Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 46: Habit Tune-Up: Mastering Teaching, Containing Emotional Emails, and Working Deeply with a Newborn

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

In this mini-episode, I answer audio questions from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: Opening: When did productivity become personal? (My new article for The New Yorker.)* Becoming so good they can't ignore you as a teacher [19:07]* Finding focused after receiving emotional emails [30:18]* Scheduling deep work amidst unpredictable childcare [43:19]* Fitting a large amount of leisure into a small amount of free time [52:19]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'd really like to establish a time-blocking routine in my weekly and daily planning, but my seven weeks old son makes that pretty hard. We can't tell when and for how long he's going to sleep, and he rarely sleeps for more than an hour. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep question's habit tune-up mini-episode. The format of these episodes is straightforward. I take voice questions from my listeners about the particular topic of tuning up their productivity habits in this moment in which our professional lives are increasingly disrupted. Speaking of productivity, I should mention earlier this week, my latest piece for The New Yorker was

published. It was about productivity. In fact, I believe it is probably the first time in the history of the New Yorker that the phrase productivity prong was actually printed. Now, if you know what that phrase means, you are part of the tribe. You are part of the productivity geek tribe and you're probably pretty happy about that. And if you don't know that phrase, then that is probably a good thing. The idea behind the article is that it was looking at a fundamental question that I had not seen asked before, which is why in office work, and in particular knowledge work where you're really applying creativity and skill to work together in teams and add information to knowledge, Why is it that productivity is left almost exclusively up to the individual?

If you get a job at an ad agency or a consulting firm or in the administration of a school or the front office of a large industrial company, whatever it is, like standard non-entry-level office style work, there may be processes in place for certain things. Like this is how we requisition new computers. Here is how you submit your hours in the timesheet so that we can bill the government. This is how you renew your parking pass. You know, there's procedures for certain things. But when it comes to how you actually have work assigned, how you organize your work, how you schedule your day, how you actually get things done, that is just left up to the individual worker.

You know, we say, look, here is our objectives, let's make those clear, here's our company culture, let's make that clear, here is our mission statement, go rock and roll. If you need to connect with someone else, here's an email address, here's a Slack channel, figure it out, you know, schedule meetings, jump on calls, whatever you need to do. Productivity is personal. It's none of our business as an organization, how things actually get done. Now, that's always struck me as a little bit odd because I know from my own work with productivity that how you organize yourself, how you organize your work, how you decide what is on your plate and how much you should work on. and how you should plan out how these things get accomplished. And this makes a huge difference. A huge difference in both how much you get done,

but also how sustainable that work is, how satisfied you feel by your efforts. So it always seems surprising to me that organizations put very little thought into that. I say, well, yeah, I kind of figure the individuals will figure it out. It seems like to me that there is a massive amount of not just output and value being left on the table, here, but you're also needlessly probably burning out so many employees who end up just mired

and back and forth emails and endless Zoom calls and Slack chats and the types of things we see arise when we just leave how work gets done entirely up to the individual. So for this article, I went into why that is. I researched this question and I'll point you towards the article for most of the details, but just to give you a hint, I found the answer was a little bit more arbitrary. In fact, I just say a lot more arbitrary than a lot of people suspect. We're given a lot of autonomy in how we organize our work because, in large part of an individual. The late great management theorist Peter Drucker, who helped midwife the entire concept of knowledge work, he actually coined the term knowledge work in the 1950s. And he was consistent, starting in the 50s

up to his death in the late 1990s was this idea that the knowledge worker, unlike the industrial worker, must be left alone. Autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. He introduced the whole idea of management by objectives, make it clear what needs to get done and then get out of the way.

The knowledge worker has to figure out for him or herself how that actually gets accomplished. So just two quick points here. one, I don't think this works. In the article, I say that we end up in a tragedy of the commons type situation. When we leave productivity up to the individuals, everyone is trying to optimize their own situation. And for each individual, where you don't have much sway over how things happen in your entire team or how things happen in your entire organization, you don't have the ability, for example, to put in place a process that other people now have to follow.

we end up with a least common denominator approach to work, where everyone is just trying to bother everyone else whenever they need them. Shoot off an email, shoot off a Slack message, shoot off one of those Godforsaken Zoom meeting invites, on the fly, ad hoc, as you need things. No one individual can get us away from that hyperactive overload because if you as an individual try to back away from that,

no one else is doing that at the same time. So now you're just someone who is getting in the way, you're obstinate, you're an obstacle that's slowing down other people's work. It's also in your personal advantage to bother other people as much as possible because it helps you in the moment to get quick responses to things. It helps you in the moment. You can just get that guy onto a Zoom call with you so that you can get the information you need. So we end up at this tragedy of the common style, inefficient Nash equilibrium, in which everyone is trying to optimize the best they can for their own situation,

and we end up with this hyperactive overloaded mess. So I don't think it works. I don't think it works. I just tell everyone, figure it out on your own. We're too connected and optimizing and organizing and organizing how large groups of people actually work together

is going to require some influence and control at a higher level. Now, here's the problem. This is something I've been hearing from some of my readers I've been talking to via my blog comments. Some of them are worried that if we don't stick with this Drucker vision of full autonomy,

we are going to end up on the other extreme, which is micromanagement. The whole thing Drucker was worried about was the idea that we were going to try to run an office like we run an assembly line, that we're going to try to go to an ad copywriter and say we're going to break down what you do. This is like a Don Draper madman style person, this is the 1950s. when who's doing this works. That's what comes to mind when I think of 1950s office work. You go to Don Draper and say,

we have a seven-part flow chart. You've got to follow this exactly, and on the other end, you are going to end up with a really good ad campaign for Kodak. We knew that was not going to happen. The work is creative, as Drucker talked about it

in some of his early writing on these issues. Often the people doing the work, the Don Draper's in these scenarios, probably know a lot more about their field than the managers who oversee them. So how can we possibly tell them how to work? And I think Drucker is 100% right about that. I share my reader's concerns about micromanagement.

That would be terrible. That would not work. But my more nuanced argument here is there is a difference between everything being left up to the individual and Don Draper in an intellectual assembly line. There is a middle ground between it. And I think the contours, the contours of that middle ground is workflow. I'm not going to tell Don Draper how to come with an ad routine,

but maybe we should care about how many ad campaigns he has to work on at a time. Because if just anyone within the organization can just throw an ad campaign at him because he's the best and we all want to work with him, he's going to get overloaded. That's not going to work. Maybe we need to think about, okay, what about the resources he needs? when working on an ad campaign. Should he just have to email people or grab people on Slack or whatever the equivalent would be back in the 1950s in an ad hoc manner when he needs things? Should anyone else be able to just get him to jump on a Zoom call because it's convenient to what

they're working on? That type of thing we might want to control at a higher level and say no, we don't want Don working on more than two campaigns at a time. We have some processes in place that makes it very easy for him to get the resources he needs without a lot of distraction, generating contexts which inducing ad hoc communication and maybe we're more protective about how other divisions in this company can go out and request and get his time.

And then how he actually builds his hand campaigns, that's up to him. Now, that's a situation that's better for Don in this example. He has less on his plate. He can do what he's doing better. It's easier for him to get what he needs to do his job, and he has some protection of his cognitive resources from unchecked request or requisitions.

Now, is that possible in today's world? Well, yes, because we see it. Where do we see it? Software development. No one tells a software developer at a company like Basecamp. Here's how you should write your code. Here is a flow chart. Here is a flow chart of steps

in assembly line style discretization of your work that's going to get you from a spec to a really efficient algorithm. We don't do that. We don't know how to do that. This is the territory where Peter Drucker said, good luck. It's very creative.

There's a lifetime of experience there. It's subjective. You've got to let the brain do what the brain is going to do. On the other hand, that software developer at Basecamp is plugged into an agile project management methodology. There is a synchronization meeting every morning where him and his entire team

looks at a transparent task board where they can see everything that needs to be done, everything that was done, everything that is currently being worked on, who is working on it, what resources do they need to work on that today? Let's make sure they get those resources and then they can just focus on that one thing.

If you work in one of these agile teams, especially a smaller team, you probably also have protection of your cognitive resources from other parts of your company. Your project manager is a line of defense. Many of these companies deploy a sprint methodology where this is what you're working on for the next few days

that's all we want you to do. There's no expectations for email. No one's calling you into Zoom meetings. No one can just throw task on your plate. This is the most important thing for our company right now. Put all your skills there. The project manager will run interference. If the marketing department needs something from you,

they can talk to the project manager. You know, if the HR department has some memo, whatever. Sent to the project manager, they'll make sure you see it. So in software development, we do this. We structure the workflow surrounding work so that when people actually do creative hard work,

it's not micromanaged, they can actually do it with a lot more freedom, and they can do it a lot better. This, I think, is division, I think, more or less we need to head towards in modern knowledge work. Drucker was right that we cannot break knowledge work down to an assembly line, but he was wrong to think that the cognitive factory here

will just completely self-organize if we give people the proper objectives and motivation. There is an in-between. I think defining that in-between is where some of the most exciting work is going to happen in the next five to ten years of knowledge work. I get into this a lot in my new book coming out in March, which I'll talk about more in the new year.

But this article I published in The New Yorker earlier this week, ask that question, gives that general answer, and I'm hoping pique some interesting thinking among business leaders, among business thinkers, among those who run teams or part of teams about where we still have a lot of room to approve in this really important sector of our economy. Anyway, if you're a subscriber to the New Yorker, read the article,

it's called the rise and fall of getting things done. I know deep questions listeners will really enjoy it. All right, three pieces of housekeeping. Number one, thank you for everyone who sent in recommendations for artist or art for decorating that blank wall in my deep work HQ. I got a lot of great suggestions and think I'll have no problem finding something that is really going to work. A second piece of housekeeping. I hope everyone who now has their time block planner is enjoying it.

I've heard of some delays for the UK edition of the time block planner. I'm looking into that. It's possible that just their inventory didn't keep up with the unexpectedly large demand. I think deep questions listeners were excited to get their planners. And we probably ordered a few more planners than bookstores are used. to selling when these things are actually released. So I think that is good news. If you haven't bought a time block planner,

want to learn more, go to timeblockplanner.com. Similarly, if you have a planner but want to explain what the hell it is to someone else, you can send them that link, timeblockplanner.com. I set up that website to explain clearly and concisely what time blocking is and what my planner actually does. All right, the final piece of housekeeping

before we get into today's questions is, as always, I want to take a moment to thank some of this week's sponsors who make the Deep Work Questions podcast possible. Let me start by mentioning Magic Spoon. I think this upcoming December is a time where a lot of people worldwide and certainly people here in the United States are looking for a little bit of escape.

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they'll refund your money, no questions asked. That's magic spoon.com slash cal and use the code Cal for free shipping. I also want to take a moment to talk about Blinkist. Now is a time, in addition to being a time for childlike escape, it is also a time to prioritize deep knowledge over shallow information. I think we have all seen the limits and the issues with just exposing yourselves to hot takes or 240 characters of something that you hope is true, and we are beginning to realize the real value in having real knowledge.

Books will give you that knowledge, but it is hard to read a ton of books. Blinkist can make that easier. You've heard me talk about Blinkist a lot. You know the big picture story here. You can run it on your phone, your tablet, your web browser, and get access to 15-minute summary

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You can do this in one sitting on a weekend afternoon. This will give you the lay of the land of that topic, the key ideas, the key people, the key resources. Once you have the lay of the land, you can pick the one or two books that are going to be most effective for you to buy and read completely. It's like a cheat code to actually having real wisdom and wisdom. I think is something we all could use a little more of right now.

So with Blinkist, you're going to get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books. And 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 also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at Blinkist.com slash deep. All right, that is enough housekeeping. Let's get started with today's show. Our first question is about becoming so good you can't be ignored in the classroom.

Hi, Cal, my name is Claudia. Like everybody else, I'm a big fan of your work and I love your podcast. One thing that I've been thinking about lately is how I can apply the IT. is in so good they can't ignore you to my specific job as a classroom teacher. I'm mostly thinking about where you say that you should develop a skill set that is extremely valuable that others might not have to be so good that they can't ignore you. For me, I am a high school teacher, but I teach history in a specialized academy for newcomer immigrants. So I am licensed as an ESL teacher and a history teacher. I am bilingual. I consistently

receive good evaluations from my administrator and I work really well with my colleagues, especially in a field like education where the only kind of progression for a teacher is typically out of the classroom into an administrative role. After three years, I'm feeling a little bit stuck in my career about what skills I could develop next. Thank you. Well, Claudia, first, I might dispute your assertion that like everyone else, you appreciate my podcast and books. I'm just saying based off of some of the angrier emails I receive on a daily basis, not everyone shares your appreciation, which is all to say I appreciate you. Now, this idea of becoming so good they can't ignore you in the classroom is not a new one

for me. I have talked with and worked with various teachers at various levels of education about this topic. And I've learned a little bit about what works and why. And so I have a specific answer to give you and I have a general answer to give you. So the specific answer says, okay, what are some of the actual things that I have seen before teachers at your level focus on when trying to improve, when trying to acquire what? I call in my book so good they can't ignore you, career capital. Pedagogical techniques is one of the obvious answers. And by techniques, this might be philosophies, this might be learning systems, this might actually have to do with technology. But there is obviously a lot of innovation going

on in the education space about how do you teach to this particular community to kids? How do you teach this particular topic? How do you work with this particular issue that arises in these situations. I mean, I'm being a course 100% vague there because I'm not really in that world, but what I know from people who are is the professional development opportunities there are large. Now, if you really want to build up career capital along that path rapidly within education, the key is to move beyond what I call sign-up sheet PD. So, yeah, there's just things you can sign up for. There's opportunities that come along to get professional development. Here's a conference you can go to. Here's a talk you can do. And you just have to sign up and you do it.

And then you've learned something. And that's probably not aggressive enough if you really want to distinguish yourself and really build up career capital. So the teachers I know who have really had a lot of success on that avenue are really out there in a more self-driven type of way, mastering pretty difficult things. Mastering difficult new technologies, mastering pedagogical approaches to require that, you know, it's not just going to a course, you read about it, you read articles about it, they'll keep up with the literature. So really going above and beyond, just occasionally signing up for PD opportunities to come your way to find some niche that you can really master, that is going to be really useful for your school and the student communities

you serve. The second general area that I have seen teachers looking for rapid career capital acquisition focus on is classroom skills. People who have a knack for teaching, and it sounds like because you get good ratings that you do, they're actually in a bit of a dangerous situation because you can easily hit a good enough plateau. Comfortable among the kids, I know what I'm doing, they generally like me, I get generally good marks for my classroom management for how I actually deal with and communicate with students. But then there's the teachers who see that like a skill that they want to push to an elite level. And that's another opportunity.

Another opportunity to get career capital is how do I become an elite communicator in the actual classroom? You know, and that's hard. But there's a lot of best practices you can learn. By far the best way to accelerate those skills is to have someone really skilled, observe, and give feedback. the more you can simulate a coaching style process where an expert can say, this was good, but over here you're struggling a little bit,

and here's where you could use a little bit of work, and then you have that deliberate practice, that pushback on this is exactly where I need to get better, let me push that particular aspect of my teaching. That is by far the fastest way to get better. So if you go that route, I want to be one of those people who gets nominated for the best teacher of the state-style awards,

you need coaching, you need to find a way to get that coaching, and you'd be surprised by how quickly you can get from a plateau pretty good towards a peak of attention-catching. So those are my specific answers. But let's talk more generally when trying to figure out where am I going to invest in career capital.

and this is true of any career, so I want to generalize here. You know, it's easy to come up with ideas. It's easy to hear people like me who have heard some ideas, just mention some things. But by far the best thing to do is to ground your decisions and evidence. Find real people, real models, whose trajectory through your career resonate with you and figure out what it was they did. What was the skills they built up?

Where did they get their leverage? What was the foundation on which they built that launch pad for that that you so much admire and confront the truth about what it was. It might not be the skill you want it to be. It might be something you're not that interested in. It might be something that's harder than you hoped to be true. But working backwards from evidence-based observations of this is a person in my field whose career resonates with me, and here's why they were able to do that. Is by far, generally speaking, the best way of identifying what career capital to go after, and I will just mention

this is something that's come up again and again, especially in this course called Top Performer that Scott Young and I occasionally run in which we actually work with people to do exactly this.

It's like one of the big lessons of that course is that figuring out the right career capital to develop, in other words, figuring out what skills to go after, what objective to chase

is actually often really subtle and really hard. Figuring out how to get good can be just as hard as actually getting good, which is all to say, treat that process with respect, which it sounds like you are, but just for the listeners more generally. You know, I have ideas, other people might have ideas,

but sometimes we're just pitching what feels right. Sometimes we're just pitching what we want to be true. So an evidence-based deconstruction of this actual person who really does resonate with me, this is how they actually did it, is by far going to be your most consistent path to replicating similarly, satisfying results.

Now the final piece I want to say here, because I got some hints towards this issue in your question, is this notion of why bother developing career capital? Why bother in particular if you were a teacher? There's this dichotomous nature of your question where on one hand you feel driven to want to do that. You know, this natural impulse, I want to be better. I want to build up more capital. And on the other hand, as you noted in your question, it's unclear to you why that the only room for advancement would be into administration and, you know, education administration is an acquired taste. Let's just say if you're a deep question listener who is not a big fan of lots of emails or lots of meetings, you probably will not be very happy in an education administration type of role.

So you're wondering, this is what I'm getting out of your question, I want to do this, but what? Why should I do this? And I'll just conclude by mentioning that there's three things to keep in mind when it comes to teachers in particular developing career capital. First, mastery just is intrinsically satisfying. Doing what you do better will make you feel better than doing that same thing mediocre, even if there is no other change to any sort of external recognition salary or opportunities. We like mastery. you can look at Ryan Decky's self-determination theory

if you want a more solid, quantified social psychology foundation for this idea that mastery is important, but we do like to do things well, we do like to get better at things, and there is value just in that. Two, it is better for your kids if you were better at what you do.

These kids need you, the better you are, the more you are there for them. That's important. And that could be a big drive. and why you continue to try to acquire career capital. And three, and this is more general than just teaching, it's really hard to predict in advance some of the opportunities that come up

for you to cash in hard-won career capital for really cool or interesting things in your career. And just because you cannot right now predict this is the opportunity that I really want to do, but I'm gonna have to have a lot of career capital. In other words, I'm gonna have to have a lot of leverage for my skills to earn this opportunity, just because you can't point to what that's going to be now in advance.

It doesn't mean you're not going to encounter a lot of those. If you are so good you can't be ignored, you will not be ignored. Good things come to people who are good at what they do. And so you should just also have general faith that a quest to become excellent at what you do will bring with it in the long run many excellent opportunities, even if you can't plot out that path piece by piece right now.

Now, Claudia, I hope you found that useful. Stay on the path. Look for that career capital. It is worth it. Let's do a question now about a particularly distracting category of email. Hi, Cal. My name is Catherine. Thank you for your work.

I've really enjoyed your books. I'm really enjoying the podcast. I'm a fellow academic, and I've maybe made the miss. of agreeing to be the director of a program. I really love my deep work, and I have carved out two hours each morning to keep up with my research and my writing while I'm also directing a new unit. But the problem that I'm finding that's getting in the way with being able to also do deep work on behalf of my program is that I get a lot of emails that have emotionally hot content.

So I get the emails from students who are complaining about professors, from professors who are upset about things the universities are doing, from people who are angry with me about their schedules. And I have a hard time dealing with the emotional nature of the content. And so it's hard to treat this like a task that can be quickly dealt with or delegated or otherwise capture, configure, controlled. And so I wonder if you have any advice for dealing with emotional residue from shallow work. Thank you so much and thank you for the podcast. Well, having just finished a stint myself running as a director of a program at my university, I empathize and feel like I have some recent experience to draw from when thinking about your question and thinking about some reasonable answers.

Now, where I'm going to turn here is probably process. In this style of knowledge work, everything is run by a process. The question is just, have we thought about what it is or not? Have we given it a name? Have we thought about whether or not it's the best process? In this case, there's an implicit process going on that says all types of issues or questions or problems or complaints should unfold as an ad hoc ongoing asynchronous

conversation using email. Now, it's a reasonable process to have in place because it's simple. It's what other professors and students are used to, so it's sort of an easy way. There's not much they have to do. It's what they're used to doing anyways. Very little prep work has to be done. You have your inbox. You just check things.

You just get back to people. So you have that process in place, and it's not a crazy process to have. The issue is it's not working. There's a diversity of different things that are coming. in through this channel, and they make different demands on your time, and they make different demands on your emotion. And so this current process of just, I will deal with those on the fly in an ad hoc manner as they arrive, is not working. The cognitive cost are prohibitive. So what I think we need here is to explore other processes for still allowing you to get this information and work with people

towards resolution, but in a way that has less of a cognitive toll. I don't have an exact answer here, but what I'm going to push for is creativity, as well as potentially diversity of incoming communication channels. I would say if you're in a leadership role like this, you're going to have to potentially consider moving away from the one-size fits all email address that's your name at university.edu that everything comes to. I know that's easiest for people, but there's other options that are only slightly harder for them, but makes your life a lot better, and we probably have to start exploring those. One idea, just as a for example, would be to have sort of open door hours, office hours,

for the program, either two or three days a week, let's say three days a week to start, two hours a day, slots of 15 to 30 minutes in length, a interface like calendly or acuity or schedule once so that it's incredibly easy for someone to grab a slot, it goes right on your calendar. You have a standing Zoom open, assuming that your university is not in person right now and you could shift this to your actual office once it is

or if it's already in person, have a standing Zoom conference open with a waiting room. room, they just get the instructions like, great, you've signed up, here's the Zoom link, just show up and I'll let you in. And that is a place for people to ask you questions. That is a place for people to complain. That is a place for people to pass along information they think is important. Now this has a lot of advantages to it. One, you now don't have your cognitive state being hijacked unpredictably and all the other times. You're consolidating your sort of interpersonal, occasionally emotionally charged interactions to set times, and then you can recover

from those times. And maybe that should be the last two hours of the day, so then you can kind of end your day after that's done and allow some of those chemicals to clear out. That's much better than taking those same conversations, but spreading them out over every day in asynchronous back-and-forth conversations. Two, for the emotional content, that hotness you're talking about is greatly reduced when you're actually interacting with someone in real time analog. Right? So when I'm talking to you, it is a different experience than if you send me an email. When people send emails, first of all, they strip all of the normal contextual cues you have

when interacting with a real human being. The cues that our social networks have evolved to recognize. And we can kind of go off the rails. We go off the rails because our deeply evolved social instincts don't know how to deal with purely linguistic text very well. Two, we misread effective tone in emails. There's good research on this. I went through a lot of this research for the new book I have coming out in March.

The writer of an email often vastly overestimates the degree to which they predict that the recipient is going to actually understand the implied tone. in some sense the way to understand this is that you feel that tone. Like when you're reading the email to yourself as you're writing the email, you're essentially simulating your mind all the subtleties and your tone of voice and your body language. The subtleties is that if you are in person or looking at someone on Zoom that you would be conveying, you feel all of that. So you just assume that the recipient will too.

The linguistic nature of email strips that all away. They just see text. And where you are trying to be sarcastic, they think that you're really mad. or where you're just pointing something out tersely because you're in a hurry, they interpret it as you were very upset with them. We have a lot more coherence, empathetic coherence when we have actual interactive

back and forth analog conversation. So now not only are you consolidating potentially emotionally charged communication, you're actually reducing the charge of that communication. And three, just from a logistical standpoint, it's incredibly more efficient to just go back and forth in five minutes, then to take that conversation,

shatter it into five or six back and forth emails and have those spread out over two days. And that's where you really get the network switching shallow work cost of administrative roles is the spreading out, the spreading out of interaction. So if in a two-hour office hour period, I talk to five people for five to 15 minutes each,

we kind of figure out what's going on and make a plan, and I do that in two hours, I may have saved myself what would have been 100 back and forth emails over a week, meaning that I was never more than five or ten minutes away from servicing one of those emails, which is a disaster for your productivity as compared to just spending two consolidated hours. So that's just going to be a more general benefit. So that's one idea, the sort of open-door Zoom office hour policy. It's like slightly more annoying for people because they have to click a time to talk to you,

but it's like one-click. And also people find, by the way, shooting off emails, it's easy in the moment, but they do find it kind of annoying because now they have to keep track but in their head, am I going to hear back? And they just say like, oh, I have a meeting on my calendar. That actually feels a little bit more controlled for people. So people might not mind that extra work. So that's one thing I would recommend.

You also might try separating out different channels. So maybe, hey, if you need to discuss with me, if you have issues, if you have complaints, if you don't understand something complex, go to office hours. If you have like smaller logistical questions, well, maybe we don't need you all signing up to come talk to me on Zoom. but instead of just again having a free-for-all, here's my email address, just go for it. Let's put a little bit more structure around that.

Something we did during my final times as Director of Graduate Studies for my department is we built out pretty elaborate FAQs for our current students. And we build on it and expand that as needed as that allows us that allows us to better work with the students to take care of the really common issues right up front.

Oh, I see what I need to do. Let me just get going. Or I do have a question for you, but I can look up what's going on here so I can make the question much more specific. The students don't mind. It actually makes their life a lot easier. Again, people, it's easy to shoot off an email,

but it also has a cognitive price. You're like, I don't know if I'm going to get this information. I don't know if I'm going to hear back. More information, more structure. People don't typically mind us. You might have a really good FAQ page. You might have a dedicated email address for questions. One of the things we did in our program is, in addition to the director, which I was, we also had a program manager.

Now, we didn't have, we've done it two different ways. We've had a full-time employee do this. But we've also had one of our instructor faculty do it, not part-time, but in, not part-time, but in exchange for a course release. So instead of teaching X courses, you teach X minus two courses, and then you spend some hours helping with the program manager role.

And then we have a dedicated email. We put in a dedicated email address for that role. And now students are going towards the program manager first, and the program manager can sort of deflect people towards FAQs and other things that are useful. And as the director that has other things that you also have to do, not everything makes it to you directly.

You have that sort of line of indirection. like that's really useful to consider that's something you might want to push for. Also, we use ticketing systems internally. So as emails came in with questions, they would go into a ticketing system so that I could coordinate with, like my program manager

without us having to send emails back and forth. Like, oh, here's a ticket for this problem. Me and him could have an ongoing discussion attached to that ticket, so it's all in one place. The status is right there. So the status could be, you know, he has it, or the status could be it's on my place,

or the status could be we are waiting to hear back from someone else in the, you know, we had to ask someone else a question like someone at the graduate school and we're waiting to get an answer back. And you can see all the different open things and what their status is and all the information is consolidated.

I'm going on a long riff here. Not that any one of these solutions is the elixir because I don't know the details of your particular unit and the administrative constraints that you were working under. But the general idea that I'm trying to promulgate here

is one of creativity and optimization when thinking about processes. You are allowed to have more complex processes than simply my name at university.edu, free for all, rock and roll. That's a perfectly legitimate process because it's simple, but if it's not working for you, there are other options. People kind of mind, most people don't. Some people enjoy the extra structure, but also, hey, you are doing service here. You are sacrificing to do service for university.

It's good that you are. Professors do need to do this. I think it is an absolute fair trade that if you're going to do this service, you can have a little bit of say in terms of the processes that surround it so that you can do your best work for the unit in a way that is sustainable.

So anyways, I love talking shop on higher education communication processes. I think you're really going to like this new book I have coming out in March. I get really deep into it. But for now, my suggestion, you've got to move beyond your e-book. email inbox being the solution to everything. All right.

Speaking of emotional charge and work, let's grab a question here about how the unpredictable demands of children have a way of intruding into well-organized work days. Hi, Kel. My name is Felix. I am a police officer and wannabe blogger and podcaster from Germany. My problem is this. I'd really like to establish a time-blocking routine

in my weekly and daily planning, but my seven weeks old son makes that pretty hard. We can't tell when and for how long he's going to sleep, and he rarely sleeps for more than an hour. The only time of the day when I can get some deep work done is in the evening when everybody else is in bed, but I don't really see the point of time blocking that single session. So my question is, how did you manage deep work during these phases with your kids? And would you still recommend time blocking for these few occasions that I have left for deep work. Any tips are highly appreciated, as is all the work you do. Thanks so much and bye. Well, Felix, when I'm thinking about my own kids, psychologically speaking, I typically would divide the initial period after a kid was born, the sort of newborn period or what I would

use to think about is like the maternity leave period. It's that period of like three to four months when maybe, you know, my wife was on maternity leave. You know, things were not, things are not in a steady state. You were in an unusual situation because you had an acute demand, which is like a newborn baby who was at home. And then outside of that newborn maternity leave period is the part that I think of as the steady state. And the sort of the key aspect of steady state is where you have your child care routine, your sort of permanent child care routine worked out, you know, whatever it is. There's a preschool, there's a nanny, there's something going going on with your parents, there's someone who's staying at home, whatever it is, right?

And so there's a period of temporary disruption, the newborn maternity leave period, and then after that you go into a period of steady state where here is the long-term solution to how this child is going to be cared for and work is still going to happen. You have, I think you said, seven week old. Okay, so you're in that early period. It's a temporary period. It's not that you can't get any work done during that period. It's just that you want to give yourself a bit of a break during that period. I've done work during that period. I have, you know, I remember editing deep work with my second son sleeping on my shoulder. So you can do work during that period, but you got to give yourself a little bit of a break and know that it's temporary. And then once you get

to the steady state where, okay, here is our long-term child care plan. You know, this is how I, when I'm working as a police officer and I'm at work, you know, this is where the child is. child's not with me, and there's a nanny or preschool or parents or whatever, uh, that's going to be a more of a normal time. So what can you do during this temporary period beyond just sort of giving yourself a break? You just need to work with your partner to find a regular pre-agreed upon time when you're going to try to get some of these efforts done.

It's, you know, this time in the morning or midday or whatever it is, it's an hour, it's 90 minutes. However you agree to it, where it's just during that time, you are not expected to be doing any child care. You can count on when that time comes, and now you have a background rhythm of that work. The only thing I would tell you is it sort of sounds like the work you're doing now.

It's not the police officer work. Maybe you're on paternity leave or something like this. It sounds like the deep work that you're having a hard time scheduling is for sort of side hustle project as a blogger or podcaster, which is great. But you need to make sure that your partner gets equivalent, set-asides for whatever he or she needs, right? And it could just be to sleep or go for a walk or go to the gym or whatever it is.

That's the only thing I would say from a perspective of keeping a sustainable balance. You need clear times where you know you can work, but you need to return that favor. Do that, and you can get a reasonable rhythm of accomplishment during the newborn maternity leave period. once you get to your steady state and there is a consistent child care plan, now you have clear working hours and clear non-working hours and that's where it's going to become

very important to time block plan or something equivalent to try to squeeze as much as you can out of your working hours so that you can be as available as possible outside of those hours. Nothing focuses the productivity mind more than knowing that you don't really have the option

of just staying late at the office or at the precinct. So Felix, I hope that is useful. This is a, it's a trying period, but a really cool period in a kid's life, so enjoy it. Let's take a brief moment to think. Another one of the weekly sponsors that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible. I am talking about ExpressVPN. You know that I am not a big fan of big tech. You know that I am suspicious of big tech's attempts.

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that's mintmobile.com slash deep. Cut your unlimited wireless bill to $30 a month at mintmobile.com slash deep. It looks like we're running a little long here, maybe because of my soliloquy on personal productivity from the beginning of the show. I can't help myself. So maybe I'll just fit in one more question here and try to be concise. This final question I'm going to do has to do about finding enough time for the leisure activity that offsets your work.

Hi Carl, this is Isabel. I am a lawyer from Spain. Thank you very much for your books, especially digital minimalism, which is a book that has entirely changed my life. I would like to ask you about hobbies and free time outside work. I have a really time-consuming hobby that is studying.

I am currently studying a degree in English literature, and it might sound nerdy, but I really enjoy it even if it's demanding. I also managed to exercise every morning before work and I read for pleasure at least three or four books every month. But at the end of the day or the week or the month, I feel I would like to do many other things like painting, writing, etc. And I don't have time or make time for them.

So my question is, is it wise to give up on things you enjoy doing or should you try to incorporate them when your schedule is already tight? Isabel, the short answer is, no, you can't do all those things. Now, I will preface that by saying, I'm really happy that you are as focused as you seem to be on high-quality leisure. This is something I talk about a lot. taking your time outside of other obligations like work

and dedicating them to intentional, satisfying, meaningful leisure activities, as opposed to numbing or seeking chemical distraction. So just being on your phone and just being on Netflix and just letting the algorithmically optimized internet content machine just wash over you. To replace that with activities that require more work and have more friction but are ultimately more rewarding on a

human level is absolutely crucial to staying happy and staying resilient and staying sane and recharging from work and generally building a good, balanced, deep life. So bravo for that, but you have too many things you want to do. I'm hoping to convince you that that's okay. If we're going to get technical, let's just get technical about the strategy for dealing with the strategy for dealing with high-quality leisure and scheduling when you have a lot of ideas. if we'll get technical and we'll get philosophical. Technically speaking, what I, what I typically recommend is that you have your keystone activities. So these are the things where you're going to, you do regularly, you make regular time for maybe at a set time every day, and hopefully you are

tracking whether or not you do them. For example, using the metric tracking space in the time block planner. Then you have other things you might want to do. So these key Keystone activities, you can't have too many because there's only so much time you have, and you have to plan for the unusually hard day, not for the easy day. Can I still get these done, even on an unusually hard day? If the answer is yes and it's sustainable, if on the other hand you need the perfect schedule where nothing runs late and you don't have to go to a conference and everything has to go just right for you to get your keystone activities done, then you probably are too ambitious there.

So they should be flexible enough in your schedule that even on a hard day, you can still get them done. And your exercises in there, it sounds like, that's great. Your work for your degree, that's in there, and that's probably taking up the rest of that time. And I think that's good. This is a focused, deep pursuit you're doing that's meaningful to you. Great. You say you like to read. That might be a third.

If you like to read before bed, that could be a keystone activity where you're always going to have that time and a half hour of reading every night that you track. That could be in there as well. All right. Now, all these other things you want to do. is great, but how do you conceptualize them? You don't have enough room in your schedule to have regular time put aside for all of these other things you mentioned, like, for example, painting. There's just not enough time. Some days you might have enough time, but most days you won't. The right way I think to think about these additional activities is that when you have free time,

that is not already spoken for by one of your keystone leisure, activities, then the goal is to do something quality there. And it's good to have a large toolbox. So, you know, hey, I use that time for a while learning how to paint. Now that's in my toolbox. So one of the things in the future I can do when I have a Saturday off or I, you know, it's the evening and a plan fell through is I could paint. That's when the toolbox. And maybe you learn, you know, some cooking techniques at some point. Now that's in your toolbox. Maybe you, you, you, get into beer appreciation, like you read some books or did some online classes on beer appreciation, which is awesome, where you buy the beer and learn about tasting it. And that's in

your toolbox too. And then, you know, sort of in the future, you have this big toolbox so that when it comes time to just fill free time, you have all these different things you can draw from that you know how to do and they're interesting and they're fulfilling. That should be the goal. not to regularly push on all of these things, not to have 17 different hobbies that you want to develop, but instead over time to build up 17 different options so that when you do have free time, you're not going to scratch your head and say,

oh, I don't know what to do, I guess I'll pull out my phone. Now, philosophically speaking, I said I would move from technical to philosophical. Philosophically speaking, this is a really important thing. For a lot of people, as they try to declutter their digital lives, as they try to make their life less frenetic and more deep, this is a sticking point.

All right, what do I do now? Now, someone like you, Isabel, that really values deep leisure activities that has a lot of various deep leisure activities that you have been pursuing, that is an easy question probably for you to answer, but for a lot of people, it's hard. There is a startup cost for any of these tools being put into your toolbox. I can't just go do like North Indian cuisine cooking tonight when I have some free time. If I've never done it before, I've never bought the garam masala,

I don't have an instapot. Like I don't know what the various tools are. I don't have any background. And it's not an easy thing I can just go do, right? So it's not necessarily easy to fill your free time if you haven't spent a lot of time practicing how to fill your free time. And that's the bigger philosophical point.

So just to briefly summary, technical, let's go back to the technical answer, Isabella. I'm telling you is have a small number of keystone activities, and then the rest, you just have a toolbox that you pull from as you feel inspired to fill in your free time. You do not see the things in your toolbox as regular endeavors where you're trying to master a skill or make a certain amount of progress. It's just, oh, I got a lot of ways I fill my time when I have the really nice situation of actually having free time. Philosophically speaking, and this is for the broader audience, having good things to do with your free time, is crucial and it is harder than we realize. It's only become harder as our phones have

eliminated the need to have to figure that out. Because now we have this alternative. We have doom scrolling, we have binging, we have cyber-stalking, we have for some God-forsaken reason videos of people opening boxes,

which is very compelling, I hear. That frees us from the need to solve this problem. What should I do with my time, but it also takes the autonomy away from us from answering the question, what should I be doing with my time? So that's my philosophical point here. We should all take a bit of a page from Isabel's book and put in the work to get good enough at things, to learn things, to be exposed to enough things, that when it comes time in the future to fill some time,

we have a lot of options from which to draw. All right. That is all the time we have for this week's Habit Tuneup mini episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. You can submit your own voice question at speakhype.com slash Cal Newport. I'll be back next week with a Thanksgiving edition of the full-length deep questions podcast. And I may even have a special guest join me. Until then, as always, Stay deep.