, but you're going to get a 100% benefit psychologically

because now you have some margin and now you have some breaks, that's a deal that a lot of doctors would take. So really trying to encourage doctors to get past this mindset of, well, why don't we just push our psychological limits as far as we can? Like push ourselves to the brink of burnout

because that maximizes the dollars. To what end? I honestly think a 10% reduction in time if strategically deployed through margin and breaks, would give benefits that massively outweigh, okay, you know, my salary is 340,000 instead of 380,000. I think a lot of doctors will take that trade, but it just is not presented. It's not on the table. Now, third, and this is particularly important in the hospital environment, communication protocols matter.

I have seen in my work the situation in which doctors, especially in hospital environments, are most miserable, is when their particular group has ad hoc communication protocols. Anyone can grab anyone at any time. They say, we'll just do this on email, and nurses will just grab you, and other doctors will just grab you, and your attending will describe you, and the person doing the insurance who needs you. And let's just rock and roll. Let's just be flexible. Let's look at our phones. Let's look at email. Makes doctors miserable. the groups that have clear communication protocols, this is when we sync up like in a daily rounds style scrum to quickly go through, okay, here's all the logistical stuff going on. This is how we insist on, you know, when a nurse needs a consult or something, we actually go through this procedure.

It's a pain, but we do it and you can rely on it. If you're in a private practice, like this is how we deal with the email portal to our patients and the expectations we give and how much time we should spend. on that and when it should go to a nurse instead of us and should we hire someone to maybe do a lot more of this communication. Getting serious about how you handle incoming communication of doctors is something that gives you a huge return. And groups and practices that care a lot about that, their doctors are a lot happier than those to say, let's just rock and roll. It's just really, really difficult when you're doing something that's already cognitively demanding in high stakes

to have constant attention fragmentation in that environment. It is a misery, regeneration machine. So Terry, those are my three thoughts on doctors. Deep work time should be scheduled like other appointments or billable appointments or procedures. There should be more margin put into the schedule, even if it means a reduction and how much money you can make. A lot of doctors would make that trade if given that trade clearly and it's supported.

And third, there needs to be clear communication protocols, particularly in medicine. You cannot let incoming communication just rock and roll. just, hey, stay glued to your phone and we'll just rock and roll. It does not work in that field. It makes people miserable. All right. So speaking of margin or getting away from overload, here's a question that comes at these issues from a much more positive side of the spectrum.

A question about whether or not someone with autonomy in their schedule should take an entire day off each week. Hi, Cal. I am a dedicated fan of your podcast. and it enlightens my week. I have a question regarding the importance of a day off in the week, the work week. I'm working from home and I have the freedom to choose when to work. So I strive to take a day off once a week from work to balance my energy, or is it too overrated? Well, Oscar, if you have the flexibility to take a day off during the middle of the work week or at the end of the work week,

I think that's a good idea to consider. I mean, one of the benefits of being very in control of your time and attention, one of the benefits of weekly planning and quarterly planning and time block planning every day is that you're going to get a lot more done than most people. But if you're in a results-oriented employment situation, you probably are going to find yourself with more free time than other people you work with. and to take advantage of that is great. It's like a reward for the effort you are doing

to be on top of your efforts. So if you want to take a day off, I think that's a good idea. Now, here's what I would suggest, and I'm just thinking out loud here. If you want to make the most out of this day off, split it in half. They take the working hours of your day off and split it in half.

And in the first half of those working hours, you're going to be running your own university, a university that has one student, you. And with extreme intensity, you are going to during this university period be picking up a skill that is incredibly valuable in your current industry. A skill that will make you so good you can't be ignored. I would recommend getting my friend Scott Young's book, Ultra Learning, where he talks

about how to take seemingly impossibly complex learning projects and getting them done. Now, I was just talking to Scott about this last night. He ran this challenge that I helped him organized a little bit years ago called the MIT challenge, where he did MIT's entire computer science curriculum in one year. Now, I was at MIT at the time, so I helped him a little bit in the setup for this challenge, but he got to the point where he could do one entire semester's worth of an MIT course in one week. Now, he was doing eight-hour days, but in one week, all the problem sets, all the exams. And he just had it down to a science. He would listen to the lectures at one and a half speed. He was incredibly intense and focused about how he would work on

the problem sets and how he would teach himself the material. But anyways, in five, eight-hour days, he was able to do an entire, let's say, course like algorithms, taught at a very high level. So let's think this through for you. Let's think it through, you know, your one-person university. If Scott could learn an MIT computer science course in five, eight-hour days, then you could do it in 10, four-hour, half days. So in a couple months, you know, two and a half months, you could mass or something as complicated as what you might learn an entire MIT course. And he talks about this all in his book,

Ultra Learning. Think about that. So now, yeah, you're taking time off, except for if you, now if you zoom out to like the two or three year period, you're not falling behind in your career. You're actually accelerating your career well beyond where you would be

if you just worked that day. Now, if you worked that day, you'd get a little bit more work done. You get 20% more work done. You know, your employer might be like, yeah, Oscar's getting a little bit more done. He's on the ball. and that's fine. You have a nice even trajectory uphill, but if instead you take that day off

and three months later, you're a master of cutting edge artificial intelligence libraries and how to customize it to a particular issue that your employer deals with and now you can generate a whole new product. It's going to be a huge moneymaker. Now you look at that career trajectory and it's going uphill real fast. So again, I'm thinking out loud. You can do what you want with this time. I'm just thinking this is one thing to do. Then what do you do for the other half of your day off? Something incredibly restorative and fulfilling. Something that has nothing to do with work.

Maybe it's a physical thing, some sort of fitness you're picking up, some sort of training, maybe you're learning, something, I don't know, you take up hunting and you get in the woods and you want to do bow hunting, so you go and shoot at your targets, or you're into woodworking, or, you know, you go to a cafe,

which is where you're going to read your way through classic books and you go to a cafe during that time or whatever it is. But something really intentional, something really high value, don't just sit around and watch Netflix. Man, you could love those days. Imagine that. Imagine that one day a week where you're in university in the morning, you just feel your skills picking up, and then you turn around and you're doing high quality leisure activities in the afternoon. You know, now I'm getting excited. Now I'm thinking, Oscar, I should do something like this. This sounds really good. Now, of course, your big question is going to be where would you put that day?

Schools of thought here. Wednesday is nice because you break up your week. Friday and Monday, though, give you a longer weekend. I don't know, that's kind of interesting. I might lean towards Wednesday

so that it feels isolated from weekend, which is a different type of non-work mindset and it feels like its own thing. But anyways, now basically, Oscar, I'm just projecting, I'm just brainstorming what I would do with this day

and I'm getting excited about it. So I appreciate the question. But I would say, now take advantage of it. At least try it out. at least try it out, you know, see what happens if you take that week off, that day off every week, try to make the most of it. I think nothing but positivity can come from it. Our next question is about a topic relevant to a lot of people these days, home offices.

Hi, Cal, I'm Tony. I'm a direct response copywriter and a big fan of your work. you've mentioned that you are in the process of finishing your deep work wear, your deep work HQ. And I know for a lot of people like me, we've had a home office for years, but it's a single room. And many other listeners are trying to carve out space for a home office and create their own deep work HQ as they realize that they may not be going back to work as quickly as they thought. or maybe working remotely permanently. So I'm wondering what things do you recommend that a general knowledge worker might do to set up their own home office, a single room home office to get the most out of it, to be able to differentiate between shallow and deep work,

and to be able to create that kind of environment, almost like the eunomonea machine, where they come in and are allowed to flourish. Well, I think in general, people are way too timid about their home office setups. People are boringly pragmatic about their home offices. They think, well, we might want to use this room for other things as well.

I don't want to do something that's too over the top here. It might seem weird in my house. Look, I have a desk. I have a place for my computer. What else do I need? I think that's boring. And I also think it's psychologically suboptimal. Location matters.

Location matters. So if you take your home office setup, the more you can actually make it distinctive. The more you can actually make it seem different than the rest of your house, the more you can actually signal to yourself when you enter the room, this is a place where I do work. Where I'm trying to produce value with my mind or organize complex systems, the easier psychological time you're going to have getting worked on while at home.

So this means if you have a home office that's in your home, don't just settle for, you know, just took this room and I have a desk in there and I can plug in my computer and that's fine. You know, paint the walls, buy new furniture, put in office-style cabinetry, build a desk, build a desk that goes an L-shaped that turns around two walls.

Find the right window. And this is going to be the window I build this desk under. Get a really big leather chair and put that over there. Buy a bookcase and fill it with books. Get really good lights. Get a really nice rug. Like, whatever it is. It really does make a difference.

It really does. You're signaling to yourself, this is a place where I work. It's different than the rest of my house. Now, if you have the ability to be even more bold, I highly recommend it. If, for example, you have a big yard. consider a prefab work shed. You can find this stuff on the internet, but basically it's like a glorified shed,

but it's insulated. You run electrical to it. It's nice looking, and it's in the corner of your yard somewhere, and you go there just to work, and it's separate from your house. Oh, I'm a big believer in those. In fact, I was even thinking, before we move to our current house in Tacoma Park.

One of the big scenarios I was trying to figure out is, would there be a way for me to build, even though we had a small yard, would there be a way for me to build a deep work shed in the corner of our yard and surround it by plants and landscaping? Now, I had a home office in our old house, but it was just a plain home office. And I wanted that ritual of moving to a separate,

building. I thought that would be really cool. Now, what we did instead is we moved to a cool, old house in Tacoma Park that had a study with a fireplace, and I built out my original sort of deep work study there. But I think more people should do that. If you have a garage with the potential for an accessory apartment above it, turn that into a deep work layer, turn that into a home office. It is very distinctively an office and not like the rest of your house. I was actually talking with a contractor I know yesterday. I ran into him on the street. He was doing a project for a neighbor. And we were chatting. And he said he's been doing a lot of this to the point where he was thinking of starting a business, a sub-business that does nothing but home office remodels.

Because he's getting so much work now from people who are doing exactly this. You know, take this space that is extra and make it into something really good for working and something really intentional. And something I spent some money on, so I feel like I'm really signaling the importance of it. That makes a difference. So yeah, I'm a big believer in taking big swings when it comes to your workspaces. Now there's other things that matter. You've heard me talk about this before. Ritual also matters, regardless of where you go to do your work if you're working from home, regardless of how it is decorated, have a ritual that starts your workday, have a ritual that ends your workday. This is something that allows you to cognitively efface yourself to change your

psychological context from home to work. I recommend a non-trivial length walk outside. Maybe you walk to a coffee shop to get the right type of coffee to start your workday so that you can have that hook, that physiological hook as well as I drink this coffee that I got from this coffee shop. That means my workday begins. Maybe you walk to a coffee shop, you get the coffee, you sit at the coffee shop, you do your time block plan, then you walk back to your home office, walk through the door, into the office, into the first block. Again, that could make a huge difference in your psychological context.

And finally, the routines and rules you have about what you do during your workday. Do you take breaks, use the internet, or your time block planning, just having some rigidity there helps you structure your workday. So what we really want to get away from is just, I don't know, I have a desk over there, I kind of work at it, I sort of get started on my laptop, sort of do other things, I'm back and forth, and then the day just all blends together. And it's a little bit emiserating. You want to get away from that. You want to work to be this really separate thing, hopefully in a really distinctive room with rituals surrounding the beginning, ending of the day,

and rules and routines structuring the day once you're in it. We used to not have to worry about this because we got all of those. effects by getting in a car or getting on a train and commuting to an office and being in that office and that office was different than home and it's a place you worked and you had these long commutes in which you transitioned your cognitive state. We used to not have to worry about it. Now we temporarily do have to worry about it. And so that is my suggestion. I think it's not just going to make you a better worker. It's going to make you a lot happier with the state of your work life in this unusual period.

Now, speaking of cool home offices, I want to take a moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes it possible for me to come here to the Deep Work HQ and record this podcast. And I'm talking about Indeed.com. Now, if you are like me, you may have reacted to the economic uncertainty of the pandemic by saying, I have to hustle. Maybe you took a side hustle and said, let's grow this out. Maybe you took your existing business and said, let's move it to the next step. You wanted diversity and income streams.

You wanted autonomy. You want to control over your own destiny. That was certainly my instinct. But if you're going to hustle, you need to hire people. You got to hire the right people. And that's where Indeed.com comes into the picture. I'm sure you have heard of it, but if you haven't, Indeed is the number of one job site in the world. It helps you get the best people fast. More so than other job sites,

and I do appreciate them about this. And if you've tried to hire online, you know what I mean. You get full control and payment flexibility over your hiring. You're only paying for what you need. You can pause the account at any time. If you no longer need to hire for a while, you're not locked into some sort of long-term contract that keeps charging you day after day. It has this sponsored jobs feature, which allows you to get the jobs you need even quicker. The data I've seen says it makes you three and a half times more likely to end up with a higher. 73% of online job seekers are visiting Indeed at least once a month. So that's where you go if you need to hire, which you probably should be doing if like me you're in hustle mode.

So right now, Indeed is offering our listeners a free $75 credit. to boost your job post, which means more quality candidates will see it fast. So try out Indeed with a free $75 credit at Indeed.com slash questions. This is the best offer you're going to find anywhere. So go right now to Indeed.com slash questions. Terms and conditions apply offer valid through December 31st. I also want to talk to you about four sigmatic coffee. I mentioned in the answer to my last question

that if you are working from home right now, you need rituals surrounding your workday to help separate your workday from your life at home to change the psychological context into one of concentration and effort. Four-sigmatic ground mushroom coffee is one of the ways I personally do these rituals. What we have here is a coffee, product that includes mushrooms.

Lions main mushroom for productivity and chaga mushroom for immune support. Doesn't taste like mushrooms, but it tastes much smoother than normal coffee. It has a nuttiness flavor. I often add a little bit of cinnamon. And it's part of my ritual. Why is it part of my ritual? Well, coffee in general, I think, is a great ritual for switching your psychological context because it's a distinctive flavor and it creates a hook.

but what's interesting about 4-Sigmatic coffee is because you also have these mushrooms added to it, it creates a unique physiological response, different than just a normal cup of coffee, different than a cup of tea. Now you have the potential for a very strong hook. Your body can learn when I feel that lion's mane starting to do what it does, when I feel that Shaga trying to do what it does, when I avoid the upset stomach because force, is lower caffeine and a little bit less harsh on your stomach.

Now I know he has time to get deep. And so I'm a big believer in adult trading coffee and using it as hooks. 4Sigmatic is one of my favorite such tools to do so. This is good stuff. It has over 20,000 five-star reviews. All of their products have a 100% money-back guarantee. So for some reason you don't like it, you just send it back. So I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee,

but it is just for us. That is, listeners to the Deep Questions podcast. You can get up to 40% off and free shipping on their bundles to claim this deal. You must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This is only for deep questions listeners. It's not available on their regular website, so you have to go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. You'll save up the 40% off and get free shipping. So go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep

and fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. You need better hooks for Sigma. Can provide it. Our next question is about scheduling depth when you don't know in advance on what days you will be physically able. to go deep. Hi Cal. I've been a follower since so good they can't ignore you and I found your advice invaluable as an early career academic with a chronic illness. For me, scheduling with any level of certainty is impossible and I rely on prioritising and just doing what I can when I can to

keep my career going. Thanks to you, I've managed to keep my head above water working half the hours of my cohort. So onto my question, my days are unpredictable, my body is unreliable, I'm in constant pain, some of the medications among make it difficult to concentrate, and when I need to take a break, I would love nothing more than to go for a meditative walk, but that's simply not an option for me. I find so much satisfaction in deep work when I'm able to make it happen. It helps me manage the pain and gives my day-to-day existence, meaning beyond dealing with this illness, which sometimes threatens to take over my whole identity. Do you have any specific advice for people who can't rely on their bodies to perform the deep work they schedule, even when there's an abundance of drive

and enthusiasm for the work itself. Well, earlier in this episode, we were discussing weekly versus daily planning and how weekly planning helps you move to chess pieces around in an optimal way for the week ahead, and then daily planning make sure that you are getting the most out of your time and attention that is available in a given day. So Michelle, in your circumstance, where you're dealing with unpredictable physical obstacles, so you don't know in advance, hey, what's Wednesday going to be like? What's Thursday going to be like?

What you would probably most benefit from is downplaying the weekly planning and putting more of the emphasis into the daily time block planning. So in other words, what you're saying is, what can I do today? How do I feel today? What do I think it's going to be possible today? Great. I can now build a plan that optimally takes advantage of the reality of today. And as you've probably already discovered,

because it sounds like you've been putting these techniques into action, approaching each day with intent is going to get you much more with what you have available from a physiological and cognitive perspective in a given week than if you don't. And I think that's what you're looking for. There's not some standard of this is how much work just in general someone in my job should be able to get done in a week. And what I care about is how far, how close I get to this standard. It should instead be relative to your circumstance. Did I make the most with what I actually was able to do this week? Now, what ends up happening is if you approach or worked that way as you've already experienced by managing to have this fantastic start to your

career, even with this fantastically difficult impediment that you have to overcome in the professional sphere, is that a lot gets done. A lot gets done when you just take each day and say, okay, what's the best I can do today? Because some days you feel great, maybe, and you're like, I'm getting a lot done today. And other days you feel terrible. There's not much you can get done, but you're getting done what you can. And that adds up. So the weekly planning might be hard for you, because that requires you to actually predict, but require you to predict what resources you're going to have available

in different days in the future. So you might be frustrated. So I would downgrade the weekly focus on the daily. The other thing I've heard, I've heard from people that deal with chronic pain in particular, is that there might be some importance in not having a binary. And like, this is a day I can work

or this is a day. I can't work, but instead having some sort of baseline rhythm of efforts that you do every day that are useful, but can be titrated very naturally and flexibly to what you're actually able to do. So that on a bad pain day, that whatever that daily block is, it's tight traded down the effort. So like you're, okay, you're not, you're not writing war and peace, but you're still making progress. You're still doing something. You're still getting the satisfaction of autonomy. I get this done every day, even on the hard days.

Having something like that is also potentially useful. Like, this is how I start my day. I do this every morning. And some days, what this means is really energized and really complex. On other days, what this means is maybe I'm in bed. And, like, you know, I'm just trying to read and take. some rough notes, but at least, hey, I did some of that. I've heard other people talking about chronic pain in particular talking about that importance. Just a psychological shift, but when they're

no longer assessing their days is, this is a day I can do things like a good day and this is a bad day. And instead, it's just this pain or whatever comes and goes with various levels of intensities. Orthogonal to that, I do this every day. So that's something else to keep in mind. So there could be some sort of ritual on depth that happens in the morning or in the evening or in the midday. Maybe it's built around this walk you're talking about. And some days, the raw quantity of work is less than others, but it's something that you do regardless. That also might be helpful.

But above anything else, it sounds like what you're doing is very impressive. Given the obstacles you face, it's probably very important that you continue to be very strategic and take very seriously how you organize your time and attention. so I think you'll find daily time block planning is going to be key to you. Perhaps this advice for having some daily rituals that can ebb and flow, as the sickness ebb and flows on various days, will also be psychologically helpful. So keep up what you're doing. Don't sweat the weekly planning.

Take each day as it goes. And I hope you find this useful. All right, we're running a little long, but let's slip in one more question. this one about high hour demand jobs. Hi, Cal. Do you have any recommendations for boosting productivity and setting boundaries and demanding jobs like finance that regularly require more than eight hour days? Well, so if you're in finance and you're new in finance, you're going to have a lot of work,

you're going to have a lot of hours. That's part of the culture. it is part of what you signed up for. And you're right, if you're two years into your job at Goldman Sachs, you can't say no, and you can't say I only want to work till 5.30, because that's not the culture. So what is your path here to perhaps a more sustainable work life? Well, typically in finance, there's a couple things you're going to want to do.

One, from a productivity perspective, you need to be a killer. You need to be dialed in 100%. Capture, configure, control, productivity all day long. Nothing falls through the cracks with you. You deliver what you say you're going to deliver. You deliver what you say you're going to deliver when you say you're going to deliver it. You don't forget things. People just know this is someone who has their act together.

They know what's on their plate. They're very thoughtful about their time they get things done. Two, you actually are time blocking and controlling your time so that when you're working on things deep, you're intense with that depth. You separate the depth from the shallow. That allows you to get more high value production per hour spent working than if you mix those two things together. Three, you automate where you can. You get efficient where you can. A lot of what you do in the first year of finance involves spreadsheets.

So master spreadsheets. Learn how to script. learn how to take the boring rote data glorified data entry that you end up with and automate it. You know, get procedures in place. Okay, I have to write these decks on a regular basis. Let me get a process in place so that I can make these decks 20% better than my peers and I can write them in 20% less time. For whatever reason, finance as compared to other high hour jobs like law has a lot more,

a lot more opportunities for automation and efficiency and systems early on. So you do these things, you're becoming so good you can't be ignored. Now you're starting to build a foundation. So what do you do with this foundation once you've built it? Well, the next step typically in finance is building out your own group. There may be a break in here somewhere to go get your MBA depending on exactly what track you're on. But then you build out your own group.

it does whatever, a particular type of trading, a particular type of financial product, a particular type of sales, whatever it is. You remain a killer with your productivity systems, completely dialed in. That group produces money. It produces money for your firm. It produces money for you. And now, and now, now you get some control. And now in that industry, you have earned a right to say, what do I want my data look like?

What are our communication habits? What do I put on my plate? What do I not put on my plate? You have basically acquired the career capital required. You've acquired the capital required to invest in autonomy on your schedule. Autonomy on your plate. So in finance, that capital is hard won because what you are trying to get from your career capital in finance is this rare combination of autonomy and a massive amount of money.

That's really desirable. You have to have something really desirable to offer in return. So that's why it takes years of building these foundations. And if that's what you want to do, if finances your path, that's how you do it. And then you're in the place where whatever it is, the managing director level, I run this group, here's how I do it. We make money. Get off my back.

And if they don't, I'm going to go start my own thing out in Connecticut or whatever it is to financial people do. But that's the path in finance to autonomy. That's the past sustainability is you have to build up a bank vault at career capital. And the only way to do that, well, I want to say the only way. There's really two ways here. You get your act together on productivity, you do the whole Cal Newport thing, or you throw as many hours as possible at it.

But that latter one is brutal. That latter one wears you out. That latter one chews up and spits out half the people who try it. They're just like, I'll work till 3 a.m. every day. I don't like that approach. So use my approach. Dial on the productivity, be a productivity killer, be on it, build that foundation, use that foundation to build out your group,

make some money for your firm that you can do what you want. So I don't know if that's the answer you want to hear or not, but that is my understanding of how finance works. It can offer you something good, but you've got to be pretty good to get it. And that is not an easy task. But then again, your peers and your colleagues, maybe they don't listen to Cal Newport. Maybe they don't have time block planners. Maybe they don't know about capture, configure, control. So you have that advantage. So maybe you'll find it to be a lot easier than most in your situation typically do. All right, that's all the time we have for today's episode.

Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. You can submit your own voice questions at speakpipe.com slash CalNewport. You're a fan of the show. Sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. Thank you to our sponsors, Grammarly, Indeed, and Four Sigmaatic Coffee. I'll be back next week with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.