Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 45: My Trello Setup, Student and Screens, My Call for a Deep Reset | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about dealing my Trello setup, reducing student screen time, and our collective need for a "deep reset," among many other topics.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS* Entry level jobs and shallow work [11:24]* The future of bullshit jobs [16:25]* Staying in the zone over the weekend [23:09]* Deciding what to read as an academic [26:45]* Calibrating academic service [29:15]* Revisiting my 2009 advice on grad school [34:43]* Deep work with a new kid [44:50]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* My Trello setup [50:06]* Reducing student screen time [54:46]* Boredom versus high quality diversions [58:37]* Note-taking apps [1:07:25]* Agile methodologies and deep work [1:10:11]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Young mother seeking better friends [1:17:05] * Young father seeking improvement [1:21:36] * Kids versus career [1:27:45]* Thoughts on the Astros [1:29:23]* My call for a “Deep Reset” [1:29:48] Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I'm recording this on Sunday. So just a couple days ago on Friday, I hosted a fun event. So we had what was essentially a live taping of this podcast for people who had preordered my time block, planner. We held it on Friday. People would ask questions with a focus on time blocking or productivity geekery in general. And then I answered them on the fly. We used Zoom. My publisher set it up. We had something like 800 people show up for that event. And though it was Zoom, so it's not like I was actually seeing people, just knowing that 800 people were there live and seeing the chat, really have a lot of energetic back and forth going back.

It reminded me of something that I don't think I realized, which is I do miss doing stuff in person related to my books. I don't think of myself as someone who does a lot of events. I know authors who do a lot of events, who do a lot of speaking, for example. They'll do 50 engagements a year, 100 engagements a year, some of the more hardcore ones. and I'm not one of those type of authors, but I do, I'm realizing a fair amount of events. There's rarely a month go by

where I don't drive or fly somewhere and have an audience of my readers to talk with, to meet afterwards. And so it was nice. It was nice to be able to be with virtually some of you guys out there who listen to this podcast and are interested in these topics.

Just a quick technical note, if you're one of the many people who pre-ordered the time block planner sent in your information, got the link for this Zoom event sent to you, but we're unable to attend. So I think we had something like 2,000 people actually sign up, and of those, about 800 people could show up live. So if you got the link for the Zoom and you could not attend,

you will be sent a link to a recording of the event. That is our sort of special offer for people who pre-ordered. The publisher's editing it a little bit. but you will get that link. Anyways, that's fun. We definitely will have to organize at some point, you know, once we're all sufficiently vaccinated, we'll have to organize some sort of in-person blowout

where we will, you know, ritualistically burn a laptop that is running a Zoom meeting and then all, I don't know, read the row by a stream or something like that. It'll be fun. Yeah, maybe this summer. Look forward to that. I also, before we get started, I wanted to crowdsource,

crowdsource some information from you, my listening audience. It has to do with the Deep Work HQ. As you know, in my Deep Work HQ, where I'm recording this right now, I do have a common room that I turned into a library. I moved all my books in there. I have set up one of the walls, one of the walls in the HQ, I have two large desk set up next to each other

facing the wall. And then I put library style library lamps on those desks. And that's where, in theory, I'll be doing more of my deep work. And I might change that configuration, by the way. But for now, that's what I'm trying because that's what I had. But anyways, the wall above these desks where you sit and stare at is completely blank. It's a long wall, maybe 15 feet, 20 feet. I don't have a great estimate of length, but like it's two large desks full of wall. I was completely blank. I need to put something up there. I want to put some artwork up there. And I thought it would be cool if it's possible for me to put up there some original artwork that actually has some meaning that ties to the types of things we talk about here and the type of things I write about. I think that could be inspiring.

So this is what I want to crowdsource to my listening audience out there. if someone can point me towards a particular, let's say, artist, or artisan, that produces work that is relevant to these topics and could fit up there. I mean, obviously, it's not going to be one big piece. I assume, like, three pieces hung up in a row or something like that, or four pieces in a row is what's actually going to fit. But I would love to actually buy something directly from an artist, not necessarily from just like one of these generic prints from one those very large online art companies. I think that would be really cool.

I don't know how much I'd actually be able to afford, but anyways, I'm throwing that out there. So you can send me a note at interesting at calnewport.com. If you have some interesting ideas, suggestions, or pointers of where I might get some meaningful work to hang on the long, blank wall of the deep work HQ, something that gives me a bit of inspiration, something that's meaningful, something I can keep with me

even after I move on from this particular HQ, whenever that might happen. All right. So interesting at calnewport.com, if you have a suggestion for me. All right, really quick housekeeping. I'm going to send out a new survey soon to my email list to solicit new questions for the fall. I sent out my last survey in September. Got a lot of good responses. I'm working my way through it, but I want to get some more timely questions.

So look out for that soon. Again, if you want to get the link to this survey, you have to be on my mailing list, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. You will also get, if you sign up for that mailing list, my fabled weekly article. I've been sending out a weekly article on these type of topic since 2007. You can be a part of that tradition. And if you want to submit an audio question for the habit tune up many episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Calnewport. All right, I've got a great group of questions curated here. I'm excited to get to them.

I think we're going to have a good episode. As always, before we jump into those questions, we're going to take a brief moment to say thanks to the sponsors that make the show possible. Let's talk Blinkist. You know what Blinkist is. I've been talking about it here on the podcast for the last couple of months. It is a service in which you can get condensed summaries of thousands of nonfiction books, expert summaries that require roughly 15 minutes to read.

You can do this on your tablet, you can do this on your phone, you can do this on your computer. There's 12 million subscribers to Blinkist so you know they know what they're doing. Now, I like to emphasize one of the ways to use Blinkist, the way I have been recommending to Deep Questions listeners, how they should use Blinkist, is to do a swarming of a topic. So if there is a topic that you want to know more about, and I think we are in a time right now when having deep knowledge, not just random information, but deep knowledge has never been more valuable. You can use Blinkist to surround or swarm the topic by quickly going through blinks, which is what they call their 15-minute summaries, of multiple books about that idea, about that time period, about that event. and in one afternoon you can sit down and go through multiple of these summaries of a topic and immediately get the lay of the land.

What are the milestones or timelines? What are the big ideas and what are they called? What concepts do I need to do? Who are the big players in terms of this world? An hour or two, you get all that information. Now you've swarmed this topic and have the complete lay of the land and you can figure out, okay, now of the different books written about this, here's the one I need. to buy and read in more detail.

These two, this one, these three. And then when you buy one of those books to read in more detail, you already know the main terminology, you already know the main milestones, you already know the main players, you're able to come into that book informed, you're able to come into that book knowing it's the right one to read. You follow this, you can master a topic very quickly.

In a way that's very hard to do otherwise. Otherwise, you're just buying random books and hope they stick. Anyways, there's a lot of ways to use Blinkis. that's one way I recommend a way to get deeper knowledge and an increasingly shallow moment in our intellectual history. So Blinkist can solve that problem for you. So once you sign up for Blinkist, you get unlimited access to their massive library of condensed nonfiction books. All the books you want for one low price right now for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to try it free for seven days and

save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial, and you'll save 25% off, but only when you sign up at Blinkist.com slash deep. I also want to talk about Magic Spoon. These are stressful times for about 19 different reasons. These are stressful times, and sometimes in stressful, times you have to put aside that doom scrolling. You have to put away the apocalyptic coverage on cable news and just do something that in the moment is going to remind you of your childhood that's going to make you happy and give you a little escape. Magic Spoon can do that. Magic Spoon is

basically like those cereals you loved as a kid but you no longer eat today because they're not healthy. somehow, through some sort of dark wizardry, the magic spoon scientist have figured out how to bring that experience to you without the unhealthy ramifications. These cereals have zero sugar, 11 grams of protein, only three net carbs, grams of carbs in each serving.

The flavors are exactly what you would hope from these type of cereals, cocoa, fruity, frosted, blueberry. And I really love the taste. You know, it tastes good. in our household, I'm the frosted guy, the kids like the cocoa. But the important thing is that my Magic Spoon ritual gives me that moment of escape. I think we all need. So go to MagicSpoon.com slash Cal to grab a variety pack and try it today and be sure to use

our promo code Cal at checkout to get free shipping. Magic Spoon is so confident in their product is backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked. That's magic spoon.com slash cowl and use to code cow for free shipping. We'll start with work questions. As always, in our first query comes from Anashamiza, who asked, should I avoid entry-level jobs

that seem like they would only have me doing shallow work? Well, the short answer is no. You should not avoid those entry-level jobs. Entry-level jobs almost by definition are going to be primarily shallow work. Now, this comes back to my notion of career capital theory that I lay out in my 2012 book, so good they can't ignore you. And this book envisions career satisfaction as a metaphorical market. As you develop rare and valuable skills, that gives you a metaphorical substance I call career capital. You then barter that capital for the types of properties of your work that makes it more interesting and more meaningful and more satisfying, for example, less shallow, more deep, but also more autonomy, more sense of

mastery, more connection or impact, etc. So in the career capital framework, when you first start in a job, assuming that we're talking, by the way, about just like a standard just out of college style entry-level job. You have very little career capital, therefore you have very little to barter for things that are going to make your job better. So your goal is not to try to find a job that for some reason will just give you all of these nice attributes for free, but instead to find a way to gather or build that career capital as quickly as possible. I've talked about on this podcast that if you're new to a job, what you really want to focus on is two things. First, being very dependable. Second, becoming indispensable.

So when I say dependable, I mean do not drop the ball. If someone puts something on your plate, no matter how shallow, no matter how much you like it, no matter how much you dislike it, they will trust that you are going to take care of it. You're not going to forget about it. It will get done. If you say you're going to do something by a certain time, it gets done by that certain time or earlier. If you have to delay, you clearly communicate. I know I told you I was going to do this thing by Wednesday. It's going to be Friday. And the way that you become dependable, of course, is this is a productivity move. You capture, configure control-style productivity, capture everything, organize and regularly

review what you have captured and control your time so things actually get done. The thing about entry-level jobs that are primarily shallow work is that they are incredibly amenable to optimization through good productivity habits in a way that as you move up the ranks, it can get more difficult because you have more ambiguous type task, you have overload, you have responsibilities placed on you that might be difficult to juggle. But at the entry level, usually, if you care about productivity, you are going to stand out as compared to those who don't. So become dependable, never drop the ball, always deliver. Once you have established that foundation, then find a way to become indispensable. Develop some sort of thing you do for your bosses.

some sort of process, some sort of skill, whatever it is that is very valuable to them and you're the one who does it. So now you're someone that would be hard to replace if you left. Now you have to have the foundation of dependability first before they'll let you take on one of these types of projects. But if you're dependable, they will and you do it really well. So whatever it is, I mean, we can be hypothetical, but you know, you're in the HR department. You're sort of at a paperwork-style job when you first come into the department. You prove that you're dependable in this particular example. Your move towards indispensability might have to do with building a better back-in process

for capturing signatures. Maybe you help your HR departments transition to DocuSign and work out the documentation on that. And you're the one who goes to the different groups in the organization and explains how DocuSign works in this particular example. Now you're kind of indispensable. So when you're dependable and then you become indispensable, that is the point at which your career capital stores are going to rapidly fill,

and then you want to take that capital out for a ride, if you will excuse the multiple mixed metaphors here, and you can begin at that point reconfiguring your job in ways that is increasingly resonates with you, more responsibility, more autonomy, etc. All right, so a long answer to a short question, but basically, yeah, your job, job might suck at first.

The goal is not to keep searching until you find a job that doesn't suck at first. It is instead to say how quickly, how quickly can I move past that initial sucky station? Dependability and indispensability will get you there fast. Marta asks, what is your take on the prevalence of BS jobs, as described in David Graber's book of that same name? Do they fit in your deep shallow dichotomy? These jobs seem shallow, but they are well paid, mostly knowledge worker jobs, and many times done by highly trained individuals. Will they disappear in a world of deep work? Well, first I should note that I'm abbreviating the expletive to BS only because I think I have to click some box in iTunes that says there's explicit lyrics or something, explicit language if I currently.

in the podcast and I figured I just keep all the episodes without that moniker. So I am saying BS, David Graber does not abbreviate. He uses the full word. So what is the idea? What is Graber's idea? What is a BS job? Well, his book, which is based off of an essay that was quite popular, his book basically argues that if you look at office style knowledge work, there are a lot of positions that don't really do anything. I mean, they do something, but they don't really need to be there. You're kind of moving paper around. You're a process supervisor. You are part of the coordinating task force for, you know, sub-level initiatives in the northeast or something. But he's saying there's these jobs that if you really dive down deeper, you end up in that scene and office space where the consultant at some

point has to just stop the person who's trying to explain what they do and say, what is it would you say that you actually do here? Graber says those jobs exist and he has a whole theory about why they exist and what it means. So Marta's asking, you know, do I think those jobs will continue to exist? And how do we think about those jobs in the spectrum of deep, de shallow work? I think, and this is the theory I lay out in my book coming out in March, a world without email, I think those type of jobs are going to go away. And the reason they're going to go away is that we have to look at why they exist in the first place. And having really studied this for a couple of years now working on that upcoming book,

I think BS jobs exist in large part because the whole notion of organizing brains to produce value is relatively new. I mean, we didn't even have even the notion of management, like how should we organize a company, who should be in charge of what? Even that is pretty new. I mean, that's Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker wrote the first books about that right after World War II. Like, it wasn't that long ago. And for the most part, management back then was management of very large industrial companies

that still produced actual things. I mean, his famous book that introduced some of these notions of management theory was about the corporate structure of General Motors. So it's actually way more recent than that than we have whole organization where the thing being produced is information and it comes out of people's brains. And so, you know, we're trying to figure out how do you organize this? How do you organize brains to actually work together and produce value? And we're not very good at it yet.

We're relatively in the early stages of doing this, especially if you want to talk about knowledge work in an age of digital networks, which really shook things up. I think there's a lot of jobs that don't really need to exist because there's a lot of haphazardness in general when it comes to how we organize knowledge work. You know, I can draw a straight line between the existence of a BS job where it's not quite sure exactly what this person does or why they need to be there to the common state of existence in which you have a never-ending stream of email messages

that you're constantly answering. They both reflect the same thing. We're kind of just rock and rolling here. Like we're just trying to get things done. This position got created at some point because we kind of needed it and now it's sort of here for our legacy and we don't really know what it does and it's kind of mutated but what are we going to do? We don't want to just fire someone. The same thinking that's like, well, I have emails coming from 30 different people because, you know, whatever, we're just trying to get things done and grabbing people's attention and like, did you get this? Let's jump on a Zoom about this. What happened to this over here? I'll hit you up on Slack. I'll hit you up on email. It's all haphazardness. It's all haphazardness because we have not yet evolved how we do knowledge work to the next, phase. My big argument in that book is that we are going to evolve. We've seen this in other sectors historically. It takes a little while, but we will move past the convenient and the simple and the legacy and into much more intentional and thoughtful ways of organizing knowledge work where we

actually think, all right, what are the processes? What do we produce here? What are the best ways to run these processes? How do we optimize them? Who should be involved? How does the information come in? How is the information organized. Huh, let's actually now think about these human brains we've hired and ask questions like how much work should any one person be doing at the same time? Is it best to have 70 or 80 different initiatives being on your plate simultaneously that of all arrives haphazardly, or should we limit it to one thing at a time? And have a whole queue of different things that we assign to people one at one.

All this type of thinking has not been done yet. Once we do this style of thinking, however, once we get serious, and intentional about processes, how we organize knowledge work, the BS jobs are going to go away. You know, once we actually realize, like, okay, here's how we do this, here's how we do this, none of these processes are going to need the random position that's supposed to be regional coordinator for, you know, standard base reporting for the Northeast or what have you. Like once we get a way more specific about how work gets done, those jobs go away,

but more importantly, so does the overfilled inboxes, so does the constant Zoom meetings, so does the Slack channel that is pulling at your attention throughout the whole day. Once we treat what we're trying to do here, to take human brains and get them to work together, the proofs value, and we treat that as seriously as Henry Ford thought about what's the best way to build cars,

I think we're going to see work. We'll get much more structured. It'll get much more intentional. It'll get much more sustainable. It'll get much more satisfying for those involved. And there's not going to be any room in a world of so much attention and intentionality for there to be too much BS jobs. At least that's my theory. So now, if you have one of those jobs right now, I would be working on developing

a skill that is actually valuable because I don't know how much longer they're going to last. Thomas asks, how do you ensure that the weekend does not take you so far out of the zone that getting back into the groove on Monday is very hard. Well, I have two things to recommend. First, if you find yourself having a hard time building momentum on Monday morning, I would suggest doing your weekly plan for the week ahead and perhaps even your first time block plan for Monday, do that all before you actually get the Monday.

Either do that on Sunday night or maybe do it on Friday as the last thing you do before you sign off on Friday. By the way, I endorse that latter idea because you will get more relaxation just from a cognitive relief standpoint over the weekend if your brain knows that you already have a plan for the next week. So there's not that open loop of, uh-oh, we've got this week coming up, I hope it's going to be okay.

Anyways, however you do it, if on Monday morning you're just rock and rolling, I've got my weekly plan, my time block plan let's go, I think you're going to find it much easier to get rolling than if you start Monday morning and say, okay, let me, I'm going to have to plan here. I'm going to have to go through my inbox and look at my calendar. That's going to, without any actual plan guiding you during those initial moments of Monday morning, you could have a very slow start. So that's one thing I think would be useful. The other is to keep your weekend active and intentional. We talked about this a lot

actually during the live event last Friday. But I think it's a misnomer, this notion that what you crave after a hard week of work is no activity or no structure. That what you really need to do is just sit around. You just need to sit around and watch Netflix and whatever. Just have no plan at all. And that's not actually what your brain craves is actually going to make you a little bit uncomfortable if there's no structure for that long. It just needs diversity. It needs to work on things that's non-work related.

it needs to give the part of your brains that's focused on work a little bit of a rest, but other parts of your brain is something to do. So I would say have more structure to your weekends. Don't time block your weekends, but you probably want to have a rough plan. Like here's the big rocks of what I'm doing on Saturday. Like I'm going on, you know, this outing and having these friends over. Like whatever it is, right?

Like here's the couple big intentional things, big rocks and then have your small list of smaller gravel. Right. Here's a bunch of tasks I might want to try to get. two because the weekend I have time or because it's interesting or whatever. And then you do your best with that. So you don't have to be nearly as organized as like a time block planned workday, but you have some intention on how you spend your time. You're active. You try to focus these big rocks on things that are high quality or deeply meaningful. And that keeps you in a mindset of I'm efficacious. I get things done. I do important things. I go after the things that are important

to me, I pursue them. I'm in control of my life. I'm building a life and meaning of satisfaction. You're keeping those mental vibes going, even though the activities have nothing to do with your day job. Keeps you in the right mindset. So when you get the Monday, you're still in this efficacious, I control my time, I do meaningful things. Mindset, it's just now you're aiming it at work endeavors instead of leisure endeavors or household endeavors or family endeavors or self-development endeavors. So that's my two pieces of advice. Plan your Monday. in advance and keep your weekend intentional, keep your weekend active. Mike asks, how do you decide what to read for work?

He elaborates that he's a professor, and when he's talking about reading, he means like academic paper reading. His elaboration talks about what are the best strategies for keeping up with the relevant research literatures. Well, Mike, my strategy. here, which doesn't apply to every academic field, but I do think it applies to a lot of fields, is when it comes to your own efforts to keep up with the literature. And when I say your own efforts, what I'm segregating out here is things like reading groups. So I mean, it is a good

idea, especially as a new professor, to join reading groups or seminar series where you're reading through papers with other people on, typically it'll be a hot topic in your particular field. I think those are good. You're doing it with other people and you're getting a lot of feedback and bouncing ideas off themselves. But in terms of just your own reading that you're doing entirely on your own, I would recommend not trying to just explore literatures. I would recommend not saying I just want to read broadly on a lot of different new work in my field to see what catches my attention. I find it to be much more effective to allow particular research projects drive your reading. Now you have what I call focused reading.

You're writing this paper. You realize to write this paper right, you need to know about X. So you go out and you read the best papers about X. And you know what you need from these papers. So you kind of might skim some or get to the punchline here or go through them quickly to see who they're citing. Because you're not just reading for the sake of reading.

You're reading because you need to know about X. You can talk about it right in your introduction. You need to know about X because you have to make sure that you're looking at the right metrics when measuring your result, whatever it is. Reading for a purpose, and in particular the purpose of this is going to help a research project I am doing. I think you find your motivation is much higher.

I think you'll find it'll be much more efficient in doing the reading. And I think the return on investment in that reading time will be much higher. So that is typically what I recommend. Reading groups and seminar series are great for just exploring. Also go to talks or attend talks. You know, right now all the talks are virtual. so go to the virtual talks. That's great.

That can handle your serendipitous discovery of new topics, but for your reading, have a reason. Sticking for the moment with the professor theme, let's do one more question on this topic from Han. He asked, how should you best choose and manage the amount of service you do

as a tenure track assistant professor at a large research university? Well, Han, I'll tell you, at my university at Georgetown, they're quite good. They're quite good at working with assistant professors to make sure that your service load is reasonable. At least this was the case in the computer science department. I guess I can't speak for other departments, but they're very careful about that. They want their assistant professors to get tenure,

and so they're very wary about overloading them with service. I suspect most large research universities are similar, though it could depend on the department. So what sort of advice would I give you in particular? Well, first I would say as an assistant professor, and for those of us in the audience who are not in academia, just so you quickly know the ranks of U.S. professors, you begin, a tenure track position begins with the rank of assistant professor. This is basically a temporary job that you will lose unless you can get tenure within some sort of time period, typically five to seven years. if you get tenure, then you get promoted to associate professor. So almost always in a tenure-track position,

if you hear associate professor, this is a tenured professor. For example, my current title at Georgetown is on the Provost-Dist-Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science. You can parse that. The associate professor part means I'm a tenured professor. The Provost-dist-distinguished is a particular,

it's not a chair, but it's like it's a particular appellation. They're at our university. It's a program where a small number of newly tenured professors each year at the university get this provost distinguished professor title. But the point is, is just to break down the naming conventions here professors, there'll be some sort of title. If you have a particular title, like a chair or something, you know,

like the provost distinguished appellation, and then you'll have the rank. Full professor comes after associate professor. That's sometimes just called a professor without anything in front of it. That is the final promotion in the U.S. system. It happens a while after you get tenure. And if basically to get promoted, the full professor is you have proven that you've become a sort of leader in your field or a well-respected distinguished member of your field. So that has to come later in your career.

You have to have enough time to actually do that. All right, that's a quick lesson on ranks. Let's go back to Hans' question. So assistant professors, this is pre-tenure, large research university. I said your department probably will help you with this, but my advice for you particularly is focus more on what's known as community service, that is service for your academic community beyond the university. So that is serving on program committees, that is doing paper reviews, etc.

Those are really important for tenure because it indicates to the rank and tenure boards that you are known and respected and a part of your research community. Be much more wary of university level service. You won't be expected to do much of that. You're not going to be dinged

for not doing much of that. They don't really want you to do much of that. I mean, tenure is really about have you establish yourself as someone who is doing good work in your field. So you don't want to do no university service, but just keep it reasonable. You know, look, I'm on this committee.

This is relatively time-consuming, so I'm not going to do other committees. And you've got to be willing to say no to things. You've got to be willing to have some uncomfortable conversations. We all go through it. I certainly have gone through my share of these type of uncomfortable conversations or having senior professors say mean things to me. Like, this stuff happens, but look, it's academia. And that's just what you signed up for.

One other piece of advice I would give about service to your research community, it is easy for that to get out of control as well. It is easy for you, for example, to get up to your ears and reviews and proposal reviews and paper reviews and serving on program committees and serving on editorial boards and you are drowning just in that specific type of service. My recommendation there is a quota system. This is how many reviews I do per semester.

This is how many boards I sit on per semester, whatever it is, right? how many program committees I sit on. Have a quota, and when it fills, when new requests come in, you say, I would love to, but I keep a quota per semester of how much of that I do so that I don't get overloaded, and I've somehow already hit that quota for this semester. And that works well because typically people aren't going to argue that your quota is wrong, right, the sentiment behind that I think people agree with. It's much better than just generally saying, like, oh, maybe I'm kind of busy.

They'll say, yeah, but can't you just do this? But if you say I've hit my limit, they're not going to come back and say, well, your limit's wrong. It should be three papers higher. So I do recommend the quota system that ensures that you're doing lots of service towards your research community, which you need for tenure. But you are not doing too much of that. All right, hon, I hope that's helpful. Good luck. All right.

So further sticking with the academic theme, let's do a question here from Michael. Michael asks, what would you change about this article on graduate student advice that you wrote over a decade ago? He's pointing to an article I wrote on my blog in March of 2009. So just as I was finishing up my PhD at MIT, I wrote a post that became quite popular called Some Thoughts on Grad School, in which I was reflecting on my experience that was just ending. and saying here is the advice I would give to other grad students. And I think in particular I was focusing on grad students who are doing research-oriented PhD program.

So Michael is asking if I stand by that advice. I think that's a good question. I don't remember what I said there. So I'm literally, as I'm talking now, I'm loading this up on my computer. All right, some thoughts on grad school. Yeah, so I opened this article. saying as my final year as a PhD student continues,

it's a nerving hurdle forward, I thought it would be nice to reflect on my grad school experience. Below are a collection of ideas, warnings, regrets, and assorted lessons I've accrued over my time so far at MIT. All right, so let's see what these thoughts are, and I'll tell you if I still agree with them. Thought number one, research trumps all. Yes, that is still true.

Don't get obsessed about your classes. Don't get obsessed about activities. Publish, publish, publish. if you're in a serious research-focused PhD program, that is what matters. I agree with that advice still. Thought 1.5. Don't let courses and qualus distract you from thought one.

Yep. All right, so that's what I was just saying. I still very much agree with that. If you're in a research-oriented program, you got to publish. All right, thought number two from this article. Don't be a firefighter. All right, so what do I mean by that?

So looking at this article I wrote back there 2009, a simple truth. You'll have more urgent things on your plate than you'll have time to complete. If you spend your days only putting out one fire after the next, as they arrive in your inbox, paper review requests, articles to read, extra experiments to conduct for your advisor, you'll get very little original research done. This violates thought one. I said the solution here I write is to spend the first two to three hours of the morning doing original work. Only then should you check email for the first time. Oh, interesting. So even back then as a grad student. I was already worried and upset about email and how it laid claim to your

times. That's an interesting thing to uncover here. Yeah, so I still agree with this. First things first as a grad student, work on your research. And then do your best to work in the rest of it. Apologize if needed if you don't get to it all. I believe that absolutely be the case. The one caveat I would add here, spending the first two to three hours of your day, I don't want to be so specific on the strategy. I would just say, time block and make sure that you have quite a bit of deep work in your schedule. All right, the third thought from this 2009 article, stick to a fixed workday. All right, and it looks like I recommend here that you follow something like a 9 to 530

schedule. Do a shutdown at the end of that schedule. Don't work beyond those hours. I write in this article that if you do that, you'll get, whoa, four advantages. one, you'll focus more and get more work done faster. Two, you'll start work much earlier, which increases its quality. Three, you'll start turning down time-consuming requests that add little to your career. And four, your stress and guilt will plummet.

Yeah, I largely agree with that. I mean, obviously, I am a big fan of this strategy, which is called fixed schedule productivity. I have refined it since then into time blocking with a shutdown ritual. I think it's more general and more flexible, but it gets at the same idea. time block your day, what am I working, what am I doing during each hour, how do I get the most out of the day? When does my day then end? Shutdown ritual as it ends and then move on. This is actually right around the time I invented my shutdown ritual. It was some of the stress of working on my dissertation. There was an important proof I couldn't get to work and it was

stressing me out. That would have been right around this time. I invented the shutdown ritual, so that's interesting. All right, thought four from this article is three projects, optimal? I don't know. I think that might be very specific to the type of theoretical computer science research I was doing. So in that case, I would say know how many projects to be working on concurrently as optimal and stick with that. That could really vary. Thought five, but don't work on more than one per day. I like that, right? So the idea there is even if you have multiple projects going to just dedicate your day to one because you really want to get into the cognitive context of that work, let it marinate, allow it to capture a lot of your cognitive energy. So I still

agree with that thought. Thought number six, listen to the married grad students and ignore the unmarried students who live in the dorms. I was a married graduate student, so I was biased here. But basically what I was arguing is that students who have families, they have more reasonable working hours. They have other things going on in their life. They spend time on. They usually recognize that being a grad student is a pretty easy job compared to other real jobs. So I still like that advice. Look at the way that the married grad students run their schedule and what they do with their time outside of work. That's probably way more healthy than the obsessive grad students who sort of live in the dorms and roll into roll into their office at noon and work till three in the

morning and are trying to constantly convince themselves. They're really stressed. All right. Thought seven promise people deadlines and follow through. All right, that's like my answer from earlier in the episode about dependability. So I guess I cared about that back then. Yeah, I think that's important. I still agree with that. Thought number eight, challenge yourself once a month. I got to read what this says.

Here's what I wrote. It's so damn easy for your research to fall into a rut, grooved by short-term decisions based on the question, what's the shortest path between here and a new publication? many a graduate student faced with crafting a job talk after five years of work realizes with horror that his research direction is weak, jumbled, and uninspiring. Once a month, take yourself out for breakfast and ask, what is my research mission as a graduate student, and how do I get back there from here? Yeah, so that's something I, that's a thinly veiled concern I had about myself. As I was looking at the job market, I worried that my work was all over the place, that I did.

didn't have a clear research mission. I think that was true. I just published a lot of papers. Now, it worked out in the end. I was still able to get hired because I published a lot of papers. So when I was on the market, I just had a lot of citations. I had a lot of publications at really good places. And that was enough for some places to say, let's go. But I didn't have a really clear research direction, right? Which is different. I think the other approach, which I think is better, is that you have a clear research direction that's a big deal that you're working towards. And it really should be what your advisor

should come from your advisor, right? Work with the best possible advisor. Work with an advisor who in a given area is making really big progress and follow that lead. And then what happens is in that situation when you go on the job market, it's basically schools will say,

well, I can't get your advisor. You know, she already has a job at MIT, but you're the next, you're the next best thing. You trained under her and know how to do the same type of work she's doing. So we can get a version of her much cheaper if we hire you. And that's how you should be

trying to get your jobs. I didn't really do that. The theory group at MIT's incredibly entrepreneurial. I just went around and found collaborators and wrote papers with a ton of different people and a ton of different ideas. I did not have a focused research mission. I wish I did. So I think the sentiment

behind that thought is right. I think acting on that sentiment will take more than simply just taking yourself out to breakfast once a month and asking the question rhetorically, what is my mission? You should let your advisor help you guide that. Thought number nine, don't mistake experience for smarts. Yeah, I used to really believe in this. I mean, imposter syndrome is a big deal in grad school. And I wrote here about, you know, undergrads think that their grad students are smarter. Junior grad students think their senior grad students are smarter than them. senior graduate students think that their advisors are smarter than them. And I say a lot of that just is actually experienced.

The more you do something, the better you get at it. So don't let the fact that whoever is ahead of you in your training seems to have better ideas and publish better than you. Don't let that be a source of imposter syndrome. It's not that they're smarter than you necessarily. It's just that they know what they're doing and you will get there. All right, the final thought, this was a long article. The final thought was take days off.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Look, having had jobs further along the academic pipeline now for quite a while, I can tell you graduate student is a easy job. It doesn't feel like it when you're there. There's a whole online universe of people who try to convince each other that it's a really stressful, terrible job, and there's nothing worse in the world than writing a dissertation. But I'll tell you what's worse than being a grad student writing a dissertation,

almost every real job. So take days off because you can. trust me. As someone who's now a tenured professor with a lot of kids, don't take for granted the fact that you can take a lot of time off, and it's not going to make a big difference. Raphael asks, I recently became a mother for the first time, and I will return to work soon.

I dread the effect my young son will have on my productivity and my ability to focus at work. I have a high responsibility job in a medical biology laboratory. How did you and your wife manage the arrival of your children and the effect it had on your jobs? Well, Raphael, I can tell you from repeated experience that I understand your dread, but things are not going to be as bad as you might be worried it will be. I mean, keep in mind how many of the people you know around you in your lab, who are above you in your lab, etc., that have kids, probably almost all.

of them. And yet, you know, work still happens, career still advance. So it's not as if you're going into weird, uncharted territory that holds a high probability of disaster. You're following a well-marked path. So a couple things off the top of my head. I'm thinking back, it's been eight years now, if you can believe it, since my oldest arrived and we returned to work a few months later. A couple things I remember from that is we prioritized sleep training. I mean, if you're both working, you just have to do it. I think we slept trained our first somewhere between three and four months. That makes a huge difference, right? A baby who has gone through sleep training, who you can put down the bed and they are going to sleep until the morning is 90% of the battle.

Beyond that, I think we had to figure out the organizational strategies that maintained care of the child. You know, between, I think we had a nanny, but we had to figure out. The way we worked it is we would wake up early and I would, before the baby would wake up. And I think I would go walk the dog. And in the winter, it's just dead dark. I just remember being dead dark and I'm out there walking a dog I would exercise at a playground

and just be freezing cold and dead dark so that my wife could shower and I could take over and she would go to work very early so we just had a shifted schedule I think where she went to work early so she could come back at a more reasonable hour and I would go to work later

but then had more flexibility on coming back later but the main point there being is just figure out what is our organizational scheme how does this work in the mornings? How does the hand off the child care work? How does the pickup work? Who goes in early? Who stays late? How do we deal with travel? My wife's job had a bunch of travel, etc., etc. So we got really locked in on our productivity systems. I had to really figure out,

okay, if I can't start work till this point, you know, how do I compensate for that? Because I had to wait for the child care to start. And so there's like an organizational question. of like how do we do the morning handoffs, how do we do the afternoon handoffs, how do we deal with snow days, how do we deal with sickness, right? So there's those questions as well. But then otherwise it just basically works, right? I mean, so you have some more constraints on your life, you have some more structure to your schedule. But when you're working, you're working, and it's not much different. And you find pretty quickly, I would say by the six month mark, if you've slept trained and you have a pretty good, well-organized schedule for your mornings

and your afternoons, you just get used to the new routine. You're like, these are my constraints. roll with them, and you kind of just adjust to the new normal. So I want to, I don't think there's going to be a cause for dread here, Raphael. If anything, if anything, the need to get more organized to handle some of these logistical issues will have a positive spillover effect for your non-child-related work because being more organized is being more organized. And once you have like a really tight schedule for the mornings, you might become more tight about how you schedule your workday. And there's advantages to be had. So obviously get your productivity game up to speed, capture, configure, control. You should almost certainly be time blocking. The configure step is much more important

now that you're trying to coordinate calendars and try to figure out what needs to be done and what you have to start early, et cetera. But you have this. Congratulations on the baby. Having kids is a ton of fun and this infant period that when you're at month two and you're just like, I don't know how this is going to work. I'm telling you, when you're at month six, that sense that you are in an emergency goes away and you will feel like you have a routine. You'll feel like it works. I love that transition with each of my kids. I've always loved that transition right around month six where you go from all hands on deck, Claxins, blaring, cortisol flaring, to a steady state of, okay, we've got this one figured out now. And so you'll be there soon,

Raphael. And until then, have some hope. All right, let's do some technology questions. Rohn asks, do you have any dragon slaying pro tips for Trello? Well, as long time listeners know, I use Trello as part of the configure stage of my capture, configure, control, productivity philosophy. In more detail, that means I use Trello to organize all of the things on my plate to keep track of relevant information, to keep track of their statuses so that I can better make plans about what to do with my time. I would say, Roan, I don't have really complicated pro tips.

I think the way I use Trello to organize is simple. There is really nothing sexy about it. Let me load it up right now. So as I talk, I am loading up Trello on my computer. I have three Trello boards. here, writer, professor. I have in parentheses classes plus administrative work and researcher. So if we look at writer, for example, here are my columns. I have a column called two process. That's where I put cards where there's something that's important, but I haven't really,

it's still ambiguous. I haven't really worked out, you know, what does that mean? What do I need to do? How do I actually take this thing? I know it's important and translate it into actual actions. I need a place for those, so I put them in the two process column so that they're not in my head. And I know the things in the two process column need to be elaborated on next time I have the free cycles to really think about it. Then I have two columns labeled Back burner. These are things I need to work on at some point. It's not particularly urgent. They happen right away, but I want to capture them somewhere.

The reason why I have two columns is for this writer board, I separate out things directly related to my writing, so book writing and article writing, etc. And the things that are tied more to the mini media business that I implicitly run. So things about my podcast or the Deep Work HQ or working with web designers to update the time block. planner domain. That stuff goes on like kind of a business writer column and then I have another column that's much more, you know,

get this book, schedule this interview type of cards. Then I have a column titled Waiting to Hear Back. So if I'm waiting to hear from someone, I pinged them about something, they promised me something. I don't want to forget that.

So I put a card for each of those under Waiting to Hear Back. I have another column called This Week week plus action plan. So when I do my weekly plan, I go through the Trello board for each role and I move on to the this week column, the things I really want to get through this week. And then when I build my daily plan every day, my time block daily plan, I look at these

trello boards, but when I look at the Trello boards, I only have to focus on the this week column, which has the things I really want to try to get done that week. And then I think about, oh, can I schedule some of these today? So the idea is I don't have to do a full review of everything on each of these boards every day, that I do that during the weekly plan. I really review and I move to things over to that column that I want to get done that week, and then it makes it much quicker, much quicker to see what I need to do when I'm planning each individual day.

And then finally I added a column here called reminders. These aren't actually tasks. These are just reminders about things relevant to that role. And that column is right next to the this week column that I look at every single day. so that seemed like a good place to have reminders. These are boring things. These are boring things. Like one of my reminders on there right now

has to do with when I write my blog post, in order to get that little pop-up that comes up on the side as you scroll down the blog post and ask you to sign up for the mailing list, I have to select something from a drop-down box as I write the blog post. and I keep forgetting to do that.

And my web person keeps bothering me about that. So I have a little reminder there just to try to remind myself. I select that drop down. All right, it's not sexy. That's my Trello board, right? There's not some really complicated pro tips

that's going to make you even more productive. It's just the basics executed properly. And that's what I do with taskboards to organize my work. Matthew asks, how can professors help limit screen time for students? In his elaboration, he is referencing, of course, specifically the remote learning environment that his university is currently under.

Well, Matthew, I think what you're hinting at is, can you as a professor maybe require less screen time for your particular class? That might help. That might help. I mean, it's not a bad idea if the nature of your content is such that it doesn't. doesn't all require, let's say, a student to be on Zoom for hours each week, that could be something. But honestly, I think the bigger solution for students right now who are at a remote university is that they need to be encouraged and reminded as much as possible that during the stage of

remoteness, they have to recreate where they are right now, a lot of the other types of benefits they would get from being on campus. Classes can go remote, but the sense of community, the sense of connection, the sense of intellectual discovery, the sense of excitement or gratitude or adventure, the other types of stuff that rounds out the typical college experience when you are on campus, that does not go remote. And in its absence, you are going to find yourself increasingly depressed. And so I have been encouraging students that, hey, when you're at home, you have to temporarily find other sources of these things that are really meaningful, and they should be sources that hopefully do not involve screens. Maybe you need to pick up a new hobby. You need to start

hiking. You live in New Hampshire. Maybe this is the winter that you're going to try to bag the 10,000 footers in the snow or what have you, right? You need challenges that gets you outside. You need hobbies that engage your mind that are meaningful. You need to find ways to interact with people that's not just on a screen. Maybe you need a running club or a biking club or someone to come hiking with you. You need to find a good patio where you can sit out there and chat with people around the fire pit, then you're whatever it is 10 feet away or whatever you need to do so there's not like a viral spreading risk or whatever it is, right? You need to get in the new books.

you need to walk a lot more. You need to, maybe this is the time to get an incredible shape. Right. But the point being is for students who are learning remotely, it's too long of a period to just put all of those other aspects of your life on hold. To just say, look, I'm in a holding pattern. Let's just do this online. And then when I get back to campus,

I can get back to these other parts of my life. it's too long for you to put these other aspects of your life, these non-screen-related aspects of your life on hold. So that's what I would say more broadly, Matthew, is that we need to keep encouraging and recommending the students that you need to intentionally build a meaningful, non-screen-based life right now. Wherever you happen to be,

you have to do that with great energy. And then when you get back to campus, you know, that's all much easier. All a student life is built around those types of, of experiences, those types of exposures to interesting things, that type of community, that type of sense of connection. You'll get that real easy again when you get back to campus, but right now when you're not there, you have to put in the effort. So that's what I would recommend. It's fine if you can reduce the amount of time they have to spend on a screen for

your class, but I care more about the time they spend just in general outside of class and what they're doing with those moments. Renato asks, Is it still important to be bored from time to time if you use this remaining time for tasks like reading or listing the podcast? Well, Renato, I get this question a lot where people say, look, in my downtime, there are things I can do now due to technology that are rewarding or high quality. So isn't a waste, isn't it a waste of time to just be bored when I could be listening to a book on tape, and I could be listening to an interesting podcast when I could be reading something meaningful. Well, my answer to that Renato is that I do not recommend that people be bored all the time.

I do not recommend that boredom is good for boredom's sake. What you need is a little bit of boredom regularly. My typical recommendation is there should be one or two moments per day in which you crave stimuli but do not give your mind stimuli. These can be just five minutes long. It could be an errand you run. It could be as simple as I'm going to go change my laundry. You know, I've got to go take this out and put this laundry in here and then put this laundry away and it takes five minutes, but you do it with nothing in your ear and nothing in your hand.

I then recommend that once a week you have a longer period of boredom, something like a non-trivial length walk or hike, that you do with nothing in your ear. just you alone with your thoughts. And that's it, right? So all the other time you have during the week, you can listen to things or whatever you want to do. But just want that daily little dose of boredom and one larger dose on the weekends. Why do I think that is important? Well, my two big reasons are one to train your mind that boredom does not always generate stimuli. If you always do something interesting when you get bored. You will develop a Pavlovian connection between boredom and stimuli that will make it very difficult to do deep work when the time comes.

Your brain will say this is boring. It's not novel. Where's our shiny treat? And if you've always given it a shiny treat before, it's not going to put up with what you're asking it to do. So your brain has to just recognize that boredom is on the menu. It's on the menu, and it sometimes gets ordered. The other advantage of boredom is this is when you're able to do self-reflection.

It's when you're able to structure an order. and make sense of the experiences in your life to integrate that into a coherent framework about you and your character and your storyline. That type of reflection is crucial for self-development. It could only happen when you're alone with your own thoughts. That long period weekly, that long walk, that long hike you do once a week, just you alone with your own thoughts, is where a lot of that work is going to be done. So I think that's enough. That daily dose, that daily minor dose and then the one weekly larger dose,

that's enough boredom. That will give you a lot of benefits. But beyond that, yeah, listen to podcasts, listen to books on tape, read books, fill your time with the most interesting, satisfying and high-quality activities you can find. Let's take a brief break

to talk about some of the other sponsors that make the deep questions podcast possible. I want to talk in particular, about ExpressVPN. You know that I am highly suspicious of big tech companies. I am highly suspicious of the way that they monitor us. I am highly suspicious of the ways they try to exploit every last ounce of our attention. In my book Digital Minimalism, I talked about the attention resistance.

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I also want to talk for a moment about a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast and this is Mint Mobile. It is shocking to me that the mobile phone industry has been so late to be optimized. I mean, is there anything more Byzantine and old fashion? then how we deal with the big wireless companies where you have to go to these weird storefronts and you get this phone and then they hook up with these weird plans

and they're really expensive and you're locked into these contracts. You don't really have any option. I mean, the whole thing just feels like it's right for disruption. Mint Mobile has done it. Essentially what Mitt Mobile has done has cut out all of the overhead. The overhead of having to have those storefronts,

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So my original provider keeps adding more and more charges on. Mint Mobile, we're talking $30 a month, unlimited plan. The service lurks great. I've been using it. I actually bought, it's a cool experiment. I actually bought a flip phone, so a feature phone with no smartphone features. And I have my Mint Mobile SIM card in that phone because I'm experimenting with this experiment right now. where I call it my bat phone,

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So if you want to get your new unlimited wireless plan for just $30 a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com slash deep. That's mintmobile.com slash deep. Cut your unlimited wireless bill to $30 a month at mintmobile.com slash deep. Returning to our questions, Danielle asks, Do you use a specific note-taking app to compile your research notes when you write an article or a book? And does it help?

Well, as with my Trello setup, Danielle, I don't do anything particularly sexy here. I use Evernote to keep track of notes for my books and articles. It works well. But it's not as if there is some special high-tech feature of Evernote that makes the whole thing work. It's just a place where I can have electronic notes, where I can include my own ideas, I can include links, and have them all organized very nicely in a nice interface. But if there is another digital note-taking system that you like better, I'm sure it's fine. One twist I do, if you just want to look a little bit into the logistics of my research process. When I read a lot of academic papers for a writing project,

so like this was the case, for example, for my world without email book that's coming out in March, I had to read a lot of research papers for that. Like one of the things I do in that book is that I take the most comprehensive look that anyone has done to date on what 100 years of research literature tells us about the impact of that constant attention switching

on your ability to produce value with your brain. So I either read a ton of papers. I'd have to read all the papers on email and distraction. I read everything that Gloria Mark has ever written, etc. What I tend to do there is I will store those papers as PDFs and a directory on my computer and I'll store them with a clear naming convention, date and lead author. And then in Evernote, I will have a guide, right? So I'll have a directory. So I have a directory, like I'm looking at it now, for one of the chapters of my email book, there's a directory called

Gloria Mark papers, and then I have a bunch of papers in there, PDFs of papers that she wrote. Then in Evernote, I have a guide to the Gloria Mark Paper directory, where I list all those titles of the files and then have a little bit of guidance, like a sentence or two. Oh, this is a paper about X. This paper looks at this. It has these type of statistics in it. So now, if I want to know something more about this particular research. this particular researcher's literature,

I can go to that guide and Evernote and kind of hone in. I'm like, oh, these are the relevant papers here. And then jump over to that directory on my computer and actually load up the papers for reading. So I do have some tricks like that, but for the most part, it's pretty vanilla how I do online notes.

Any good online note-taking system will get the job done. Rafael asks, where do agile methodologies fall into promoting D. work, why isn't this the ideal method for knowledge work? For the listeners who are not familiar, agile methodologies is an approach to project management and that is quite popular in software development. If you've heard of specific methodologies like scrum or like conbon, those are examples of

agile methodologies that are used in software development. So I don't mean to keep referencing this book that I haven't published yet. But in that new book coming out in March, I get into detail on this question. I look really closely at Agile Methodologies, and Raphael, I agree that there is a lot to be learned from them in terms of the best ways of organizing knowledge work well beyond just software development. Now, I don't know that we want to graft software-style Agile Methodologies without change. to all other types of office work. In my experience, I think these methodologies can get pretty fiddly.

People can get pretty obsessed about very minor rules. You can get rigid. You can lose flexibility. Now, I don't know if this is a software developer thing. I mean, I think us engineering types tend to like to get obsessive about systems or if it's just a general cultural reality of agile that people get really caught up in the weeds of the details, but I think there are some big ideas from Agile methodologies that are themselves going to be well suited to many more types of work.

So the key thing I really like about these methodologies is that there is both transparency, transparency about both who is working on what and how new work is assigned. In most knowledge work settings, work assignment is obfuscated and informal. someone throws an email your way, someone asks you to do something in a Zoom call. What you're working on is something that just exists mixed between what's in your head

and what's in your inbox and what's on your calendar and whatever you've scattered over whatever productivity systems you use. But even you and most KnowledgeWorks settings probably don't have a great sense of how much is on your plate and certainly the people throwing stuff your way

don't either. In agile project management scenarios, that is not the case. There is a task board that everyone in the team can see, here is what's being worked on, here is its status, here is who is working on it.

I know exactly what is on Raphael's plate. I know exactly what Raphael is working on. Because there is a shared workboard in agile settings, there is transparency then to how new work is assigned. This happens typically during a daily, brief, but real-time meeting

where everyone on the team gets together, they review what they're working on, they review what they need from other people. This is when the status of work can change. This is when new things can get assigned to your plate. This forces you to confront. Here's what you already have on your plate before you give me something else.

There's no obfuscation. There's no informality. We're all looking at the exact same deployment of tasks, which you can flip around, by the way, and say, equivalently, we are looking at the exact same current plan for deploying and allocating intellectual resources, and we have to agree as a group, what's the best way to update that plan. I think that is far superior than just rock and rolling on email and just throwing things people's

ways and plain obligation hot potato where something drops on your plate, but you feel overworked, so you bounce it to someone else with a question mark just to try to get it off your plate temporarily, and they try to bounce it back to you. Incredibly inefficient, incredibly naive way to actually allocate cognitive resources. So this agile notion of that here is a transparent place where we see who's working on what, we make the decisions together about how to update those assignments, we do it transparently, we do it in a systematic way. I think that is much better. The other thing I like about Agile Methodology, and this comes from Conbon, more than anything

else, is this notion of a work and progress limit. There's this mentality of you should not be working on a lot of things at the same time. Here's what you're working on right now. Do this as well as you can. When you're done, we're going to pull in a new task for you to work on. Again, very different from our push mentality and most knowledge work where we just use email and slack and informal conversation on Zoom and just throw things at people. Boom, boom, boom.

We push stuff off our plate on the other people's plate so that we don't have to worry about it. A push approach to task assignment is almost always suboptimal. It leads to overload. It leads to stress and this leads to worse outcomes

and worse performance. Poll methodologies are much better. Hey, this is what I'm working on this morning. When I'm done, I'll pull something else in. I think that's really important. And then finally, and this is an adjunct to this work-in-progress limit mindset, is the notion of sprinting. Sprinting is really big and agile methodologies. And this is where you say this is what we're working on for the next day or the next three days.

Let's put our heads down and do it. When we're done, we can come up for air and figure out what should we work on next, what emails have come in, what else do we need to be doing? I really like this mentality when you're working you're working and then when you're done you can say what else do we have to deal with that I think should be more widely deployed as well all of that all of that I think is a smarter way

of making use of brains we have brains we need to get value out of brains there's a lot of good ideas hiding in agile methodologies so again this is a point I elaborate in my new book that's coming out in March but I'll make it here in its sort of simplest form

we need smarter approaches to making the most of brains. Agile methodologies have good ideas. I think we can imagine a future in which a lot of these ideas are deployed a lot more broadly while still sidestepping some of the most sort of fiddly cultish aspects of agile methodologies as they're currently deployed. I mean, I think there's a way to put these ideas into action without having the debate for 20 minutes about the scrum master's role. in the sprint review, etc. So Raphael, that is a good question. You are on the right track.

What Agile is doing is, in general, I think the right direction for knowledge work. Look at what software developers are doing today. If you want to have a good sense about what the rest of us working in offices are going to be doing tomorrow. All right, let's hear some questions about the deep life. Natalie asks,

how can a homemaking mom make can maintain meaningful real-life friendships. Well, first, Natalie, that's a good question to ask because having meaningful real-life friendships is absolutely critical to human thriving. That is a point I go into in-depth in my book, Digital Minimalism. And if you are at home with your kid or kids, you do lose the ready-made professional friendship route, and so extra effort, as you point out, may be required. Well, just a couple thoughts on this.

I think the key thing about maintaining real-world friendships is that it requires a lot of effort. And I talk about this in digital minimalism when I say that our brain is wired to value social connections on which we are making non-trivial sacrifices of time and attention. If you're making a non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of someone else, your brain treats that as a more serious social connection than if you're just, let's say, sending an emoji on a text message or leaving a quick comment on a social media post. So if you want a friendship to be something that is rewarding and meaningful, you have to think about it as something that is going to require energy invested regularly, almost like a fitness routine. And if I'm going to be on shape, I have to every day do exercise. I've got to keep on the food I buy. I have to keep on the food I eat and prepare.

Well, same thing for friendships. If you want healthy friendship habits, you have to put in daily energy. So that means you need to try to talk to people every day. Call people, send people text messages, send people email, whatever it is. But just this sort of daily, you know, I'm talking. It might not be the same person every day, but you should be talking to people every day one way or the other. constant communication contact is building that foundation and then you need to actually invest effort to do things with people, organize things.

Let's go a playground with our kids for a play date. Why don't you come over, we're going to build a fire and we can hang out and chat. Let's go for a walk together. Let's go for a hike together. These options get a little bit more limited during the pandemic, but there's still a lot of options. things outside, masks, etc.

But you have to constantly be trying to set things up. So to simplify those two pieces of advice, be communicating with friends every single day, organize at least one or two things a week where you actually are with friends in person doing something. If you invest that energy, I mean, you'll learn over time. I don't really like spending time with this person. I really like spending time with this person. It'll kind of filter through your friends.

But if you invest that energy, you can have these really strong social connections. And so make that investment, make that a priority. Where do you actually find people to be friends? Well, if you don't have a professional context to pull from, you have, of course, just preexisting friends. So like keeping up with people from college, keeping up with people from high school, you have people who are physically proximate.

So you have neighbors, people you see in your neighborhood. That's a good source. If you're a new parent, you have things like new moms groups is a great place to meet some people. If your kid's a little bit older, you know, preschools or parents at your kid's schools or at your church or synagogue, all these are great places to encounter people.

And it's basically like you have this net and definitely don't actually use this metaphor out loud because you're going to scare off all your friends. But it's like you have this net and you're capturing potential friends. And they get thrown into your framework of like, now let me start adding this to the list. to people that I'm going to text and email and call on a regular basis. And then you start

trying to organize. Let me try an event with this person and get together with this person, start to see, is this working? It's just not working. And so you're constantly sucking people into this net, throwing them into your constant contact, upgrading from there to actual real-world activities, filtering out the people who you don't get along with, prioritizing the people you do. You invest this effort. You will end up relatively quickly, let's say, in like one year's time. with probably a really good core of friends that you spend a lot of time with and that your mind sees as being meaningful, meaningful social connections in your world. All right, we did a question from a young mom. Let's do a question now from a young dad. John asks, what if I feel like I'm not terribly good at anything? I'm a young father wanting to improve my career prospects.

Lately, I have been stuck doing office work and I don't feel like I have any real skills outside of basic clerical work. how do I apply your ideas about career capital towards finding a better job? Well, John, now that you have a kid, the time has come to stop coasting. It is now time for you to get your act together, to step up, to become a man, to become a father. I think you are feeling that push. That's why you ask this question. There's a very common transition for young men. It's a transition from just being out there in the world.

and coasting through things, and they sort of have a job that they don't really take that seriously, and they're playing video games, and just hanging out with their friends, then you have a kid, suddenly you start thinking, okay, I don't think that model's going to work anymore. It's time to grow up and to grow up fast.

And I think you're asking this question because you feel that. A lot of people in your situation feel that. It's kind of an exciting moment, John. So I think there's some cool things ahead for you. All right, so how do you do this? How do you get your act together? Well, first of all, in the professional world, you got to get organized. And I'm talking capture, configure, control, productivity.

Use that as the foundation of becoming dependable. Once you're dependable, become indispensable. I've talked about this a couple times. Even in just this podcast episode, you need to do that. You've got to be capturing everything. You've got to have everything on your plate organized. If it's clerical work, great. That's even easier to organize.

Have something like a Trello board. Use time blocking, something like my time block planner to control everything. every day. If your job is mainly clerical work, you're going to find that you're going to get 2x more productive if you actually use these type of considered organizational systems. That's going to free up extra time during your workday. Use that for two things. One, to become indispensable, so to find, as I mentioned before, work or project you can do for your team or for your boss, that's very valuable. Two, use the second half of that free time to start training yourself on new skills. Maybe you do this first thing in the morning or you do this towards the end of the day.

Figure out something valuable in your particular field and deliberately practice that skill. It is time for you to start moving up. That's how you are going to do it. When you're done with your workday, have a very clear shutdown routine so you can shift into father mode. You can shift into being at home mode. And you want to give that your full energy. So you need to be doing that as well as possible. That's going to be part of this moment you're going through of getting your act together, of going from being a boy to being a man and a father. So what you do at home is going to matter as well. This is probably a good time to go through something like the deep life transformation process I talk about here on the podcast quite a bit

where you identify the major areas in your life that are important to you. For each of those areas, you try to develop a keystone habit, something that you do every day that signals to yourself that you take that area of your life important. Here's a hint, John, one of those really big areas that are involved your kids. Once you have a keystone habit going in those big areas and you're tracking it every day,

if you use something like the Time Block Planner, there is a metric tracking space for every single day in that planner. You then take these areas one by one, give four to six weeks per area, and try to revamp that area, that part of your life. So start again, because you're a young father, start with the kids bucket.

Revamp how you engage with your kids, how you spend time with them, what you want to do with them, how you train them, how you, whatever it is, like however old they are, but how do you be the best father you can?

You should probably be reading books right now to help you on this. And then you do the same thing for the other buckets, one after another. Maybe there's one about your physical health and fitness. You try to overhaul how you eat, how you move, how you exercise,

get into some sort of exercise, something you can join, something that's exciting, whatever it is, but you overhaul that part, of your life. You have one for maybe your soul or your spirit or your philosophy or however you want to think about that where you're going to get a serious reading habit together. You're going to start building up knowledge and not just getting stuck with information. And if you don't know what that

means, listen to last Thursdays habit tune up mini episode where I sort of left the productivity sphere and did a whole sermon on knowledge versus information. But you go through your buckets one by one and try to transform that part of your life. And then you repeat. Then you go back and after a couple months, you revisit those buckets. What was working? What doesn't? How do I stay on the path? To use a jocco-will-in term here, how do I stay on the path in this part of my life? What do I want to change?

How do I tweak things, etc.? It's an ongoing process. So you should have those two things happening simultaneously, John. In work, you're getting your productivity game on, it's making you dependable. You're building on dependability to indispensableity, your training new skills, you're going to move up fast. Get your act together, you'll move up fast. And life outside of work, you're building and cultivating the deep life by getting keystone habits going in all of your main areas of your life that are important, and then one by one going through those areas and overhauling that part of your life, and then

repeat, you should do that once or twice a year. I think you feel that fire, and I think you are going to do well in this process. I think you are going to be surprised by, how fulfilling it feels to be intentional about your life. That instinct you're feeling now is not going to go away. That's something that I think all young men feel as they move towards adulthood as they move toward fatherhood. Do those two things in those two spheres of your life, John, and I think you are going to find that you get unstuck, and you will be surprised about what you're capable of.

Sergei writes, I'm a 30-year-old software developer, and the pace at which things are moving in this field is just shocking. I don't yet have kids, but I want to soon. But sometimes I wonder if having no kids and dedicating myself fully to my career would be a better choice. What are your thoughts on this?

Well, Sergei, have the kids. If you're someone who wants to have kids and it sounds like you are, then you should have the kids. You'll be fine. As I told Raphael earlier in the podcast, you are not the first person to have a demanding job and also have kids. Essentially, everybody with a demanding job also has kids. Not all, but most people do. Right. So you're

not going into uncharted territory. You'll be fine. The first six months are a little touch and go. But then you get your routine in place. You get the sleep training done. You will be fine. And your life will be much better because you have them. So if you have a, if you have this instinct that I want to have kids, that is one of the more primal instincts that you are going to encounter. I do not recommend trying to thwart it. You are not going to end up better off. But as I told Raphael earlier in this podcast, you probably are going to want a couple the arrival of your first kids with really stepping up your productivity game. That is how you are going to compensate for some of the new obstacles that are introduced. But by the sixth month mark, if you're careful about it, you'll be rock and rolling in your new routine and having a great time with the little one running around

your house. All right, let's get to a more important topic here. VIN asks, what is your unfiltered opinion of the Houston Astros 2017 World Series scandal? Well, then I think last year, me and my Washington Nationals dispensed a little justice there, we took care of that little issue with our World Series victory. Sam asks, what is your practice for receiving and digesting the news.

Well, Sam, this is a timely question given all of the disruption and concerning developments happening simultaneously in the world right now. My advice for this current moment is consume much, much less news. You are going to overload your circuits if you are regularly monitoring the news right now.

there are just too many things going on that are alarming and too many things that are alarming that are being reported in the most alarming ways. And I don't mean that as an indictment of the news media. They're reporting on these things in the way that they would or should be reporting on them because they are serious issues. It's just that there is a lot of issues that fall under this category and it is too much for our brains to handle the scale

and the scope of these issues is something that you cannot marinate in. So I talked about on this podcast for a little while, after the election, I was looking at online news more frequently. I just wanted to know what was going on. And I hated it. My brain could not take it. It made me distracted. It made me miserable. And I had to put a stop to that real quick. So what should you do? Well, I would say you should have a news consumption ritual in the morning. And it should not take longer than 15 to 20 minutes. So you know what's going on in the world so that you're informed. but that you're not dwelling and that you're not obsessing and that you're not marinating in the gloom.

This ritual should not involve cable news channels. This ritual should not involve social media. If you can avoid the internet altogether, that's probably great, but most people don't have that option. If you live in a major city like I do, you can just have a newspaper delivered to your door. That's what I do. I have the Washington Post delivered.

I look at the front page. I look at the front page of the metro section. I like to know what's going on in the world of sports. I do this for about 15, 20 minutes. That's what I need to know. I'm done. And I recommend something similar. If you can't get a paper delivered,

have a website for a newspaper that you subscribe to digitally and glance over their top headlines. You could listen to a daily news roundup podcast if you want. That can get you there quickly as well. But my point being, you want curated quality information, so not being selected by algorithms,

not coming over social media, not furiously fighting for eyeballs on cable news. You want to know the big things going on, and then you want to be done. Most of the alarming things happening in the world right now are things that you have no control over, and there's nothing you can do about. Spend three hours reading about it every day

is an exercise in futility. and so that's what I've been recommending and I think the key thing about this I really want to emphasize is that after you're done with that morning news consumption you don't do other news consumption and you for sure, for sure, for sure do not look at social media for news

in fact this is probably not a bad period in which to take a break completely from social media. This is not a time you do not want Facebook's algorithms you do not want Twitter's algorithms you do not want Instagram's algorithms selecting things for you to see right now You're going to short circuit your brain, it's going to make you miserable.

It's not going to make your life better. It's not going to make your family's life better. It's not going to make your community's life better. An idea that I have been pushing more informally is that people should perhaps consider the next two months or so. So like December and January, as a period to really turn their attention aggressively inward towards themselves and their family

and their local community. This is a period to invest as much energy as possible into making yourself better, into making your family's life better, into making your community's life better. These are the things you can control. There's going to be a lot of bad news

for the next month or two. We have to get through the winter wave of the pandemic. We have to get through all the political turmoil that's going to happen between now and January. There's nothing you can probably do about it. I mean, unless you're a researcher at a viral laboratory, unless you are, you know, a state election official.

There's nothing you can directly do about these things. So take that energy and put it somewhere productive for yourself. I'd like to use the term the deep reset when I think about these types of improvements. I think now is the time for a deep reset. Come out of this period of intense uncertainty and turmoil better than when you win in it. That is 100% better than saying, I'm going to spend the next two months doom scrolling. I'm going to spend the next two months

desperately hoping to see a good news article to give me chemicals to fight off the other chemicals caused by bad news articles. That is passive. That is a direction or an activity that doesn't fit well with our brain and its wiring. It's not an activity that's going to be sustainable. It's not an approach that is going to make anything better

in your immediate circle. So let's do a deep reset. The end of November, December, December, and January. Get our house in order. let's get ourselves in order, let's improve things with our family lives, let's improve things with our community. We'll let the world events are going to do what the world events are doing. We'll keep up with it.

We'll be informed, but we're not going to marinate. We are not going to dwell. And if things get rougher, bring up the intensity. If restrictions build to a shelter-in-place command for a while where you live, great. Bring up the intensity even more. my prison workout routine just got more intense. The project I'm doing with my kids just went into overtime. The relief effort I'm organizing in my local town is now taking up a lot of my time.

The news gets grimmer. We get more positively focused. That is what I'm starting to recommend for people. And then when we come out of this, the election turmoil is over, the winter pandemic, wave is over. The vaccines are being more widely distributed. The monoclonal antibody treatments are available in all the states. When we come out of it into the positive other side, which is coming, is coming, is coming. When we come out of it on the other side, you're coming out of it with your head held high and your life has been made better. And that is an infinitely better way to do it than to just

fall deeper and deeper into gloom. To get pushed down increasingly by frenetically aggressive and grim reporting to the point where you're just crawling out into the other side, crawling out towards the light at the other end of the time. You don't want to be crawling out. You want to be walking out with your head held high. So that's what I'm recommending.

Read very little news, do it in the morning, be done with it, put all of your energy as intensely as possible to yourself, your family, and your community. When things get rougher, make that energy more intense. And then when we come out of this on the other side, we'll all go on vacation and we'll all relax.

But now is the time for a deep reset. I'll talk about this more. in the weeks ahead, but I think that is absolutely the right mentality for making it through this last final bit of darkness before the light that's on the other side. Well, that's probably as good a place as any to wrap things up for today. Thank you to all the readers who submitted their questions. Also, thank you to today's sponsors of the podcast.

Remember to sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. If you want a chance to submit your own questions, go to timeblock planner.com. If you want to find out more about this time blocking nonsense we keep talking about here on the podcast, we will be back on Thursday as always with our next habit tune up mini episode. Until then, as always, stay deep.