Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 52: Habit Tune-Up: Pandemic-Induced Overload, Side Hustles, and Managing for Depth

Episode Date: December 10, 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: * Capturing ideas outside the office. [4:31] * Prioritizing leisure. [9:08] * Coping with pandemic-induced shallow work. [11:58] * Succeeding with a side hustle [21:59] * Deep work at the organizational level [28:45]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.

Today's episode of Deep Questions is brought to you in part by Blinkist. As I explained in Monday's episode, Blinkist is a subscription service in which you get access to 15-minute summaries of over 4,000 non-fiction bestsellers in more than 27 categories. So on Monday, I highly recommended using Blinkist as a way to quickly survey a field, learn to basics, and figure out which books are worth reading in more detail. today I wanted to add that one of the most popular categories among Blinkist's 15 million users is actually personal growth and self-help. So in addition to using Blinkist to quickly master complex topics, it also provides a great way to rapidly tune up our master parts of your own life. So as I mentioned, Blinkist has a special offer for our audience here. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can start a free seven-day trial and get 25.

percent off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkist.com slash deep. We're also brought to you in part by Grammarly. Now, as I explained in Monday's episode, Grammarly Premium is a product that elevates your writing. It runs on all of your devices. It doesn't just fix your grammar mistakes, but it also gets. gives you suggestions about clarity and vocabulary.

Something I wanted to add today, however, is that Grammarly Premium also has feedback about your tone. I was messing around with this recently. It's actually really cool. I don't know how the tech works here. Again, it's like having a really good editor who looks over your shoulder as you type an email or send a text message to your boss. Clear writing is crucial to clear expression, grammarly premium. can help you achieve that. So if you want to elevate your writing with 20% off Grammarly Premium,

you can do so by signing up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off Grammarly Premium at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a Deep Questions, have it tune up mini episodes. The format of these mini episodes is straightforward. I answer a handful of voice questions, specifically on the topic of how to tune up productivity habits. A couple of quick announcements before we dive into it. First, as I mentioned on Monday's episode, I am looking for feedback as I go through the process this December of tightening up and upgrading the Deep Questions podcast in preparation for our season two, which will begin in the new year. So you can send any feedback you have to interesting at calnewport.com.

One of the things I asked about in particular on Monday's episode is what to do with the habit tune up mini episodes. Do we like this format? Should we tweak this format for the second episode? Should we do something completely different? I have been appreciating the feedback you are sending. Another thing I've been working with is moving one of the ads to be a cold open at the beginning of the show and then have one or two more ads be mid-roll.

we're really trying to keep it at three or less ads per show. This show is an exception due to some scheduling issues. But anyways, I'm interested in your feedback on that as well. It's always a balancing act. So interesting at calnewport.com for that feedback. Second announcement, if you subscribe to my mailing list at calnewport.com, you should have gotten a message Monday with a link to the latest question survey. This is the survey in which my listeners submit questions for the main episodes.

of the Deep Questions Podcast. So if you're on the mailing list, look out for that message. I look forward to getting your written questions through that survey. And of course, anyone can submit voice questions for the habit tune up many episodes. You can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. All right, that's all I have for announcements. So let's get right into the questions. Hello, Cal.

My name is Liv and I work in marketing. I'm a big fan of yours. I've been reading your blogs and books. And I just got hold of your time block planner, which I am very excited to start using. Today, my question is about how to better capture ideas and thoughts, especially when you don't have the right tool to write them down at the moment. And the reason is that I often find myself having new ideas or new thoughts or remembering something while I am either driving or cooking or, for example, brushing my teeth.

And those are the moments that happen to have most of my ideas or remembering things that need to do. But obviously, those are the times that I don't really have a good access to a pen to write it down or have my phone near me. And what happens is that often forget that those, ideas. So I just wonder if you have any good tips to, in terms of capture them better. Well, Liv, in your case, I would suggest using your time block planner to help solve this problem. The daily pages, of course, include a section for capturing notes and ideas. And I would just have that

planner nearby throughout your day. And that's where I would go to jot down these type of ideas when you have them. So for example, I bring my time block planner, into my bedroom at night because I often have some ideas right before I go to bed, things I want to offload off my mind and it's right there on my dresser. And that means it's also there in the morning. So if I'm brushing my teeth or taking a shower and have some ideas, it's right there waiting for me in my room and I can go out there and jot them down with me. I then bring it with me throughout the day.

It comes to my deep work HQ. You know, if you're out exercising, it's right there at home when you get back, ready for you to capture the ideas right there. why do I suggest using your planner? Well, because that's where you are going to center your shutdown ritual. The shutdown complete checkbox is right there on the daily pages in your planner. You're not going to check that checkbox until you have done a shutdown ritual that includes looking at all your notes, looking at all your tasks that have been captured in a planner

and make sure they get moved into more permanent systems. And they're right there, right under the shutdown complete box. So when you're jotting things down on those capture pages, you know for sure you're not going to shut down that day until that has been processed. And so you can trust it. If you can trust it, you do not have to waste mental resources trying to remember that idea because you're not quite sure if you're going to see it again. One little caveat to this is what happens to ideas you have after your shutdown routine. So I mentioned I often have ideas before going to bed. well, you know, presumably I've done my shutdown routine right after my workday.

So you might think this would be a cognitively fraught time to be writing down more ideas because you no longer have the assurance that you're going to capture those new ideas or process those new ideas during shutdown. Well, the answer here is simple. You just put them on the page for the next day. So let's say it's Thursday and it's night. You've already done your shutdown routine and you have an idea. you just put it under the notes section for Friday,

so that when you do Friday shutdown complete, you do that shutdown ritual, you will see the notes. So that's what I recommend. So yeah, you don't literally have the notebook in the shower or you're not literally holding it while you run, though I think that would be funny if you did, but you're never far from it. Now, if you don't have a time block planner,

the more general point to take away here is have a analog thing that can follow you throughout the day, a mole skin, a field's dog, note with a good pin that's clipped right onto it, whatever you prefer, that follows you throughout the day, so you're never too far from having a place to jot down notes and ideas. The key is just to make sure that you have a shutdown routine every single day that forces you to look at this notebook whatever it is.

That assurance of, if I write it here, it will be seen within 24 hours. That assurance is what really allows you to not only have more ideas, but to let them go and to reclaim those mental resources after you have them. All right, let's go a different direction here and do a question about having too many leisure activities. Hi, Cal. My name's Don. I'm in my late 20s and a chief of staff at a small nonprofit. I love the show and love your books, and each of my interns gets a copy of so good they can't ignore you as a going-away gift. My question is related to the timing of leisure activities, as well as when one leisure activity takes up a disproportionate amount of time in your schedule. I'm an aspiring triathlet who's training up to an hour and a half to two hours a day.

I get up at 5.30 or 6, and before my 9 a.m. stand up, I try to work out, read the paper, write, meditate, and cook. All of those rarely happen. So my question is this. Is there a good way to prioritize my leisure activities, especially when one is taking up a disproportionate amount of my time? Or should I accept that within each season, I'm going to be doing one activity more than the rest, and embrace that for what it is. do the second option there and embrace it for what it is. Now this is actually a topic I've talked about before, I think even recently, but it's come up enough that I'm just going to briefly revisit it here again, maybe not in as much detail as I did before.

But essentially, when it comes to high-quality leisure activities, it is easy to ambitiously try to take on more than you can actually handle, and then these activities become an unnecessary source of stress. So what I often recommend is for someone in your situation is that maybe you have a primary high-quality leisure activity like triathlon training, which, by the way, I think is a great one. Being healthy in body makes you more healthy in mind. It helps your ability to concentrate. It sharpens your brain.

Training in the winter months is a fantastic way of offsetting, having less sunlight, etc. So anyways, I think that's a great primary leisure activity. And then everything else should just be, I have a, a large toolbox of options for ensuring that when I have free time, I am doing something quality. And that's the way I would think about it. Outside of your primary leisure activity, you just want to make sure that your time off is spent well, but not conceive of that time in a goal-oriented mindset of I'm making progress on this and I'm making progress on that. It's just, hey, there's four or five things I like to do with my time. I'm

kind of invested in. Maybe I'm doing one for a while. Maybe I'm doing one for a while. Maybe I'm switching back and forth every day. Maybe it's seasonal. Maybe it's based on a book I read and it changes my mindset, whatever. But I would say, again, one main activity and then just a general commitment to do quality versus non-quality activity in the free time that happens to remain. All right, let's try one here about getting too much shallow work put on your plate because of pandemic-related shifts. Hi Cal, my name is Claire, and I'm a data scientist at a tech company. Prior to the pandemic, I was hired to do what is essentially deep work, analysis and experiments. Due to the pandemic, a lot of junior roles were made redundant.

These junior roles used to take care of the shallow work. because these roles are no longer there, I have to do those roles and cover for them. As a result, for the past six months, I've done very little deep work, and I feel that I'm not learning anything new. The company has recently announced that they will start hiring again, but my fear is that now that I've done shallow work for six months, I will be branded as a person that is a go-to for these kinds of requests. Is it better to just start afresh and find another job where I can dedicate myself fully to doing deep work?

Or would you stay at a company where people know that you are capable of taking care of shallow work and expect you to fulfill that? Well, Claire, before leaving my job in this situation, I think I would first try the deep, the shallow work ratio strategy. Now, this is an idea that I first talked about in my book, Deep Work, and it's one that I've heard a lot of success stories about from my readers. The basic concept here is you go to whoever supervises you. And you say, this is what deep work is, this is what shallow work is, this is the type of deep work I do for the organization, this is the type of shallow work I have been doing for the organization. Both is important. what is the ideal deep to shallow work ratio for me? In other words, if I look at the hours I spend working in a typical week,

what is the ratio of hours that are dedicated to deep work versus hours dedicated to shallow work that you think is going to produce the most value for our organization? Because, of course, this is a balancing act. You know, deep work is what moves the needle. It's what makes the money. But if you're not doing shallow work, you don't keep the lights on. So you have to figure out some balancing act.

Act here. And so you just talk with who's supervising you and saying, what are we going for here? What's the number you think will be best? Now, in your situation, because of what's happening at your firm, you might want to actually complicate this slightly and say, okay, what should that ratio be now? And how should it evolve over the next six to 12 months as we staff up? Because it might be the case that, like, right now, that needs to be kind of high. But you can put a stake in the ground and say six months from now, it should be down to this, and a year from now it should be down to that. And then you agree on what these ideal ratios are. And then here's the key part is you measure. If you're doing something like time block planning, you have a really great record of what's

actually happening in your day, how many deep hours versus shallow hours. You probably should be tracking. If you use my time block planner, you should be probably tracking deep work hours as one of your metrics on the daily pages. So you have a clear record of it. then you can come back and say, okay, we talked about, like, right now, the optimal ratio should be X, but I'm only hitting Y. So what changes shall we make so that we hit that ratio that we decided together was going to create the most value for the organization? I've had a lot of people come back to me who have tried this strategy and who told me that they were convinced that the culture in their office of distraction and shallowness was so entrenched that there's no way. it would ever change, and within like a week or two of having this discussion, their bosses or supervisors were willing to put in massive changes. All right, so why is this? Well, because it is clear and quantitative

and positive. So it's clear. It's not just a general request to be less distracted or to have more time to concentrate. That's too general. You have numbers. You want to shift the numbers. It's much easier to manage what you can measure. The other thing here is that it's positive. You're not coming to your supervisor and saying, here's what I don't like. You're sending me too many emails. You're asking me to do too many things.

Make your life harder and stop asking me to do as many things. Psychologically, that's a bad foot to start on when you're talking to your boss or to your supervisor. But if you're instead of coming out from an angle of how can I produce more value for the organization, it puts people in the right mindset. Now here's the thing. Two negative outcomes are possible here. First, your boss or supervisor might say, I don't want to have that conversation.

I just want you to, let's just, you need to do what you need to do. I don't want to talk about ratios. I don't want to be pinned down with anything. Because I want to make sure that I have the flexibility to make you do the things I want you to do. That's a giant red flag. But at least that flag has been waived clearly. Two, maybe they have the conversation. Maybe they agree.

But when you come to them with the numbers, they're like, look, Claire, what can I say? You need to do the things we need you to do. If those are the cases, so you've had a conversation, you've come out at positive, you've been quantitative, you've tried to find the optimal balance of deep to shallow and how it should evolve. If you've tried all of that, and it's still clear that your bosses or supervisors mindset is still, look, I just don't want to be pinned down. I just kind of want you to be the dumping ground for the stuff that I need to get done, and I don't know anyone else who's going to say yes, that's when I might think about another job. So basically try to reform in clear and positive ways

what your workload should be and how it evolves, really explicitly, on paper, clear discussion, and give that a chance. And only if that doesn't work is when I would think, okay, this job has now transformed into something that I'm not, I don't want to do, that's not going to build me career capital, that is not going to allow me to advance. Now, I'll tell you, almost certainly it's going to work

you know, that's the feedback I get about this strategy is that managers know that deep work creates value. I mean, it's what moves the needle. Like the experiments or data you collect Claire is vital to the organization. If you're not doing that, it is a problem. And managers get that and sometimes they just need some vocabulary and some quantitative framework or scaffolding around which to help make these decisions. So almost certainly this will work, but you might have a dud of a boss. And at least this will make that 100% apparent if you do. If they are trying to make you into a shallow work dumping ground because, you know, you're acquiescent and you're good at it and they ignore your entreaties to actually go back to the best way to maximize your value to the company,

then yeah, that's a bad situation. Maybe transfer to another division or group or team within the company if it's large, or maybe you might start thinking about finding something new. I want to take a brief moment to talk about another one of our sponsors, ExpressVPN. As I explained in Monday's episode, ExpressVPN is a tool that creates a secure tunnel between your devices and the internet. So you create a secure and encrypted connection to an ExpressVPN server, and then the server talks to the internet on your behalf, preventing people who are right near you from snooping your packets or the sites you're talking to from knowing who you are. Now, I mentioned on Monday that this is a good tool for those looking to push back against big techs intrusions into your privacy. But today I wanted to mention one other benefit.

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Go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep to find out more. If you go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep, you can also get three extra months of ExpressVPN protection for free. That's EXPR-E-S-S-V-N. dot com slash deep to learn more. I also want to talk about purple. On Monday's episode, I discussed their world famous purple mattress with its innovative purple-gred technology, which not only gives you multiple support, but natural cooling because of all

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and perhaps also become a true purple grid believer. So if you're ready to start upgrading your sleep, go to purple.com slash deep 10 and use the promo code deep 10. For a limited time, you'll get 10% off any order of $200 or more. That's purple.com slash deep 10. Use promo code deep 10 for 10% off any order of $200 or more. Terms apply. Our next question here has to do with side hustles.

Hi, Carl. Great show. if you ever search for an alternative name for it, I suggest labors of Hercules. To the question. I work in financial resolution, so work similar to FDICs, but in Europe. I got to a solid expert position and was lately offered a big promotion, and only then I realized I don't want to invest more time and energy into this career where I am paid per hour and all and all I have to come to an office. So I managed to move to halftime and I still do deep work, time blocking, good job for this

employer. But I also want to start a side hassle that will eventually lead me to more autonomy. And here I would appreciate your help on how to come about it. Well, first, I appreciate the mythological overtones of the labors of Hercules. I do fear, however, that I would need to be more visibly muscle bound for that title to really play. So we may not be able to make that work. But onto your question about side hustles, I want to first point out that making a move for autonomy is probably a smart idea. So in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I talk about autonomy.

as being what I call the dream job elixir. It comes up again and again when you study people who really have a lot of satisfaction in their working lives and their professional careers. It's often because they have attained one way or another a lot of autonomy over what they work on, how much they work on, when they work on it, etc. And so building up your own hustle on a side is a good route towards autonomy. There's other ones, but that's a good one. So how do you succeed with a side hustle. I have three quick pieces of advice to offer here. First, this is a piece of advice actually from So Good They Can't Ignore You, and it's the notion of using money as a, quote, neutral indicator of value, end quote. I'm quoting that because that's a term that was given to me

by Derek Sivers. It's not a term I came up with on my own. So what did he mean when he talked about money is a neutral indicator of value. What he was saying was the most accurate way to assess how well your side hustle is going is to see how much money it's producing. Are people actually buying the product? Are people actually paying you for your service? Now, the reason why he calls it a neutral indicator of value is because if you ask people, you ask people you know, what do you think about this business idea? What do you think about this side hustle? they will likely give you a non-neutral answer. They're probably people who like you.

They're probably people who like the idea of a side hustle. And they're like, that's great. We love this idea. That's good. You should go for it. That's not necessarily accurate information. However, when you're asking somebody to actually give you some of their money, they really are not going to do that unless they think what you're doing is worthwhile.

So what Derek talked about, and I quote him talking about this in my book, is that as he made every move in his professional life from one hustle to another, the main criteria he used to indicate that he was ready to jump from one thing to a side hustle is my side hustle producing enough money to support me. So for example, he was an A&R executive at a record company, and at some point he jumped into playing in a band. When did he make that jump? when the band was already making enough money

to more or less replace his salary. He then jumped from that band to a technology startup called CD Baby. When did he make that jump? When CD Baby was making enough money that he could support himself from that and not need to perform. So anyways, I think that's a good rule of thumb.

If you're offering a service, see if you can actually get people to pay for the service. If you're selling something, see if you can actually get people to buy it. and don't make a change, don't leave your existing job completely until your new thing is making enough money to help support you. It's a great neutral indicator of how well something is going. My second piece of advice is that with a side hustle versus a full-time hustle, I often recommend that you are pretty careful about tamping down the hustle aspects and really

focusing on a laser, like a laser, on the core things you do that produce value. When you're starting something new, there is a tendency to try to crush it in all directions, just to be a whirlwind of activity, shooting emails, jumping on calls, trying to have coffees, hiring virtual assistants or virtual contractors over here, getting your web designer locked in, having people, different teams you're throwing money at, to work on different parts of it. There's a comfort in busyness and activity. But when you only have a limited amount of time, and you already have a good income and support from your existing job, You don't want to waste your energy on the whirlwind.

You want to take the time you have and focus on what's the main craft I'm honing, what's the main thing I'm offering. Let's just try to make that as valuable as possible on a small scale. That's what's going to give you the biggest return ultimately is if the thing you do best is as good as possible. So I don't know what your side hustle actually is, but I would say be really, really focused at first. You're selling one thing. You're looking to have just one client and handle that client really well. it is, but focus on the core and don't get too distracted by the periphery when the business or idea is being executed on the side. Finally, I would suggest that you use something like

time block planning so you really are controlling your time so that you can have clear separation between your normal job and your side hustle and that both get the time they need. What you want to avoid is having your side hustle sort of mix and blend with your normal job. and it's hard to tell when one ends and the other doesn't. You have a half-time job, use time blocking to really just spend half your time on it and then to make the most of the time that remains for the side hustle. All right, well, hopefully putting this answer to use is not too Herkulean. See what I did there.

But I'm glad I had a chance to talk about side hustles because we don't touch on that topic a lot, but I think it's one that's on a lot of people's minds right now. All right, we have time for one more question. This final question has to do with supporting deep work, not just for individuals, but at the organizational level. Hi, Cal. Cameron here. I'm a film editor and producer at a small creative agency and documentary production company in Seattle, Washington.

My question is about building a deep company from the ground up. I am lucky enough to work at a small company where all of us who are full-time have read and bought into the ideas of deep work, and we're slowly starting to implement those in our own daily routines. A lot of what I hear from you seems to be mostly targeted towards the individual worker and how they structure their systems and schedule and mindset. So I'm wondering, do you have any tips or ideas on how to take those things to the next level on an organization-wide basis?

Well, Cameron, that's a big question. I actually have a big new book coming out in March that deals with a lot of these issues of how do you rebuild organizations? What's the future of work, in other words, once we recognize that human brains are really meant to do one thing at a time and not to try to have this constant back and forth

attention switching between communication channels and work. I will here, however, give you a couple small ideas. It will hopefully point you in the right direction. direction for now. The first is actually having just the vocabulary straight within your organization. Knowing the difference between deep and shallow work, knowing that deep work is what moves the needle, but shallow work is what keeps the light on, and having some sense that both are important and that getting the ratio right is valuable. I talked about earlier in this episode the notion of a deep, the shallow work ratio,

where you identify what is the optimal ratio of deep work hours to shallow work hours and a normal work week for your current position, the optimal ratio that maximizes the value you produce for the organization, you might consider having that ratio be identified for everybody, and that it's part of the management culture at the organization for people to keep track of that.

and if they're not hitting the ratio for changes to be made so that they can. The other small idea I'll mention now is that the thing that disrupts deep work or cognitive value production more generally is context switches. And the things that induces the context switches is the need to keep checking emails or instant messenger channels. So checking your inbox or checking Slack. So if you want to promote deep work, you want to try to minimize context switching in your organization.

And the way to do that is to think with a process-centric mindset. To think about all the different processes that implicitly exist within your organization, you can basically ask for each, does this type of thing, whatever it is, like dealing with a new client request, dealing with an issue a client has, trying to get a script ready for production, whatever it is. For each of these implicit processes that makes up all the things that happens

at your organization, you can ask the question, right now, what role does unscheduled messaging play in this process? Now, for a lot of organizations, most of their processes leverage the convenience of just hit me up with an email

or we'll just do Slack when something needs to get done. But if you have, dozens of these implicit processes that all rely on unscheduled messaging to make progress. Now you have the average employee of your organization having to be tending in an asynchronous fashion a couple dozen different ongoing unstructured conversations, and that's death of deep work. And as soon as you are in that professional context, the amount of value you are extracting from brains really decreases. This is especially true in creative fields like you said you were in.

So that creative, high-intensity output really drops if that same brain is being asked to maintain and keep up with dozens of ongoing asynchronous back-and-forth conversation. So what you can do, and it's not easy. Again, I have a whole book about this coming out. It's not easy, but you can identify these processes and says, okay, we are going to put up some stronger, stricter guardrails about how we deal with whatever, new client request, a problem with a client, moving a script from ideal. to production, whatever it is.

We're going to do the hard work of putting some more structure in here that minimizes what the number or amount of unscheduled communication required. And you start to see your work through that perspective. You start to see your organization through that perspective. You start to think of anything that requires unstructured back and forth conversations as not good. Friction in the assembly line. Sand in the gears.

No good. it's better to have more structure, a little more overhead, a little bit more of a growing pain than it is to just say, look, it's easier in the moment, but you're going to have to do unstructured back and forth conversations, because again, this does not scale. So that's a small take on a bigger point here. But you can go through and begin to structure processes to try to minimize the need for me to just shoot off an email and wait for you to shoot off an email back, and then I shoot an email back to you, or we just jump on a Slack channel and rock and roll. by rebuilding your organization around processes that are way more structured and when and how

communication happens, especially in a creative industry, it ends up being a big win. I mean, it really does seem like a pain in the moment because it is convenient. It is convenient for a particular process not to have much overhead, not to have much more structure. Why can't I just shoot you an email? I don't want to learn a process. What if there's a hard edge on the process? What if your process doesn't think about this a bad thing that could happen?

I don't want bad things to happen. No, no, no, let me just shoot you an email. That mindset is very seductive, but again, it simply doesn't scale. It simply doesn't scale to have every process rely on this ad hoc on scheduled conversation because you soon are awash in too many back and forth asynchronous interactions. All right, so those are two thoughts to keep in mind. Deep to shallow work ratios as an explicit part of your management and starting to think about your work as processes

and starting to think about your process, your goal for each process as reducing the need for unscheduled communication. It's a pain, but it's possible. Your team will be happier. Your organization will produce more value. And again, I have a whole book coming out about this in March, which we'll be talking about a lot in the new year. Don't worry.

So if this answer seems cursory, fear not, Cameron, you are going to know more about these ideas. than you probably ever wanted to as we get around the launch for that book. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. You want to submit your own voice questions for future habit tune up many episodes. You can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. I'll be back next week with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

And until then, as always, stay deep.