Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 40: Habit Tune-Up: Optimal Notebook Usage, Quarterly Planning, and Combating Burn Out

Episode Date: October 29, 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: * Notebooks for personal reflections vs. business organization. [5:50]* Elite quarterly planning tactics. [10:18]* Diminishing distracting day dreams. [18:37]* Combating burn out. [32:58]Special Offer Links from Sponsors: - magicspoon.com/CALThanks 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.

What I've done is I've listed three to four general improvements that I'd like to make in each of the four classic buckets. And then I've shortlisted a number of habits that I'd like to start tracking to hopefully help me make those changes. My issue is some of these changes are quite general, like spending quality time with my young son or becoming more of a leader within the studio. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep question's habit tune-up mini episode. The format here is straightforward. I take audio questions specifically about how to tune up your productivity habits in this moment in which our professional lives are increasingly disrupted. Now before we get going, I want to talk about something else that has been on my mind in recent days. And that is what I've been calling shallowness creep.

So I've been running this experiment with my personal productivity this week, which has been interesting. I basically said, I'm going to spend less time on shallow work. You know, I'm going to basically have a little bit of time set aside here, a little bit of time set aside there. So some blocks in my time block schedule, but I'm going to stick to them. And the idea is like get as much done as you can in those blocks, but that's it. Be okay with things don't get done. People don't get heard back from. things on your list you're trying to get through this week, don't get churned as quickly as you

would think. Stick with these smaller blocks and just see how it goes. And something I've noticed is, actually it's been fine. That the shallow work in my schedule had been, I think, in recent months, been creeping and been creeping into my schedule. And I'm not quite sure what's going on here, but I think what was happening was there's always work to do. And I was trying to kind of get it all done. Obviously, you're not going to get everything done. But you know what I mean? It was once I got into the shallow work mode, it's like, well, what if I could get this done and this done and this done?

And I think what I was pursuing was this idea of if I could really get ahead of the non-deep task I had highlighted as being time sensitive or perhaps a target for this week, that there would be some relief. But I get to a point where I could say, okay, I got that done. And now I guess I have a lot more flexibility with my time. now I don't have to worry about these tasks and somehow I will feel better. I'll have more relief. But what I was really discovering is that,

now that list would never really get done. And you would end up just eating up lots of time and days and hours would go by and you would really step on the toes of your ability to do deep work. And this magical later in the week period where you say, oh, I have nothing left to do except deep work. I got all my shallow work done. That would never come because new shallow work would arrive and emails would arrive and things you didn't think about what arrived,

and also maybe your days later in the week were more fragmented than you realized you had more meetings. There wasn't really that much opportunity to get a lot of other things done anyways. And so I said, what if I just did less? I've got to say, it's been an interesting experiment. As I mentioned, I feel better.

I don't feel like I'm out of control. I do feel like important stuff is getting done. I'm focusing more when I do my shallow work, but I also just have a lot more time free, not just for deep work, but to get my shutdowns done, and they get my shutdowns done early. So I don't quite know how to crystallize this

into a Newportian principle at this point, so I will keep my summary here relatively crude. But basically what I'm discovering is that there's no end to shallow work. You can't ignore it. But you also don't want to give it too much of your schedule. So you should see what happens if you're a little bit tighter

about here's the time you get. I'll try to make the most with it, but this is it. So I think you might discover like I did that even when you cut back on that time you spend each day, you come away each week feeling like you're doing fine on the shallow task, but you're going to be a lot more relaxed and you're going to have a lot more depth potentially accomplished.

So I don't know. Let's keep thinking about this. I'll let you know if this develops into a more well-honed principle, but at least for now, I found it interesting. Let's do some quick housekeeping before we get into this week's questions. If you want to submit your own audio question for a future habit tune-up mini-episode, you can do so right from your browser at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. In recent weeks, I would say the ratio of female to male questions has dropped again.

So I'm putting the call out to my female listeners. We want to hear from you. We want to hear your questions. A quick note about my time block planner. We are getting closer to my Time Block Academy event, the live event in which I will be taking questions from the crowd about the time block planner. We're holding this right after the planner ship so that you will hopefully, if you pre-ordered it, will have your planner in hand. This event is available to people who pre-order the planner. You have pre-order the planner or you're thinking about pre-order the planner.

Go to Calnewport.com slash blog. There's a post there from a couple weeks ago that explains how to get access to that event. And it should be a lot of fun. Finally, thank you to everyone who is rating this podcast, who's reviewing this podcast, and who is subscribing to this podcast. It makes a difference. I read every review, and I appreciate them. All right, let's get going. Our first question for today's episode is about notebooks.

Hi, Cal. So I have a question about the notebooks you use. Personally, I have two, one that I had before I read your book that I just used for journaling, and one that I bought afterwards for capturing and my time blocking. I'd like to know, do you use one notebook for both of these purposes? Because I'm finding it a little cumbersome to carry around to both, but I don't know how I would separate my reflection time in my notebook from my work capture configure time. Anything you can speak to on this topic, I'd appreciate.

and I'm sorry I couldn't come up with any Greek mythology references. Well, Patrick, what we can do here is we can wait for you to come up with a good reference. You can resubmit your question once you have one, and then maybe then I will think about answering it. Is this not a good idea? All right, maybe I'll answer your question anyways. Because it's actually a good one, and the way I'm going to paraphrase what you asked is, should the notebook in which you do things professional focused, like time block planning and capturing of tasks,

should that be separate from a notebook in which you capture bigger ideas, perhaps reflections about your life, beyond just the scope of work? My provisional answer is yes. My provisional answer will be yes. So if you use something like my time block planner for your professional notebook needs, that has time block planning, that has capture, that has also a space for ideas to go.

But I think about the idea column for the idea capture column in my time block planner as thinking about professional ideas. You know, oh, we should interview this person. Oh, here's, you know, here's a note on what we should do with this upcoming marketing campaign, things that are within the sphere of professionality. I like to separate personal ideas. You know, here's something about my life or here's something about my career writ large. Like, should I be doing this type of work or that?

Should I be changing my career? Like really big picture thinking about my career. But here's something about my life. Here's something about my values. Here's something about my ethical, political, or philosophical beliefs. Those type of ideas. Personally, I like to have a separate notebook for those. Partially to separate the professional from the personal and also partially it could be something

that is a lot more portable. and then what you need to organize a typical workday. I use, you know, as long-time readers and listeners know, I used a standard small-sized moleskin notebooks for that type of personal reflection and capture. This fits in a pocket. It fits easily in a bag when you're traveling. You can bring it with you in the woods when you're on a hike

and jot down reflections. And I like that it's this thing. This small aesthetic object is used for just that type of thinking, and it's different than like my big time block planner where I'm trying to figure out when am I going to fit in filing this report versus editing this podcast, which is much more prosaic, much less inspirational. So that's a personal preference. You could very easily capture personal reflections in the same notebook as your professional.

Bulletjournalers do this. I think one of the big ideas behind Bullet Journal is that it's one notebook to rule them all. You have this one notebook where you keep track of work stuff. You keep track of all of your tasks, you keep track of your calendar, but you also keep track of personal things. You keep track of notes on a new cooking technique or the books you've read or the people you've talked to, and it's all in one notebook. And that's actually the advantage of bullet journaling.

So for people who like bullet journaling, they would say, no, no, no, one notebook. And then there's the digital people on the other extreme that have different digital tools for every different thing in their life that they track and organize. And they really like having the two big monitors in front of them and they're shooting between the systems using key. keyboard shortcuts or whatever it is, people who use computers a lot do. And so there's a lot of different answers here. So this is just my personal opinion. I think you should have one analog notebook for everything business. So you don't have to interact with a computer to organize, structure and execute

your professional life. And you should have a separate needlessly precious cost $7 more than it probably should takes itself a little bit too seriously style notebook that you use for keeping track of deeper things relevant to living a good life. All right, thanks for that, Patrick. Even without a mythological reference, I guess we still got some value out of it. All right, our next question here has to do with quarterly planning. Hi, Cal. My name's Sam from the UK, and I work in game development.

I've been a long-time follower of your work. I like to think I lived the deep life pretty well. I'm sure there's room for improvement. My question relates to quarterly planning. Since it's late September, I'm putting together my first quarterly plan, which is covering October to December. What I've done is I've listed three to four general improvements that I'd like to make in each of the four classic buckets. And then I've shortlisted a number of habits that I'd like to start tracking to hopefully help me make those changes. My issue is some of these changes are quite general, like spending quality time with my young son or becoming

more of a leader within the studio. I believe I should be setting more concrete goals. But so far, the only one I've got is to complete this marathon. I'm hopefully running in December. Fingers crossed. Am I going about this wrong, looking for specific goals that I can essentially tick off of a list or are more nebulous goals, such as those I've mentioned, going to be impactful enough on their own? I'd love to hear what you think. Cheers. Thank you. Well, quarterly planning is definitely an important topic to revisit. And Sam, even though your examples from your recent quarterly plan had to do with your personal life, so like spending more time with your son or training for a marathon, it's still relevant to talk about this topic in the habit tune up mini episode

because similar issues come up when making quarterly plans also for your professional life. As I talk about, I actually have two such plans. I call them strategic plans, but they are quarterly plans, and there's one for my professional life and one for my personal life. And it's the same techniques are relevant for both, so we can talk about this together. At the highest level when quarterly planning, you have objectives. And objectives can be relatively nebulous. Right. So it can be, for example, in your personal life, more quality time with my son, improving my relationship with my son. In your work life, it might be something like I want to produce good peer-reviewed research. I want to increase the quality of my peer-reviewed research. I need to increase the quantity of my

peer-reviewed research submitted this quarter or whatever it would be. But these are relatively high-level broad objectives, things you care about things you think, general things you think are important. So you want to get clarity on those things when you're doing your quarterly plan, and in particular which ones, which of these high-level important objectives you want to focus on or need to make progress on. And then the next step is to say, okay, how do I actually take action on making progress

on this general objective? Well, there's a couple different levels for doing this. One approach here is habits. You talked about habits. You could say, I want to try to get a habit instilled that is going to help me on a regular basis, make progress on this thing I care about, and signal to myself that I care about it. You mentioned habits.

I think that's important. My main full-length episodes on my podcast when we talk about the deep life, this is what I often recommend to people and what I think, Sam, you are implicitly referencing when they're trying to re-engineer their life to be deeper. I mentioned that they should identify the core buckets in their life. And for each of those buckets, come up with a keystone habit, a habit that they can instill and do regularly that helps them make progress on the thing they care about and also signal to themselves they care about that thing. So habits are definitely in your toolbox. The other type of thing

you can put in place to help make progress on a big objective is concrete goals. I separate the two. Like I separate the two, right? So I want to do more research, or I want to up the quality of my research. That's a general objective, something I care about in my career. I want to work on this quarter. A concrete goal is I want to publish this paper for this conference. I can submit it at this deadline. Or I want to submit three papers, two at this deadline, one at that deadline. An actual concrete goal that you want to make progress towards. So those are the two types of actual ways of instantiating a general objective. I want to try to get a habit in place that I regularly do, or I want to make regular progress on a concrete goal that I either succeed in accomplishing or don't,

and it's a goal that is tractable for the time and I have available and the skills and resources available to me. Now when it comes time to do a weekly plan, you're looking at this quarterly plan. Well, the habit, you're just reminding yourself like, hey, remember, we're trying to do this habit. Is that working? And maybe you want to tweak what you have it there, and you're trying to instill a habit. That's straightforward. But you look at your concrete goals, and you say, well, what do I need to do this week to stay on

track for accomplishing this concrete goal. Now, often when I have concrete goals, I will elaborate the timeline in my quarterly plan. So like, okay, not a full out, I should be clear about this, not a full out, here's every beat of how I'm going to get from here to a paper submitted in November. It won't be that detail because it's too hard to predict the future. But I'll often look at, I don't know, maybe the month ahead. If I'm looking to submit this thing at the end of November, then September, I really need to be spending quite a lot of time.

reading these papers and having regular meetings with my collaborators to try to figure out whatever, right, what's going to be the new technique we're going to build a paper around. And then I'll update that quarterly plan. When I get past September, like, okay, now we're in October. I see this concrete goal and this goal is, you know, in the November, I have to have this thing done. So what should I be doing now in October? And then I make a timeline for October. This is kind of the activities I should be doing here. I need a draft before I go to this conference, because then I can bring the draft to talk to this collaborator with or whatever it is. And so you have this evolving timeline. You're updating your quarterly plan. It's a dynamic document, but it's doing its job. When you do this, the quarterly plan is doing its job, which is when it comes time to weekly plan, it gives you some concrete notion about hump. I better get a lot of time in writing this week because that's part of my timeline for this concrete goal for this month.

And my timeline for what I'm doing this month is trying to keep me on track for finishing this goal when I get there in three months. So that's the way I think about quarterly plans in action. You've got giant objectives. Habits are one thing you're trying to put in place. The quarterly plan is just a reminder. Remember, these are the habits I'm doing. If the habit doesn't quite stick, you can adjust it there into quarterly plan.

And then you have concrete goals. I want to get this done by this time. Here's what success looks like. The quarterly plan should probably elaborate, okay, for the near future, for the next month, for the next six weeks, what do I need to be doing to hit that concrete goal? That informs your weekly plan. Your experience and your weekly plan should then go back. and update your quarterly plan.

You tweak the way the habit is because the way you originally thought about it wasn't going to work. Your original plan that I'm going to spend an hour every day right after school with my kid. Well, that doesn't quite work because there's this aftercare activity this day and then I often have this regularly scheduled call

on Thursdays. And that habit's not going to be tractable. I need to find a different habit for satisfying that objective of spending more time with my kids. You go back and you adjust it. You go back and you adjust your timelines. Okay.

now that we're the month before the deadline, what's my plan for this month? And that's the back and forth cycle. So Sam, that is my vision for you. Big objectives to get translated down to more concrete practical goals or habits. Those inform your weekly plan, your weekly plan, inform and update those concrete goals and habits. That back and forth is going to help you get a lot more out of your quarter than if you just tackle each day and say, What am I excited to do? Or even if you're tackling each week and saying,

what I want to do this week? To have that level of planning is where you really get to the superpower stage when it comes to getting a lot of important things done. All right. Speaking of important things, let's move from the world of work to the world of students and tackle a question about daydreaming. Hi, Carl. My name is Viv, and I'm a student.

I have a question for you about daydreaming during work. So while I'm working, I'm actually not so distracted by social media or newspapers or whatever, but I find myself daydreaming about hypothetical situations or conversations. I don't think this happens because I'm craving social interaction because I actually do interact in my letter time with people, so I don't think it's stemming from that. I think I daydream because it's entertaining, it's easier than work, and it feels good in the moment. Yeah.

So, yeah, but all in all, I don't want to daydream, obviously because it's diminishing my productivity and it's leading nowhere. Yeah, so what is your advice on that? Thanks. Well, Viv, I have two pieces of advice to offer you. But before I get to the advice, I will just quickly note that the fact that your daydream seem to center on conversations or social interactions, that's completely normal.

That is actually the most common type of daydream that people encounter. There's a lot of good research about what's known as the default mode network in the brain, the elements of the brain that fire up when you're not actively engaged with a particular thought or a particular target of concentration. I write a little bit about this in my book, Digital Minimalism, but the default mode network, as far as we can tell, likes to go back and integrate and review and replay social interactions. Now, we've all probably felt that poll that when you're just sort of sitting where and bored,

like that's what you end up thinking about in the shower is like the email you just sent. You'll go back and rewrite in your head. An email you just sent while you're taking a shower. Why? That seems like the most boring thing can possibly think about, but we're compelled to do it. Or maybe you just talk to someone. You'll go back and you'll kind of replay that conversation. Anyways, that's very common.

Our brain does this. There's some good theories about why. A lot of theories that focus on the importance of social interaction to our species, and our brain is in essence sort of practicing, socializing our brain is working on and improving and strengthening its understanding of social context. Like all this is important to our species. That's one of the big theories explaining where the default mode network brings us back to that. But I just want to emphasize that first.

There's not much to unpack there. that's just what people do when they daydream. All right, so how do we diminish these daydreams when you're trying to do other types of work? Well, I have a training exercise to offer as my first piece of advice, which is productive meditation. I introduced the idea of productive meditation in my book Deep Work, and it's something that I have been advising ever since. It's been very effective for me in my life, and I've heard back from a lot of readers. It's been effective for them as well. this is a training technique to help increase both the intensity of your concentration, but also your

comfort, maintaining focus on one element, even though your mind or some parts of your mind might want to pull your focus of attention to other things like default mode network style reviews of social interactions. So with productive meditation, you take a particular problem. So if you're a student, it might be, you know, something you've learned in class or a paper you're trying to write. or a mathematical technique from your econ class that you're trying to master, whatever it is, but a work-related problem, and you go for a walk. It needs to be a walk.

I'm not quite sure why, but it just works better if it's a walk. You go for a walk, and you try to make progress on this problem just in your head. Now, when I described productive meditation in my book Deep Work, I said, based on my experience doing this diligently for a two-year period, So I was a huge productive meditator during my two years as a postdoctoral associate at MIT. Based on my experience doing that, I said the number one problem you're going to have is your mind is going to want to shift its attention from the problem at hand to replaying conversations, replaying emails you just sent, replaying social interaction. So it's basically you at war with the default mode network. You have to hire executive function centers of your brain trying to keep attention focused on an abstract symbolic thing.

which humans can do, but it's difficult. And you're at war with the default mode network that says, come on, our social ties are what matters here? We've got to think about these things. We've got to think through. What about that conversation? Was that a bad conversation? Maybe I shouldn't have said that.

Maybe we should go back and talk to them. That's a hard tension. So with productive meditation, what you do is you borrow a self-compassion technique from mindfulness meditation. And you just notice every time your attention wanders to something else, like a daydream about social interactions, you just notice it and bring it back to the problem. And then a wander again, you notice it and you bring it back to the problem. And this might happen, you know, two dozen times. That's fine. Notice it, bring it back to the problem.

You will get better at this if you keep practicing. Now, the other benefit you get from productive meditation is not only do you get better at suppressing or inhibiting the default mode network's interruptions of your efforts, not only get better at that, but also the intensity of focus that you are able to comfortably achieve will deepen. It's very difficult to work on things

just in your brain, so by forcing yourself to come back to this again and again, you stretch those cognitive muscles. That'll have the benefit of when it comes time to do cognitively demanding school tasks. They will be easier. So you get two benefits there. Now, you might be asking,

well, wait a second, why do you productive meditation? why not do mindfulness meditation? There is already a big meditation movement out there. A lot of people are fans and proponents of mindfulness meditation. There's a lot of apps to help you do this. There's a lot of support out there in various communities for mindfulness meditation. So why not just have a mindfulness meditation practice?

Because that has other benefits that we know about. Well, I think that will help. But it won't help as much this particular problem as productive meditation. meditation. Now this has to do with a branch of psychology known as transfer theory that really tries to understand how we learn new things, how we learn new skills. And one of the big observations from this field is that skills don't transfer as much as we like to believe from one domain to a related but not quite the same domain. So it's a popular story right now that like if you're doing mindfulness meditation, you just sit and you're silent and you just keep your attention

let's on your breath, and notice when your attention wanders or bring it back, that yeah, that when you're in a work situation and your attention wanders, that your brain will be just generally better in better shape, generally better to resist that type of social focused rumination. And that might be somewhat true. But if you really want to reduce your mind's ability or tendency to wander while working, the best way to do it is to actually practice not letting your mind wander while you're working. Don't work on the general scale and hope it transfers to the work situation, practice the specific thing you want to do, which is I want to keep my concentration on one intentional target without having my mind out of my control,

keep wandering over to other types of thoughts. So I'm a big believer, and the closer you can get in your training to the thing you're actually trying to do, the more value you're going to get out of the training. That's a big finding and transfer theory. I think that holds here. So Viv, do productive meditation. As I mentioned, I did this when I was a postdoc at MIT. I lived about a mile from campus. I walked back and forth to campus twice per day. This is a lot of what I did. I get at least one or two of those walks. They'll do productive meditation. It made me much better at concentrating and much better at resisting those type of default mode intrusions. The second piece of advice I would give is intentionality about how you allocate your time

can make a difference in your tendency to daydream. A big problem that students in particular often get into is that they just generally say, I'm going to go study. And they just have a large swath of time. Like, it's the evening now, and I'm just going to study as long as I need to study. And it's open-ended. And it seems like it's going to go forever. And your brain thinks this is crazy. And it's bored.

We're going to have to take a break sometime, so why not now? Students do much better when they instead constrain their schedule, when they instead get very intentional about how they allocate their time and attention, and they work up against constraints. So you want to do something like time block planning, where you actually block out, okay, I'm going to work for an hour and a half at this point on this thing, and I want to try to get done during that time. You have artificial scarcity, there's time constraints, you know exactly what you're trying to do. You don't want to break your block schedule, so you're more likely to focus, you're less likely to let your brain wander. Your brain will be more on board when it's like, we're doing this for an hour.

can we get it done? Here's a challenge, challenge accepted. It's more on board for that than like, let's go to the library and just work ambiguously for unending hours. There's only so much of that that your brain's going to put up with. So I would suggest some type of time block planning. When you're doing your time block plans, I'll just give this one last piece of student advice, Viv. I often recommend the students that you do something called a student workday,

where you don't just build a time block plan for each day from scratch that day. But what you do first is you identify all of the work that you know regularly occurs in your student schedule. Like you know there's a problem set to do every week for this class. You know you have to do a lab write up every week for this class. You know you're going to have reading assignments twice a week for another class. So the work that you know is going to happen and need to get done every week. For each of these things that's going to regularly occur, you pick a time in a day where this is where you always do it.

Tuesday from 2 to 4 is when I do my lab write-up. And every Tuesday from 2 to 4 it's when I do my lab write-up. So you're still building a time block plan where you give every minute of your working hours a job, but some of those blocks are predetermined based on the student workday schedule. That's really helpful. I think it really helps just to make a smart plan once

for when all this work gets done and then just blindly execute. Otherwise, what happens is you just say, what do I want to work on today, which usually turns into what is due later today or tomorrow, and that leads to a lot of pile-ups of work. It's all due on the same deadline, rushed work, exhaustion, and perhaps even burnout. All right. So quick summary, daydreaming about social interactions is what daydreaming is for most people.

My two pieces of advice is train yourself out of that tendency and have the bonus of increasing your focus ability with productive meditation. Also get more intentional about your time. Work on things in well-defined blocks. do something like time block planning. If you're a student, augment that with student workday regularly occurring work blocks. And you should find that things get much easier for you.

I want to take a moment to talk about magic spoon. Now, as I mentioned in Monday's episode, when I grew up, I was a cereal kid. I love cereal. I ate cereal every morning. I would have cereal as a snack. I was a big cereal fan. And now that I'm an adult,

life has to be terrible and boring. And I don't eat cereal because, you know, you can't have refined sugar and you can't have all the carbs and everything is gray and there is no happiness in the world. In comes magic spoon. Cereal that adults can eat.

Here's the thing. Zero sugar, 11 grams of protein, only three net grams of carbs per serving, and yet it is cocoa flavor or fruity flavor or frosted flavor or blueberry flavor, basically the types of sugar cereals you would eat as a kid without the junk. And it does actually taste good. My favorite is frosted.

It reminds me a little bit of that taste you used to get when you would eat the cake batter from the mixer before it was cooked. I can't go wrong with that. So anyways, that's Magic Spoon. I was talking about this on Monday. Everything was good. I was able to have bowls of cereal again. Life was a little bit less gray.

Adult life was a little bit less terrible. but then a kid's found it. And so this is sort of a, you win some, you lose some, we win some because they think we're giving them a huge concession when we let them have this cereal for dessert. They don't realize there's no sugar in it. They don't realize it has a lot of protein. They think we're giving in and they've won a victory. So that's the good news. The bad news is they're eating it all.

So I guess I'm going to have to order some more because I've got too many kids and they all eat too much. So anyways, that's Magic Spoon. It's keto-friendly. It's gluten-free. It's grain-free. It's soy-free. Low-carb and GMO-free. You can use it to trick your kids.

You can use it to rediscover some of that childhood nostalgia. You can use it to make life just a little bit less gray in a dark time. If you go to magic spoon.com slash cow, you can grab a variety pack and try it today. Now, be sure to use this promo code Cal at checkout and you can get free shipping. Not a bad time to have things sent directly to your door. You don't have to go to the store. Just order this free shipping. Boom, it shows up.

MagicSpoon is so confident in the product that is backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. You don't like it for any reason. They'll refund your money. No questions ask. That's magic spoon.com slash cow. And use the code cow for free shipping. Our next question also comes from a student, but is also relevant to many more.

professional circumstances, and it deals with the issue of burnout. Hi, Cal. I have a question about burnout. I'm a college student who's going through a pre-med curriculum, and it's quite challenging and it requires me to spend many, many hours studying. I've had a lot of success lately, but I have noticed that every six to ten weeks, I'll go through a week or two weeks of feelings of burnout. I've learned to extend these periods of time in between the times where I feel like I'm burned out by studying every single day so that I don't have intense bowel distress before exams,

which I've read, causes more intense levels of burnout and has longer lasting effects. So I've mitigated the issue that way. I also take your advice and I have a shutdown around 630 every single day. I only violate that if I have a major, major exam, but I have not had to violate that this entire year. So my question is, do you have any other ways that you think that students and researchers and anybody who does a lot of studying and deep work can mitigate the effects of burnout? Well, this is an issue I've thought a lot about, but it was not something that was always on my radar. So if you go back and look at my early history as a student advice writer, you will see that my first two books really did not deal with psychology at all. So that was how to win a college and how to become a straight-a student.

And they were written like no-nonsense business books. I was a relatively serious young man. I wanted to know how do you do well in school. I thought people, my peers were sloppy in their habits, that they were leaving a lot of energy on the table, that they were exhausting themselves for no reason, and those books were very much, here's how you should do it. If you want to take notes optimally, if you want to write papers optimally, if you want to study for test optimally, here are strategies that work, and I can't understand why you wouldn't use them. If you go to my blog, study hacks, and go back to the archives and look at that first year 2007, it starts off that way as well. All right, here are some refined techniques for note-taking in this context. Here's a different way of thinking about how to optimize your study habits. It was all of this straight-up non-psychological strategy-centric advice. Then you'll notice a shift in my writing.

So if you're watching Study Hacks Archives, you'll see as we go from 2007 towards 2008. I start talking about stress. I start talking about overload. I start talking about burnout. I introduce my notion of the Zen Valedictorian, then I introduce my notion of the Romantic Scholar, and then I end up writing a book called How to Become a High School Superstar, which is all about how high school students can avoid burnout.

That book was originally pitched, by the way, with the title The Zin Valedictorian, and it was going to look at in its original formulation how to avoid burnout while still doing well at multiple levels of schooling, high school, college, graduate school. that got focused to college admissions for various reasons. But the way I was thinking when I pitched that book is that burnout is key. The psychological component of student success is key.

So what happened? What happened is I started working with real students. I started this blog study hacks. I was very confident that my study techniques worked well. And I said, this will be a no-brainer. I'll start consulting with students here in Boston. so some Harvard students, some MIT students, some tough students in this original group, and I will help them, students who are overwhelmed, and I will overhaul their habits,

and I will teach them how to manage their time and how to take notes and how to study and how to write papers, and then they'll get better grades, and they'll feel better. And it kind of worked, and it kind of didn't. And it was the kind of didn't cases that really caught my attention, because I was not exposed to student stress and burnout. I was very efficient as a student. I knew what I was all about. I was disciplined and driven.

I didn't find schoolwork to be that difficult because I was organized. It just wasn't on my mind. But for a lot of these students I began to work with as I was working on my blog and wanted to tell their stories, I realized there was a lot more going on psychologically than just, is your habit good or bad? So I had to do a crash course in student stress and burnout. This is what I used to tour the country talking about, by the way. There was a period where I talked at Dartmouth and at Harvard and at Princeton and I think I did Duke, a bunch of different schools.

Middlebury, I went up to talk, and I would give these talks that were on essentially student stress and burnout, avoiding burnout, the cause of it, to cause of student stress. So I was really deep in these topics. All right, that's a preamble. Let's get to the conclusions.

So what I basically discovered is that for a lot of college students, burnout has two ingredients. Difficulty. So just the difficulty of the efforts involved the straight up hardness of doing the work and motivation. And we could very roughly use the intrinsic extrinsic scale, but the degree to which a student felt like,

I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, they had very solid motivation. And the degree to which they felt like, I don't know, I just feel like I'm supposed to do this or that I felt pressured into this. Or it just seems like this is what people from my neighborhood study, we all become lawyers, and this is what I'm supposed to do,

to the extent to which a psychologist would say, in motivational theory, that the locus of control was moved towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum, that was problems. So if you combined really hard work, so it was just hard to do, it was physically, physiologically taxing with low motivation or extrinsic motivation, you get burnout. And students would get exhausted and they would get unhappy. It would sometimes you would get what I used to call deep procrastination,

which was a student-specific expression of depressive syndrome in which you lose the ability to do schoolwork. And even when your grade is on the line, like a professor is like you have to hand in this final paper, and you can't. And they say, I'll give you a deadline. You have to hand this in it or you'll fail the class. And you can't.

That's deep procrastination. And these are the type of things I ran into when I began working with actual students at elite schools in particular, realizing, oh, this sort of stress and burnout issue is more than just my habits are bad. So those are the two ingredients to give you burnout. So if you want to avoid burnout, you have to deal with both of those ingredients.

Now, it sounds like what you are doing, which is smart, is you're focusing on the hardness ingredient. If you can make school work less of a physiological toll, if you can get rid of the 20-hour days, if you can get rid of the all-nighters, if you can get rid of the sense of I can never keep up with all the work on my plate, that really helps. and that really helps. And so I'm glad you're working on. So this is where the study habits matter.

You read how to become a straight A student, in particular, read the study hack archives from the early years. You've got to really dial in how you manage your time. You have to really dial in your techniques for taking notes and for studying for writing papers. It need to constantly be evolving your techniques. We used to call this the post-exam post-mortem. After every graded major graded assignment, go back and say, what worked, what didn't in my

preparation, get rid of the time-wasting thing that didn't work, take the things that did work and make them even more efficient, make them even better. So you're constantly evolving your techniques based on real feedback. Now, I'll say as an aside, I got an email this week where someone pointed out that it is actually redundant to call that technique the post-exam post-mortem because the post-mortem implies that the examination happens after the event in question, to which I say, I don't care, I like the alliteration. So we're going to keep calling it to post-exam post-mortem, because that's a phrase from an important early period of my life. Okay. So you're doing that. It sounds like you were doing that pretty well. There's probably room for improvement.

The more locked in you are in your habits, the better that's going to get. The other piece of trying to reduce the actual difficulty of the work, and this is something I used to preach all the time, you have to reduce what's on your plate. And this always surprised me. The degree to which when I was dealing with elite college students, I would sit down with them, and I would say, I am a world's expert on time management and efficiency. Let's go through everything on your plate. You have three majors. You're doing undergraduate research. You have seven clubs. You're the president of two. It can't fit. Even if you were the most efficient, organized person on earth, there is no way you can fit this. You literally don't have enough time. And the degree to which the

students would still say, I don't think I can take anything off the plate, though. I don't think I can give any ground. And, and of course, burnout would follow. So one of the more effective things you can do in addition to your habits and reducing the difficulty of your work is you've got to do less. Now, for a while, I was preaching this philosophy I mentioned earlier in this answer, what I called the Zen valedictorian philosophy. And the whole notion of the Zen valedictorian philosophy is it's possible to be relaxed and very successful academically if you would just stop doing so damn much. Don't have three majors, have one. And make your course load well balanced.

If you have a hard biology course in your biology major, balance it with other types of courses that have a completely different type of work so that's not going to pile up. And make sure at least one of those courses is really easy. And you know what? If you have a lot of extra credits, like maybe you came in with advanced standing or credits from your AP courses, take advantage of them. Maybe take a couple courses off your plate so you can do a semester that's lighter.

Don't sign up for seven clubs. Have one. I used to call this to rule of one. one major, one major extracurricular activity, right? Have one extracurricular activity. Now, you could do other things extracurricular, but only have one activity in which you have any responsibility where people depend on you on a regular basis to do work.

Have it most one, not three, not four. Reduce the urge to do lots of things. And I don't want to go on a tangent here, but this was sort of at the core of my book how to become a high school superstar, students are in a hard situation because they're very early in their careers. So they're desperate to figure out how can I demonstrate my value to the world because I'm ambitious and I want to do well. Now, later in your career, you demonstrate your value by doing valuable things. But when you're 17, you're thinking about college admissions or you're 19

and you're thinking about entering the job market, you haven't had enough time or experience to actually do much. That's impressive. So then you start thinking, well, how do I signal that I'm really impressive. How do I channel my ambition? How do I channel this into actual activities? And the answer that students land on too often is, I'll do more. It's like the one lever you have to pull. I saw this a lot at MIT. Like the kid would show up at MIT and their town and their family and their school was so proud of them for getting the MIT. And they say, I can't let them down. All right, so what can I do to win here? What can I do to show that I'm a great student? And the only lever they have the poll is, well, I'll do triple major. That sounds impressive. I'll do a bunch of clubs. That's

If they get addicted to when I rattle off all the things I'm doing, there's a little bit of an instinct there for the listener to be like, wow, that's a lot. And then maybe they'll think I'm impressive. The whole point of the Zen validatorian philosophy is that that's nonsense. Yeah, maybe people will be slightly impressed you did a lot, but it is a very low return for the huge toll it's going to put on you. And more importantly, if you're trying to do that many things, the thing you do best, you're going to do a lot worse than if you were focusing just on one or two things. And this is especially true as you move from college into the job market. People are more interested in, are you a star in something? How good are you at the thing you do best

than they are in how many majors you had or how many clubs you were a part of? You are almost always better having one major, very little extracurricular activities, easy schedules, but you are a standout in that major. And it's not just great grades, but that professors are writing recommendations to say this is a star student. That is good. going to get you so much farther than, hey, I limped through triple majors and eight activities. No one gives you credit for quantity. They give you credit for quality. Which is all to say, that may be a bigger lever to pull than you realize is get away from having too much. Easier classes, easier number of majors, get rid of the extracurriculars, clear up your schedule. I used to in my

talks I used to give when I would tour college campuses. I had this great Gladwellian example that I had learned from a blog reader and not to go on a tan... You're unlocking things here, by the way, question asker. You didn't say your name, but I'll just say you are unlocking you're unlocking stuff that used to dominate my life. And so you've unlocked a Pandora box here. I had this great Gladwellian example

of an American college student who was completely overwhelmed and completely miserable, then went to Australia for an exchange program. and through a series of circumstances outside of his control was basically forced into a very simple schedule. He couldn't do any extracurricular activities because they had this activity card

and as an exchange student he couldn't get one. And then he signed up for these courses and they fell through for various reasons about registration so he was taking less courses than even a normal load and no extracurriculars. And it was this huge like 180 turn compared to what he had been doing at his American college to try to prove that he was good, to try to improve that he's impressive.

And the punchline of the story is that he thrived. Like suddenly he could just work on those classes. He didn't feel stress. He had more than enough time to do him. He would spend a lot of time on the beach. He would do his reading on the beach. He aced them. His professors wrote him glowing recommendations. He came back to the school. I think he went to, where did he go? Small liberal art school. It might have been Swarthmore. I'm not quite sure. Anyways, goes back to a school, radically reduces everything on his schedule, becomes a star and the small number of things he's doing, and is on like a rocket ship trajectory after that, because he was suddenly people like, oh, I know this guy. He's in the major. He's great. He was engaged. Interesting. Anyways, a great Guadwellian story because it had the sort of natural experiment reversal. So do less. Do less and do what you do with much more thoughtful strategies, tactics, and systems.

So that'll help. That's one half of the burnout. If you make your work not so hard, it's much harder to end up burnt out. Then we have the other half of the burnout equation, which is motivation. Now, after my Zen valedictorian series, if we go back to my timeline here of my intellectual development on these topics, the next series I wrote, and this was the final series before I transitioned out of student work altogether. It's called the Romantic Scholar. I'm going to recommend you go back and Google Romantic Scholar and study hacks and find those

articles I wrote. But basically, the Romantic Scholar was all about how students can reclaim a sense of intrinsic motivation for their studies. You know, if you feel like you want to be doing something, you value something, you're doing it on your own terms, it's much harder to burn out. Even if it's really hard, it's much harder to burn out. And so I really got into that Romantic Scholar series, a lot of advice for basically training your brain to think about, the academic activity you're doing as a student as being something that you value beyond just its instrumental purpose,

beyond just a job it's going to open up. And all sorts of advice there. I'm trying to remember. Like adventure studying was a big one. Going to talks in the subject matters you studied, like going to see the people who come to talk. I want to go see them. I want to hear cutting edge people,

reading books and listening to lectures in your field that have nothing to do with your classes, you're being graded for. It's just you're teaching yourself I'm interested in these topics, and I'm interested and excited about people working on these topics, and I like the field. I had a post called Heffawizen and Heidegger. It talked about find romantic ways to do the work. You know, if you're over 21 or you have a particularly good fake ID, bring your reading for your, you know, early, late 19th century German philosophy class, bring it to a pub, bring it to a bar, get a Hefeisen while you read Heidegger.

go to a place that has a fire going in the fireplace and be pretentious about it. I don't know. Wear a beret. Maybe I take back that last piece of advice. Don't wear it a beret. Burnout might be better than that. But otherwise, I think I'm giving good advice here,

which is basically that whole series was about taking back control of, okay, I'm a student, this is an exciting time of my life. Intellectual endeavor is in itself meaningful. I am studying what I want to study. And I'm interested in this field and the intellectual life beyond just the instrumental rewards it brings me. If you do those two things, if you take back control of your motivation

and then you make your work less physiologically hard by having better strategies and not doing so much, now not only do you avoid burnout, you love school, and you still remain really impressive. Because again, what really matters in the end, how good are you at the thing you do best? Quality over quantity.

You're doing less stuff, you're on board with what you're doing, you're surrounding yourself by a field, you have really good study habits, you're going to do really well. People are going to remember you it's going to open up interesting opportunities. So that's my advice. Now, I think this is generally applicable. I mean, not universally, but I think in general, when people are facing

burnout, you have these issues, is to work too hard and have you lost the motivation for it. And so if you work on those two ingredients, the psychological toll of work can be improved. Now, the making the work easier, we talk a lot about, you know, good productivity habits, essentialism, taking things off your plate. We've talked about that in the professional context. the motivation one I think is a little bit tricky I think people take the motivation thing a little bit too literally like well unless my work is some inborn natural passion I'm trying to follow then I won't feel like I really love it

and then I'm not going to be motivated. No, no, no, it's much more subtle than that. It's much more subtle. It's that I like the field I'm in. I know why I'm doing this. I'm doing this by my choice. And in work it could be as much as like this work is important to the world.

This work is important to the community. This work is important to my family. I'm supporting my family. That can help you get the motivation back on your terms. Engaging with the people you work with. I got to know them. I'm friends with them. I understand them.

Getting to know your industry, even if it's a very niche industry, like I understand this industry. I'm on board with it. I'm excited about the future of it. Just investing in. This is a world I'm interested in. I take pride in the fact

that I'm doing well in this world and I'm helping this world, and I know my people, and I want this business to survive, and it's employing people, I'm supporting my family. All of this can come into the equation of getting the motivation away from just, I don't know, I feel forced into this, I don't want to do it, and it's just hard. So in the world of work, I think these ideas that were cultivated by me and my work on students is still relevant. You want to make sure you don't have too much on your plate.

You want to make sure you're tackling your work with good strategies, you want to make sure that you have motivation in the right place. All right. So you do these things. I know for a fact in the student world, this really, really helps. And I have a pretty good hunch it helps in the world of work as well.

Well, that's probably a pretty good place to end things for today's episode of deep questions. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. You can submit your own audio question at speakpipe.com slash Calnewport. Sign up for my mailing list at Calnewport.com. You can get my famous weekly article and find out more about this podcast and other things going on like my Time Block Academy upcoming event. Thank you everyone who reviewed, rated, or subscribed. I really appreciate it.

It's helping this podcast grow. I'll be back next week with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.