Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 48: Habit Tune-Up: Deep Athletes, Idea Capture, and Distracting Rumination

Episode Date: November 26, 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:* Time blocking versus calendar planning [6:07]* Deep work for professional athletes [12:24]* Capturing non-urgent ideas [21:33] * Distracted by rumination [35:09]* Prioritizing interesting projects [43:17]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 tend to generate a lot more opportunities and ideas and projects than I can reasonably follow through. And I have a really hard time choosing between things because I'm interested in all of them and they're all relevant to the broader scope of my work. I'm Cal Newport and this is a deep questions, Abbott Tuneup mini episode. The format here is straightforward. I will answer voice questions from my listeners. about how to tune up their productivity habits in this moment of increasingly disrupted professional work. If you are listening to this podcast

on the day it comes out, which is Thursday, in the United States, then happy Thanksgiving. Now, I am taking this entire week off as a vacation. In Georgetown University, where I work, we skipped the standard days off during the fall and consolidated them all into this week. So this whole week is a vacation. And I am actually taking it as a vacation, at least to the extent that I'm able. I'm still recording this podcast.

I still wrote a blog post. I had an NSF final report to file. And there's a little bit of logistical wrangling. But by my normal standards, it is a vacation. I think the biggest mark of it not being a normal week is that I am not time blocking my days. I am treating each day like a weekend where I sketch out a rough plan of what needs to get done or anything that has particular times. I will sketch that out, but I don't time block the times in between, just like I would a Saturday or a Sunday. I do still use my metric tracking for each day, as I think that's important every day.

I still use my capture. So that's just a little view into what vacation looks like for a time blocker. The other thing in my productivity world that has made a big difference recently is I have continued to tighten my rules about news consumption. All of my news consumption right now is relegated to first thing in the morning, mainly centered on reading and honest-to-goodness physical paper newspaper that arrives at my door. I read many of the section A stories and at the very least glance at all of the other sections. And then that is it. That is it. No falling down news rabbit holes in moments of boredom or concern or where you need numbing or hoping to get a positive chemical.

And it has made, I've got to say, it has made a really big difference. If you are not doing this right now, try it. try it for at least a few days. See how much different you will feel psychologically, see how much more productive you'll be professionally, and feel how much calmer you're going to be physiologically. If you try this rule for just even a few days, look at a paper, be it online or physically in the morning

so you know what's going on in the world and expose yourself to stories that you might not necessarily seek out on your own or might not be pushed your way by a social media algorithm. them and then make that your news consumption. Do not surf online news during this experiment. Do not, do not, do not allow social media to be a source of news during this experiment. The difference is night and day. The difference is night and day. So I have really been enjoying that. I think you might find it useful during this period as well. Well, we have a good show today. I have five good habit tune up questions that I think you'll enjoy.

and because this is a holiday week, at least for my U.S. listeners, I want to keep this episode reasonably pithy. So let's just do one quick ad, and then we'll get started with the questions. I want to talk briefly here about hydrant, a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast. Hydrint is a drink-mix powder. You mixed a powder right into water to create a refreshing drink, has a little bit of real fruit juice for flavor, but what it's known for is what is also in that mix, which is four key electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and zinc. You drink a hydrant drink when you want to not only hydrate yourself, get it, hydrant hydrate, but also you want to replenish those electrolytes, making sure your body has what it needs to

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winter days. So we've got a special deal for our listeners to save 25% off your first order. Go to drinkhydrant.com slash deep and enter our promo code deep at checkout. That's D-R-I-N-K-H-Y-D-R-A-N-T dot com slash deep and enter promo code deep for 25% off your first order. Drinkhydrant.com slash deep and enter promo code deep to save 25%. Our first question is about the relationship between time blocking and your calendar. Hi, Cal. My name's Annie, and I'm a project manager, and I currently time block my day each morning, but I'm finding that I also have to update my outlook calendar to reflect my commitments.

and I'm just wondering if you have any recommendations for keeping your electronic schedule updated as well as your time block schedule. Thank you. Annie, this is a good question. For a lot of people in a lot of different knowledge work jobs, their digital calendar plays a very important role. I think it's fair to say that for a lot of these type of knowledge work jobs, 30 to 6.000, 60% of your time on a standard workday is actually dedicated to meetings, appointments, or calls that are scheduled on your digital calendar. These calendars are updated frequently, as you point out, as people email you about setting up meetings, as invites arrive digitally. Those

calendars are a real locust of frenetic activity in modern knowledge life. So what is the relationship between these type of digital calendars and your time blocking discipline? let's say, for example, that you're using my paper-based time block planner. Go to timeblock planner.com to learn more. And you also, as in your situation, have a very busy outlook calendar. What's the relation? Well, here's what I recommend. First, your digital calendar is where all of your appointments are stored.

It should remain the core of your pre-scheduled obligations. So when it comes time to do time block planning for a given day, what you're going to actually do is copy meetings, appointments, calls, any of these prescheduled obligations off of your digital calendar and into your paper time block plan for the day. Then you time block to space that is left. So in the introduction to my time block planner and in the video I recorded, the instructional video at timeblockplanner.com,

I say that should be the one to order. copy all your appointments, then time block the time that remains in between. Now what happens if your needed appointments change during the day? You treat that like any other schedule repair event. When you next get a chance, you build a new time block plan for the time that remains, that reflects the new schedule of appointments or meetings or calls in your afternoon. If you're using the time block planner, you would just move over to the next column on the time grid.

Now, the question, of course, is why use a paper planner at all when you already have Outlook? If it already has all the appointments in it, why not then schedule your other time blocks right there on the calendar? Some people do that. And I think it's a valid approach, especially if you're in an organization that uses something like Outlooks or G-sweets features to actually show your team when you're available or when you're not. So some people use these productivity suites in such a way that your unscheduled time on your calendar shows up as available so people know when to try to schedule you.

Some organizations even allow people to automatically schedule a meeting for you if the time is unspoken for. And in those circumstances, to put your time blocks in your calendar like they meetings or appointments protects the time, so there's a real advantage there. Other people just like the simplicity of seeing it all in the same place. I know G Suite users will set up a separate calendar using Google Calendar, but they'll have a separate calendar for their personal time blocks, which they can make a different color than the calendar in which they have their prescheduled obligation so that they can really see quickly, these are meetings and appointments and calls, and over here are time blocks that I myself is scheduled. So I think that's kind of

completely valid. I prefer to copy everything onto a paper planner because I do not want to be tied to productivity software throughout my day. I want to return to my computer. I want to access things like my email program or my calendar at times when I think it is optimal to do so. I don't want to be forced back into that digital task context when I don't need to. Because first of all, it just changes your mindset into an administrative mindset. It can reduce focus. But also, once you're in something like the G Suite or Microsoft Outlook productivity universe,

you're going to get hit by notifications. You're going to see emails. You're going to see other things coming up. I think there's a time for reaction and a time for action. So having a schedule with me in paper means I am free for my computer when I need to be free for my computer. Or if I'm using my computer, let's say, the right,

I can just have the word processor program open and not have to see a calendar. and not have to see an inbox. Also, I do a fair amount of work away from infrastructure. I do it on foot. I do it while walking. I do it at cafes.

I do it on hikes, especially when I have deep work to be done. So I like having something that is portable that does not require a digital interface. So, Annie, it's up to you. You can build your time block plans directly in your calendar. You can copy from your calendar

into a paper-based planner either will work. They both have their pros and cons. The key thing that they both share, however, is intentionality about how you're going to spend your time. The key thing they both share is a movement away from a reactive list-based method where you let your inbox just drive what happens and occasionally try to make progress randomly on a to-do list

and gets you instead taking control of your time and attention and making the most of what you actually have available. All right, this next question I have here comes from the world of professional athletics. Hey, Cal, my name's Connor. I'm from Australia, and I'm lucky enough to be a professional athlete in Australia. I play Australian rules football. It's quite different to American rules football, but it's the same sort of team sport, essentially. I've just got a question about deep work. So in the industry that I'm in, there's about 45, 46 players on the playing list. There's a group of about 10 coaches plus the medical staff, physios, doctors, strength staff,

etc. So day to day, there's a lot of different people, a lot of teamwork, collaboration, all those sorts of different things. Just in terms of deep work, I'm not sure whether or not you've encountered deep work or how to look at it in terms of professional athletes from a team perspective. I'm just wondering if you have and how that have been able to apply deep work to their jobs within the professional sporting field of a team sport. Thanks, man. Connor, one of the things that has surprised me about the reception to my recent books, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, is the degree to which they seem to resonate within professional. athletic. So you are not the first professional athlete to bring this up.

Perhaps most famously, at the Masters Golf Tournament, maybe this was last year, or maybe the year before, Phil Mickelson, at the time the number one ranked player in the world, he talked about digital minimalism during his press conference and at many interviews since that press conference. and he talked about his impact on his game. There's been a lot of interest in these ideas from the NBA. Multiple professional NBA players have mentioned these books, but I've also had conversations with two different NBA teams, including conversations with the general managers, one of these teams. There's a lot of interest in the NBA about ideas like deep work

and ideas like digital minimalism when it comes to their sport. I've talked with rugby, coaches, as well, had some fleeting back and forth conversation with Major League Baseball back office officials. So the point being is there is a lot of interest in these ideas in the world of professional sports. To briefly summarize my opinion on how these intersections are best realized, I think there is two separate categories of impact here. There is the impact on athletes and impact on, let's say, the back office, all of the staffing and administration that goes into actually acquiring, running, and deploying the best possible professional sports team.

Now, when it comes to the athletes, when you're at the professional level in any sport, in any sport, at a professional level, it is an incredibly cognitively demanding task. It requires really intense concentration. Shifts in concentration, reductions in concentration, small epsolons in your ability to concentrate versus your opponents can make a really big difference because from a physical standpoint, everyone is a specimen. Everyone is at the absolute top of their game,

and so the headspace is where a lot of difference is made. This is why, for example, Mikkelson was so big on something like digital minimalism because he knew being on his, his phone in between rounds and seeing people commenting on Twitter. You know, that could be the difference between a bogey and a birdie on the ninth hole on Sunday at Augusta, which might be the difference between winning the tournament or not. That type of thing matters.

Same thing for the NBA players. It's incredibly, cardively demanding to try to stay locked in when you're on the court. Now, I think NBA players in particular worry about the impact of these constant distractions because more so than a lot of sports, they're very young. They're very young. It's not like in baseball or something where by the time you actually make it to the major leagues, you've probably been playing into minor leagues for years and years. You might be already in your mid to upper 20s and maybe you have a family. Just the nature of the sport in the NBA means you have a lot of very young players who are still pretty attached to their phones as young people

happen to be. That's an epsilon that makes a difference. And you can't train like LeBron games if you have an angry tweet rattling around in your head. It's hard to have a really good game if you are 10% cognitively exhausted. So these type of things make a difference. So I think if you're a professional athlete, your ability to focus is crucial. It is as important as your physical conditioning. If you're constantly exposing yourself to lots of purposefully algorithmically driven distractions like social media on your phone, you are diminishing your general ability to concentrate. You're also sapping mental energy during those days that could go into, let's say, more focused, deliberate training. I do think it makes a difference. I think athletes at the professional level

who are an incredibly intentional and careful about their internet usage and in particular social media usage will have a non-trivial edge. There's data to back us up. There's anecdotes to back this up. I do think it's important. All right, what about for not the players, but the back office. Well, here there's a completely other dynamic at play, but when let's say a new general manager comes in and takes over a team, you know, he or she, and I'm saying she now, because in baseball, the Miami Marlins just appointed the first woman general manager of any major men's sports league in North America. But when general managers come in, they clean shop, they hire their own people. They set their own culture. There's a lot of shakeup. And there's often a lot of

haphazardness in how these back offices actually run, a lot of ad hoc communication, a lot of old school, let me just grab you in the hallway and let's figure this out. And so this is both an issue and an opportunity. The reason why I think it's an opportunity is because these teams are small enough that you can really build cultures from scratch. These are cultures that overturn every time a new general manager comes in. So they are malleable, traditionally speaking. If you build up good workflows in a back office for a professional sports team, I think it's possible to get a lot more value out of the high value thinkers that you hire. Out of the Billy Bean-esque characters, out of the whoever Jonah Hill played in the Moneyball movie, I don't know what that character's

name is the Yale trained kid that knew how to do Saber Metrics, right? You bring in these big brains to help find opportunities, help figure out contracts, help figure out how to put the best possible team on the field or on the court or whatever the sport happens to be. You do not want these brains constantly, constantly context switching. You don't want them always running from one crisis to another. You don't want them up to their ears and email delivered through their phone because that means you're getting a low return on these contracts. So I'm a big. I'm a big. believer that in the back offices of professional sports teams, because the culture can change radically every time a new general manager comes in, because the teams are relative to large

companies quite small, and because really what you're trying to do is get value out of brains in a very obvious way in these back offices, it's a great environment to experiment with much more cognitively aware, much more efficient workflows. You know, this is exactly the type of thing I talk about of my book coming out in March, A World Without Email, I'm hoping that book finds an audience with general managers. Now, to be honest,

I hope it starts with the general managers of my team. So maybe I should get an advanced copy over to Mike Rizzo of the Washington Nationals so that maybe we can squeeze a couple years of advantage out of that. But, you know, largely speaking, I think these type of ideas

are going to have a potentially highly receptive, highly impactful reception among that particular sector of knowledge work. Right, Connor, so that's my quick summary. I think players need to really worry about the impact of technology on their brain because their brain is critical to their elite level performance. And the back offices of professional teams are perfectly suited to be as innovative with how they run their offices as they are with their innovative offenses or recruiting or scouting type techniques. They're used to innovation there. They should innovate how they run their office as well.

And Mike Rizzo, if you're listening, I will trade you. free consulting for some good Washington Nationals tickets. All right, this next question here has to do with idea capture. Hey, Cal, my name is Micah, and I'm a Christian minister, specifically working with college students. I've been a big fan of your work for over 12 years now, and as a result, I'm more productive and more organized, and I want to thank you for that. I have a question about the capture phase of your productivity system. I feel like I have a good handle on the daily and weekly tasks that come across my plate.

I'm able to capture and configure those and get them done. I'm able to do the tasks that have deadlines and the important recurring tasks that come up in my personal and professional life. But I have a lot of ideas and projects and plans in my head that I think would be good for me to do. But they're not urgent. And in some cases, they're not even important. But I still have a nagging sense that there are things that I need to at least reckon with. And there's a ton of them. and for me to sit down and start to work through these ideas,

put them on paper and clarify them and rank order with him, would take me forever. And I just don't have that time. I know that David Allen says it can take multiple days for people he coaches to get through the capture phase, but I have three little kids and a full-time job. I can't just pause everything and do that. But yet these background obligations and these good ideas routinely derail my productivity system.

Micah, Idea Capture is, a crucial topic, and I'm glad you brought it up. It's crucial for two reasons. Ideas, which is my shorthand for non-urgent but potentially important projects, ideas can be very important in the long term for how your career unfolds, what impact you're able to have, how successful you are, but in the short term, they can be devastatingly distracting. Now, I think ideas have to be dealt with differently than we deal with tasks. And by tasks, I mean obligations that you have to get done probably in a relatively short time frame. So as you know, and as it sounds like you have been doing, when it comes to tasks, you capture them as they pop up throughout the day, whether they be

something that you come across in your own head or someone tells you in person or it arrives via an email message or it's mentioned in a meeting, various obligations show up. You capture them in a trusted inbox. This is classic David Allen. You then process them from that inbox into a trusted system where you can do pretty advanced configuring, which is sort of my twist on David Allen. Maybe you use something like a Trello board where you have boards for roles and columns for statuses and you move things around and you clarify things and you really get a good snapshot of in my different roles. What are the things I'm obligated to do and what is their status? You then review all of these boards when dealing with tasks to figure out what am I doing this week or what am I doing today.

Ideas are a little different. Ideas are a little bit different. You do not need to be, for example, reviewing every idea you've had. From the highly speculative to the probably things you really should get to some point this semester or quarter and everything in between, you do not need to be reviewing those, for example, every day. You probably don't need to be reviewing those even every week. The discipline that I try to maintain is once a month, and I actually put something on my calendar. I put a reminder on my calendar that says,

okay, today, it's usually on a Friday, review your idea system. So the idea is if I move an idea into my idea system, I can trust that it will get reviewed, but I don't need to be looking at these all the time. These type of big ideas for projects are something that really plays out typically on the quarterly scale. You look at your ideas, you see which one sticks, which ones don't. It's good that you have those semi-fresh so that when you're figuring out your next quarterly plan,

you might draw from those to figure out, okay, let me execute this or this, or let me put these projects into the quarterly plan. So I think monthly is probably the right scale. Now, the issue with ideas, as you found, is that they can be really distracting, because if you have a good idea and you ignore it, there is a part of your mind that says, you know, Micah, we cannot forget this. This could be a really good idea.

I discovered the distracting potential of ideas when I was a graduate student. And that's when I first realized, goodness, I'm having tons of ideas. Some of them about research papers, some of them about my writing, some of them about my life outside of professional endeavors,

and it was becoming a source of stress because I didn't want to forget them, but I didn't know where to put them and it literally was making me anxious. And that's when I realized, oh, ideas have to be captured as well. So what I introduced at first, a habit that I used for many years

is I had a Moleskin notebook I would use for all ideas. And I would do a monthly review of the Moleskin Journal. I would often go to a bagel store. I'm trying to remember what it was called. It was a chain. It was a Brugers or maybe it was an Einstein.

So I'd go to a certain bagel store, I'd get a coffee, a flavored coffee, and a breakfast sandwich. I'd do this once a month. I have very vivid memories of this. And I would go through all the pages I had added to that notebook and just remind myself of what those ideas were. And then when I would fill my moleskin, I would buy a new one. And I would go through this process of, well, let me go through my one that just filled, the one I just finally finished filling all the pages from. Let me review the entire thing. and then transfer into my new moleskin to the very beginning pages

short summaries of all the ideas from that older, recently filled moleskin that I think are still interesting and worth keeping in mind. You know, I would say 10 good ideas might come out of a moleskin and make it to the next one and give them pretty short summaries. And now when I do the monthly review of that new moleskin, I would see at the beginning a summary of those ideas from the last mulskin. Now you might worry, Micah, that this process would lead to,

an additive increase of ideas being pulled from other moleskins until eventually you get to a place where your entire moleskin is full of good ideas from previous moleskins, but that didn't happen because there was attrition with every transfer from one moleskin to another, and it would take somewhere between one to three months to fill one, depending on how many ideas I had, you would lose a bunch of ideas from the old ones. There was a half-life ideas where they no longer seem so urgent. They've been around, you've seen them every month for a while, they no longer seem like this is the thing you really need to do, and they don't make the transfer. So this was my simple system. It worked really well. One notebook, transfer the best ideas to the next, allow natural

decay of potency of brainstorms to keep the idea count relatively low, nice natural back pressure there. Worked great. I did that for years. Nowadays, I had to professionalize that system somewhat because there's so many ideas I have to deal with, especially when it comes to writing, article writing, and blog post writing, and podcasting and the sort of media things I do in my books and all of my different areas in which I'm working on academic papers. My life planning is much more complex because I'm not just a 25-year-old grad student now, daydreaming about the future. I'm a father. I'm a husband. I have a lot of kids. I have things I'm intertwined within the community. It's all really complicated. And the most can no longer keep it. I'm in the most of the

keeps up. So Micah, what I do now is I use Evernote, as I've mentioned before. I have different notebooks, and in my notebooks, I have a bunch of notes. And I have that monthly reminder still, except for now I'm glancing through Evernote. And I glance through all my notebooks. For the relevant notebooks, I'll glance through all my notes. And my idea there is I just want to be sure that if I move something into Evernote, it's not going to be forgotten. I'll see it. I might not read it in detail, but I'll see enough of it that I'll be reminded of it, so I won't forget it. And that allows me to have some mental relief that when I have an idea, I can write it down. Typically, I'll start by writing it in the idea or notes column of my time block planner.

And then when I do my shutdown routine, I'll transfer it over to Evernote. And I know I'll at least see it once a month. I'll see it once a month and we'll no longer have that distraction or anxiety-producing feeling of there's a good idea and I'm worried it's going to be lost. So this is all to say, Mike, if I could summarize this all, idea capture is crucial. If you don't have a system you trust, this can be a major source of distraction and anxiety. Not to mention, you might just forget a really good idea. On the same hand, it's not the same as task. You do not need to have these in a sort of complicated configure system. You don't need to be reviewing these daily or weekly. It's sufficient to have a

capture system you trust that gets these things into like a notebook or an Evernote setup. you review regularly, that should be enough to make sure that a good idea is remembered and your mind is not worried about missing out on the key insight or forgetting that key insight you had that might end up changing everything. I want to take a moment to talk about another new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast, and that is Green Chef. Here's how it works. You go to their website.

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It's going to be easy to make, but also be at a level of sophistication or interest that's maybe above a lot of our existing recipes. So certainly Green Chef is something that we appreciate right now in the Newport household, and I'm assuming you might appreciate it as well. So if you are interested in this service, go to greenchef.com slash deep 90 and use the code deep 90 to get $90 off, including free shipping. That's greenchef.com, g-r-e-e-en-c-ch-e-f.com slash deep 90, the number 90, not the word,

and use that code deep 90 to get $90 off, including free shipping. I also want to talk about one of my favorite deep work rituals, which is drinking four-sigmatic coffee. In particular, they're world-famous four-sigmatic ground mushroom coffee, which includes lion's main mushroom. Mushroom coffee is a lot easier on the gut. It also has neurological effects. as I like to talk about when I talk about four-sigmatic,

the details of these effects are less important than the fact that they are distinctive. I drink this coffee every time before I start particularly difficult deep work sessions. My brain learns now to associate that clear physiological hook with deep work. It becomes a very powerful ritual. 4-Sigmatic coffee means it is time,

at least for me, it is time to concentrate. It also tastes great. Doesn't things like mushroom. Mushroom coffee actually tastes a little bit nutty. For some reason, I like adding a little bit of cinnamon. I think it complements it really well. A very distinctive drink

that in my life has a distinctively useful application of being my signal that it is time to do deep work. And we've worked out an exclusive offer with Four Sigma-Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee. this is just for you, the listeners of deep questions. So if you want to get 40% off and free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for you,

and it's not available on their regular website. You have to go to 4Sigmac.com slash deep to access it. So you'll save up the 40% and get free shipping if you go to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-E-S-I-G. M-A-T-I-C-com slash deep. Hey, Cal, my name is Dwidge, and I'm on a graduate in physics, and I have a problem. Whenever I work, I have a lot of thoughts in my mind, and I kind of deep dwell into this while I'm working. So how shall I ignore it? Well, Dwyge, the problem that you are suffering from

in which ruminations are distracting you from your work is a problem that is quite common among professionals in general, but in my experience is particularly acute among students such as yourself. That's the first thing I'm going to say. There's nothing unusual going on here, and there are some relatively standard approaches, which I think you will find will help quite a bit. So the reason why students, I think, particularly suffer from rumination-driven distraction is that students are the most likely to treat their work very generically. They will often use the term study as a generic catch-all verb

that captures all types of preparatory work you might do to prepare for an exam or writing a paper, doing a problem set, or anything you might do as a student. They just used the word study, as in, all right, I'm going to go study now. And especially in the sciences, there's a culture of let's just go to the library and see who can stay there longer, who can stay up later, hours and grit, hours and grind. This is what's going to produce good results. But when your brain is being told that what you're going to do is so generic, just like we're going to go study, it was very difficult to maintain.

sustained unbroken concentration. And so other things will distract you. So for a lot of students, that's ruminations. For other students, it's going to be digital distractions. My phone is there. My G-chat window is there. My WhatsApp app is one-click away. But same idea.

The work is abstract. It's very hard to sustain energy and motivation when you're trying to do something that's so ill-defined. So what's the solution there? Get much more specific. You know, back in the older days of my study hacks blog, when I focused primarily on student issues, I used to say this all the time. Manish the word study from your vocabulary.

Take that one step, and your life as a student is about to get a lot more effective. When you can no longer just say, I'm going to go study, but have to be more specific. Oh, I'm going to go do active recall on my question evidence conclusion clusters. I am going to go do my second phase where I gather my research packets for the paper I'm writing. These all being, by the way, strategies from my book, how to become a straight-A student. When you're being that specific, that's an entirely different ballgame. So now your mind says, oh, I know the specific activity I'm going to do and I have faith that this is an effective activity. The next thing you want to add into this equation is a clear time frame.

All right, I am going to go do this whatever. active recall in these QEC clusters, I'm going to do it from 7 to 830. So I have a plan for what I'm going to do. I trust it's effective. I know when I'm going to do it. Once you've shifted to specificity of activity and of timing, now you have a good foundation on which to push back against distraction, be it ruminative or be it a digital distraction.

Because now you can say, in this session, my goal is to do this thing. with as much concentration as possible. And then when I'm done, I'm done. And when I'm done, I can go for a walk and I can ruminate and I can look at my phone, I can take a break or whatever I want to do. But during this session, this is what I'm doing. And with all of that specificity in hand,

it's much, much easier to sustain concentration. Now, if you find it hard at first to do this for a long period of time, you can, of course, train yourself to get better and better. I used to work with students on this where we did 20-minute stretches at first. Intense concentration unbroken on one clearly defined academic objective. We used a stopwatch.

If they broke concentration, glanced at a phone, or let their mind significantly wander, we reset the stopwatch. You had that stopwatch there and you had that simple feedback trigger of it getting reset if your concentration significantly deviates from the work at hand. Great training mechanism. Once they are comfortable with 20 minutes, we would up it to 30. Unless they were comfortable with 30,

we would up it to 40. So there's training. I'm saying here to which you can do. But when you have specificity, now you have something you can train. And within a semester, you should be able to get to a point with sufficient clarity and training

where you can sit down for 90 minutes and maintain laser-like focus. And then in between these laser-like focus blocks, you can then let your mind wander. You can do breaks. You can talk with other people. You know, you can look at the internet, whatever you need to do.

Now, the bonus of this. approach is because your intensity of focus is increased because you're so locked in, and the amount of time it's going to take for you to get your work done is going to significantly reduce. The core formula in my book, How to Become a Straight Day student, is work produced is a product of time spent and intensity of focus. You increase the intensity of focus. then for the same amount of time, you get a lot more work done. So you'll actually have plenty of time

to go on long walks and think big thoughts and wear a black turtleneck and talk about the existentialist or whatever the other things undergraduates need to do while also still getting your work done. So that is my prescription for all undergraduates is be specific about what activity you're going to do. Take the word study out of your vocabulary.

Be specific about what times you were going to do it in. demand full concentration in those times. If your ability to concentrate without distraction is only ill form, can only last for a little bit of time, then only schedule a little bit of time, but train yourself with the goal of making those periods expand. If you do this, you're going to find that you actually have more free time than you had before. Now, this does not just apply to undergraduates.

I think this is true. Of most knowledge work, the more specific you can be about what you're going to work on and when you're going to work on it, the type of specificity you can get, for example, using something like time blocking, the more you're going to be able to actually resist distraction, be it psychological ruminations or be it technological digital diversion.

And just like I recommended to undergraduates like Dwidge, you can train yourself to have longer and longer periods in which you are comfortable with intense concentration without distraction. As I talk about to undergraduates like Dwidge, that same formula where increasing focus reduces the time required to get the same work done. That same formula roughly applies, so you will get more done. You'll have more free time. You can get your work into a smaller footprint. You can add more projects into your day. You get a lot more options. So I appreciate this question because we could start with a small concern.

The voice in my head is distracting me from my work and get to a bigger potentially positive change to how we work in general. So DeWich, thank you for that question. Get specific about how and when, train yourself, and you will be surprised by just how much good physics work you can get done in a relatively short amount of time. All right, I had promised to be pithy in this week's episode. I do want to squeeze in one more question, and I will do my best to be appropriately terse in my response.

Hi, Cal, this is Sarah, and I work for the UN. My question is about decision-making and prioritization. I tend to generate a lot more opportunities and ideas and projects than I can reasonably follow through. And I have a really hard time choosing between things because I'm interested in all of them and they're all relevant to the broader scope of my work. So I wanted your advice on what mindsets and techniques you use to make decision-makings, both on a small scale and a large scale. So, Sarah, first of all, congratulations on having a job in which it is conducive to use,

you coming up with ideas that are interesting and you have the freedom to execute them, that type of autonomy and impact in your work, we know from the research literature, is a great recipe for meaning, satisfaction, and motivation. So we're starting here from a foundation of good news. So what should we do about this issue of having more interesting, good, potentially impactful ideas than you actually have time to execute? Well, a couple quick thoughts here.

First, as these ideas come up, I would go back to the advice I gave Micah earlier in this episode. I would move them into an idea system, not into execution. So when an idea comes up, get it into your trusted idea system. Don't send off that email or bring up that suggestion in a meeting that actually commits you to working on it. I don't know if this is the case here, but I know for some people, the lack of an idea capture system actually leads them to initially. ideas more often because they don't want to forget them. And so they figure if I have an idea, either I initiate it, like start seeing out some emails and get the ball rolling, or I might forget it and I don't want to forget it, and then they end up overloading themselves. So you might find that just having a trusted place where you can store these ideas and review them regularly will reduce the amount of ideas that actually get initiated.

So when should you make the decision and how should you make the decision about what ideas to execute? Well, going back to my advice for Micah, you should look at your idea review system once a month. This is critical for your mind to trust that ideas won't be forgotten. That will reduce that urge to just start an idea or for an idea to fester as a source of distraction from other things that are going on right now. Because your job is very idea-centric and ideas really matter, when you do these monthly reviews, you might want to also take time to clarify and do some mild configuring, to add some notes or merge some ideas or remove some ideas from lists that have been outdated or replaced by more recent ideas.

You have a good place where you know you're going to see these ideas. You're not going to forget them and you take good care of them. So when then should you actually make the decision about what ideas to initiate? You know, for the most part, I think the quarterly planning scale is the right place to do this at the quarterly plan is when you figure out what am I working on in the next quarter. You know, what ideas am I still executing? Do I have slots for new ideas? And let me look through that well curated idea collection system and pull some of those out to execute.

You're looking here at the whole picture of what's on your plate, how full it is, how much room you have, and you're trying to figure out what is the best collection of metaphorical foods to place there. That's the right way to make these decisions, not on the fly, not in the moment, not when you just had that brainstorm and you're excited about it, because now you are controlling what you want your load to look like. I tend to push for doing a little bit less, but being incredibly aggressive during the quarter at trying to get to some sort of finish point. I wrote a blog post once very early in my writing career that was called the art of the finish. I think those ideas are somewhat timeless. it basically underscored the importance of almost relentlessly trying to push projects that are active towards their completion.

It's the finishing of things that matters. It's to getting things to the finish line that produces value-producing results and allows you to start new things. And so I would typically lean towards maybe having a little bit less on my plate but being very aggressive about the things on my plate. So I can churn through them faster. So Sarah, that would be my recommendation. Good idea capture system. The first stop for all of these ideas is that system.

It is not execution. Let them cool down. Let them evolve and mature a little bit. Let them go through a couple monthly reviews where you might expand or contract or realize that the idea you had was actually in retrospect crazy and you're just going to take that right off the list. And then when you get your quarterly plan,

make a careful strategic selection of a diverse mix of different projects to complement each other in all the right ways and aggressively execute those things. I think that is going to be the right balance between spontaneity and focus. That is really going to keep getting important work done. All right, that's all the time we have for this week's Abbott Tuneup mini-episode. If you want to submit your own voice questions for this series,

you can do so at speakpipe.com slash how new. support. You want to help spread the word, please rate or leave a review. I read every review and appreciate them. I'll be back next week and until then, as always, stay deep.