Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 54: Habit Tune-Up: Capture Tools, Getting Started, and Building Skills at Home

Episode Date: December 17, 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: -  Clarifying capturing and configuring. [2:09] -  Time blocking for teachers. [9:24] -  Starting from scratch on a hard professional challenge. [15:20] -  Building professional skills as a stay-at-home parent. [25:35] -  Bottom up versus top down when reorganizing your life. [32:04]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.

This podcast is brought to you in part by Magic Spoon. Now, in Monday's episode, I told you about Magic Spoon. It's an amazing tasting, treat-style cereal without all of the junk. So zero sugar, 11 grams of protein, only three net grams of carbs and eats serving. Now, Monday, I recommended that you use Magic Spoon as an escape, a dose of childhood nostalgia in these otherwise tough times. and in doing so I mentioned that frosted is objectively speaking clearly their best flavor.

Well, here's the thing. Some of you disagreed with that. All right, point taken. So I want to mention today that Magic Spoon has a solution to this cereal flavor argument that I am having with some of you about which of their flavors is best, and that solution is the variety pack.

You can now try all four of their main flavors. It comes in one pack. If you want to get that shipped to you for free, go to Magic Spoon.com slash Cal and use the promo code Cal. That's magic spoon.com slash cow and used to promo code Cal for free shipping on your variety pack so that you two can come to the clear realization that frosted is the best flavor. I'm Cal Newport and this is a deep questions, have it tune up mini episode. The format of these mini episodes is straightforward.

I answer voice questions on the nitty green. details of how to tune up your productivity habits. Only one quick announcement today. I need more voice questions. They are easy to submit. You can go to speakpipe.com slash calnewport. And you can record those voice questions right from your browser. It is quite easy.

All right, I have five good questions to dive into today during today's many episodes. So let's get after it. Hi, Cal, this is Sara. I'm a devoted listener and reader, and I think that what you do with this podcast is incredibly generous, so thank you. I have a question about the capture and configure system. What notebook do you use to carry around with you for the capture element of the process? I'm imagining that it's significantly smaller than the time block planner, which, by the way, I have and love. so I would really appreciate you telling us what you use for that. And then when do you configure? Do you do it at the end of the workday? Do you do it as part of your weekly planning? Thanks so much.

Sara, these are both good questions. Let's start with a question about capture. I actually do use my time block planner as my primary capture notebook. You'll notice in your data. pages that you have on the left-hand side, the tasks and ideas columns, that is for capturing. I like capturing there when I can because it's right below my shutdown complete checkbox, so I know when I'm writing something down on those pages that it will definitely get processed. If there's one thing, I do not like skipping, it is my shutdown ritual.

And when I do the shutdown ritual, I have to check off that box. And then check off that box, I have to confront what's on those capture pages. so I get a little bit of peace of mind. Now, it is a relatively big notebook, but for me, you know, I have it, if I'm at my HQ, I'll have it in my library, so I can just go in there and jot things down.

If I'm at home, you know, in the evening, I've talked about this before. I put it upstairs in our bedroom, so if I have an idea right before bed, I can capture it there. If I'm working elsewhere in the house, maybe it'll just be downstairs. So it's not necessarily literally on my person at all times,

but it is nearby. Now, I don't think it's a bad idea that if you're going to be on the move and maybe you're going to have ideas, so you're going to be, for whatever reason, out walking, out exercising, going in and out of stores, maybe your job has you on your feet

in such a way that you don't want to carry a time block planner with you. I think it's perfectly fine to have a smaller notebook. I've, in past times, have enjoyed those stino-style notebooks where the spirals are at the top. You can stick the pin.

right in there. There's a reason why reporters famously use those because they're portable. If I can capture a lot of information, you just have to make sure that you connect it to your shutdown ritual, that for sure when you shut down, you were going to look in that notebook and not miss any tasks. For those who are not quite sure what I'm talking about when I mention the time block planner or the capture pages, we have a good website for you, timeblockplanner.com. It explains all of those details. Now, I want to briefly mention, though, there are other capture tools I use, you should not forget physical capture. Letters that arrive in the mail, something someone gives you, like a business card that you need to then process into your contact system.

And for that, I literally use a plastic inbox. We have one at our house in the front foyer right next to the front door where the mail comes through the mail slot. I process that every day. Now what about emails or electronic things, things that come through, through electronic messages. Well, I think it's reasonable for your inbox itself, your electronic email inbox to be one of your capture inboxes. And then when you go through your email,

it is like you are processing the inbox. Now, the key thing here for email, though, is that you have to treat your plastic, I should say your electronic email inbox just like you would, the capture pages in your time block planner or a plastic physical inbox next to your door. It's not a storage system.

you don't store all of your bills and your paperwork you need for your taxes and the letter from your mortgage company. You don't store that permanently in the mail sorter next to your door. That's just where it goes until you get to it and then you file it somewhere else. Similarly, when you jot down an idea in a capture page for your time block planner, you don't just keep it there. And for the next two months, you have to turn back to December to 17th or what have you to keep track your test.

No, it's just there temporarily until you process it into a more permanent system. Think about your email digital inbox the same way. It's a great tray to collect things, but then once you read it, you have to process it and change it into something else. It should turn into a task that goes into your task system or an appointment or a reminder that goes on to your calendar or just go straight into the trash. So that's my only word of warning there. So you can have many different capture systems, but the time block planner is not a bad one to include in that arsenal. The other question you asked is, when do you configure? So as I talk about a lot on this show, my general philosophy on professional productivity is a capture, configure, control, trio of objectives and configures where you actually make sense of an organize and clarify the task that you have captured and put into your system.

As I talk about on this show, I tend to use Trello boards, one board per role. to do this organization. I would say, Sara, that during my weekly planning is when I do the most serious configuring. So I really go through those systems. I clarify things. I move things around. You know, I have a column on each of my Trello boards for To Do This Week. That's kind of an important configure step that happens during the weekly planning. It's also, though, when I clarify things. And maybe I'll throw out some tasks that I think aren't really that important or I'll combine things or I'll clarify things. And during that weekly planning, I look at every single card on every single board and make sure that I feel good about it. Now, I'll still mess around with this during the week,

but it's more, I would say, spot adjustment. So if I have a particular new thing that comes on my plate, I capture it, you know, I'll go into my system when I'm doing my shutdown routine or what have you, and I'll put it into a Trello board and I'll get to card right. So there's a little bit of configuring happening there. As things come in, I'm updating the board. As I finish things, I'm moving them off the board. When I'm waiting to hear back from someone about something, I'll put a card under waiting to hear back. And so I mess with the systems all throughout the week. That is really during my weekly plan that I touch every single card on every single board. My goal is coming out of the weekly plan is to have confidence in the week ahead so that I can execute. I can execute in the week of

the head without having to keep looking at everything. That when I build my daily plan, you know, I can look at my weekly plan, I can look at the, just a column of things to do this week on my trollo boards. I can really narrow in the energy I have to spend on the days that follow after my weekly plan. So that's really when I get the bulk of my configuring done. All right.

Speaking of the time block planner, let's do a question now about time blocking for teachers. Hey, Cal. I really love the work that you're doing. Thank you so much for the podcast. I've read two of your books so far working on more, but I've got deep work in digital misimilismism under the belt. I am a fifth grade teacher in Sacramento, California. And looking to geek out, as you say, on this time block planning,

I apologize, no Greek mythological references. Please don't banish me for that. But really, I have the time block planner. I started using a moleskin, you know, prior to you releasing yours. And I just, I don't know what really to time block. I mean, my day has spent, you know, 8 to 230. I'm teaching.

Is that deep work? Do I consider that deep work? Do I just time block my planning? Do I time block my 230 to four when I arbitrarily, you know, scream that my day has shut down? And I just time block that time. I don't know. Any guidance that you can provide would be super helpful. Well, you're for sure banished, but before you go, let me see if I can make some progress on your question.

So in its vanilla form, time block planning says that the first thing you do when constructing your daily time block plan is to add blocks for things that are already scheduled. So you go to your calendar, you say I'm at the dentist from 10 to 1130, let me block off that time. I have a meeting from 1 to 2.30. Let me block off that time. And then you look at what remains and make decisions about what you want to do with your time and attention during those remaining moments. Now, essentially, the issue you are bringing up is that for a fifth grade teacher, those already existing appointments is much of your day. Because for you, it's, look, I'm in the classroom here and I'm in the classroom there, and so much of your day is actually already spoken for.

So the question I think you're asking, is it still worth time block planning this all out? My instinct is yes, I would still follow the discipline. So, yeah, you have a lot of appointments. Maybe you're teaching from 9 to 11, and then there's a study period, and then you're teaching from one to two or whatever it is. You know, so block that out first. And then you will see clearly, here is the time that remains. Now, it might not be a ton of time,

but the time blocking is going to help you here make the most of it. It's going to, what's going to allow you to notice, for example, like, wow, I have very little time between nine and four. And so maybe I need to do something earlier in the morning. What do I want to do? What exactly do I want to get out of that time? or I have a one hour block for lunch and other things, and I want to be really strategic about get these two urgent tasks done during lunch

that makes the whole rest of the day work. The time block plan lets you do that. Maybe you end teaching at two and you want to end your day at five, and you're trying to figure out, okay, what do I get done during that time? And maybe you head home at some point in there. Now you can really be precise about that. Like do this one thing for a half hour, then head home before the traffic. And that gives me 90 minutes.

And during this 90 minutes, So let's spend one hour on this and 30 minutes on that. It really allows you to make the most with the most intention out of the time that remains. That's when you're looking at your time block plan that you might realize, shoot, I have to work late. Which is an unfortunate reality of a lot of people in education right now. So the way the loads work is that you can't avoid doing work at night. At least now you're facing the reality of here's how much time I actually have. Let me make the most out of it.

Now the one caveat I would give for you as a teacher is that the granularity at which you block your quote-unquote appointments, I think you can make that rougher. So if I'm just a business person and I have meetings from nine to noon on a particular day, I'm going to put on my time block plan each of those meetings, what time to start, what time to end. But if I'm a fifth grade teacher and I'm teaching from nine to noon and it's the exact same, schedule every day. It's home room, it's math instruction, it's taking the kids to PE, it's social studies, whatever it is. If it's the exact same schedule every day, I don't think you need to get real detailed in that 9 to 12 block about what's happening when because it's completely ingrained as

habits. You can just put one big block. 9 to 12. Just label it, you know, morning teaching schedule. So that's what I would recommend. Still time block plan. You can capture the regularly a appointments to take up most of your time with just big course blocks. But the key here is to be so intentional and clear about this is what actually remains. And it might not be a lot. It might make you uncomfortable to see how little time actually remains. It might make you shake your fist metaphorically a little bit at the powers that be that have put so much on your plate outside of just your standard teaching and preparation, but you see it. You can make a very intentional plan about how to make the most out of your time, and I want to add when to shut down.

I do like to hear that you yell at the top of your lungs when do your shutdown routine. I know you're being facetious, but I kind of secretly hope that you're not. I think that'd be funny. You get all those benefits by actually making a plan for the day. So that's what I say. Build the plan, even though whatever it's going to be for you, 75% of it is going to be predetermined, getting the most out of that 25% and knowing when that 25% is done, that is a benefit still worth fighting for. All right, let's do a question now about how to get started on a brand new,

difficult, professional endeavor. Hi, Kel. This is Janice, and I'm just starting a PhD program. I wanted to ask you, what is your process of starting something new that is unfamiliar to you? I find myself feeling like I need to study all the study habits, read all your blogs, listen to all your podcast, take down every single idea and have to implement it. And I don't know how to overcome that mindset. So I'm very curious to know how you approach learning something new and again, implementing that process of accretion to become an expert. Thank you. Well, Janice, first of all, yeah, I do not recommend reading everything I've ever written and listening to everything I've ever recorded. I think by the time you finish that, you would be so burnt out on productivity

thinking that you would say, screw it, you'd quit your PhD program and become a TikTok influencer. So with that warning in mind, I do think your underlying question here is good. You're asking, how do I start from scratch conquering a new professional challenge or endeavor or job? Because it does seem overwhelming. There's so many things that seem relevant, how do you avoid burning out on too much information? Well, my advice is to start. Start with a planning foundation that injects intention, clarity, and accountability into your professional life. On that foundation, you can experiment. You can make decisions. You can make some wrong decisions. Let's try this. Let's put this skill. Let's try to learn this new skill. All of those types of high-level decisions about skills to master pursuits to go after. They're all controlled and structured if you have an underlying foundation of accountability. of clarity. So what is that underlying foundation? Quarterly, weekly, daily planning.

That is what you want to start with. You know, now you're a PhD program, so you'll use the term semester is probably more relevant than quarterly. You should probably do fall, spring, summer. Same idea, though. What am I doing in the fall semester? What am I doing in the spring semester? You have a big picture plan. This is what I'm working on. Here is my goals. And then every week you make a plan for your every day you time block plan your hours for the day. This gives you control and intention behind your actions. It's very easy, in particular as a PhD student, to spin your wheels. I've talked about this on this program before.

It's weird being a PhD student because in many ways your job is easier than normal jobs and in other ways it's harder. And this has a way of short-circuiting people's brains. So they do a lot of make work because they feel like, I don't have enough things to be busy about. And so they spin their wheels and make. work so they don't feel guilty. But on the other hand, being a PhD student is very hard because you have less things to do, but they're intellectually more demanding. Intention is key. Here's my plan

for the week. Let me make a plan for today based off that weekly plan. I'm going to time block, study for this here, read this here, exercise here, go to this talk, get out ahead, you know, on this paper due in three weeks. Let's get started and look at some sources today. Shut down by five. Lay that foundation, you're 80% of the way there. Now, on top of that foundation, in your semester plans and then percolating down to your weekly and daily plans, you can have various objectives that you're working on. So if you're a new PhD student, assuming you still have coursework to do, that is you're not coming in after finishing a master's that takes care of most of your coursework. Your focus at first is probably mainly getting your study skills where they need to be being on top of your schedule. So work is getting done ahead of time.

you're not letting things pile up until right before the deadline. So that's probably what you're working on in the spring. That's probably what you're working on in the fall for the first year or two. It's just let's get my study skills up. Let's have a good schedule. This is a time that you might read some of my study hacks blog archives from 2007 to 2010. In particular, you'll see a lot on just scheduling and study skills and how to break up work. You might find a little bit of value in my book, How to Become a Straight A Student.

you know, but maybe you're starting there. I would also probably recommend as a PhD student having in your semester plan some sort of regular reading discipline. So you're getting in the habit of mastering literatures or picking up skills pretty early on. After a year or so, I would say you're going to turn your focus towards mastering research.

And again, this all gets captured in your semester plan. Every week you look at that plan. The plans of living documents. You can come back and adjust this as things work and things. You can experiment. You've got flexibility. This didn't work. Let me try this.

I have a new approach. I'm going to try to get this research done. Every hour, every morning for two hours, I'm going to try writing. Like, whatever it is. You can experiment, but you have the foundation. I plan my semester. I used that to plan my week. I used that to plan my day.

So what I'm trying to get out, I don't get too much into the weeds of being a successful PhD student. I want to be a little bit more general here for our listeners in general. And this is what I'm trying to get at. that. If you have a foundation in which you're planning with intention, how you direct your time, how you direct your attention. If you have that foundation, now you just have a steady base on which to try lots of different experiments, lots of different initiatives, some that will work, some that won't without feeling burnt out, because you say I'm an organized, structured person who is always trying out some things to see what sticks and what does it. So Janice, I hope that

is useful, but I hope more generally it's useful for everyone else. semester, weekly, daily time block planning. On that foundation, you can comfortably experiment with a lot of other strategies, habits, and ideas. Our next question is about building professional skills during a period in which you are staying home to take care of your kids. Before we get to that question, however, I wanted to briefly talk about optimize. Now, on Monday, I told you about Optimize. It's a subscription service that combines ancient wisdom with modern science to help you make the best version of yourself. When you sign up, you get access to over 600 book summaries.

Written by Brian Johnson, the founder, the CEO, the chief philosopher of Optimize, also a longtime friend of mine. You get videos every day. You get accesses also to courses on key topics, including a course I taught on digital minimalism. I forgot to mention on Monday, however, that there is a discount available. If you go to optimize.me slash deep, you can get 10% off your subscription. That's optimize. That's optimize.me slash deep. Also, as I mentioned on Monday, if you are very serious about kicking off a new and better

version of yourself, you should consider Optimize's 300-day coaching program. This program is no joke. there is serious research that shows that the people who go through this program really see big changes. You can find out more about that coaching program. The next class of which starts January 1st, so your time is short. You can find out more about that at Optimize.me slash coach dash letter. That's Optimized.me slash coach dash letter. If you end up signing up for the coach program, let them know A, Cal sent you, and B,

that Cal's Deep Work HQ office is clearly superior to Brian's in the woods outdoor office. If you don't know what that means, it's a bit of an insider reference. You'll have to go back and listen to some past episodes, but Brian will know what it means. So let him know you're on team DeepWork HQ. I also want to take a moment to talk about Headspace.

Now, as I mentioned on Monday's episode, Headspace is the guided meditation app, 600,000 five-star reviews, 60 million downloads, 25 published studies on its effectiveness. It's the gold standard. This app will guide you through mindfulness-style meditations. If you're a beginner, you do short ones. If you get better, they can guide you on longer ones. And the cool thing here is that the app can have particular goals that you are pursuing

with your meditation. Maybe you're trying to reduce news-related anxiety. Maybe you're trying to help fall asleep. They can guide you. What I forgot to mention on Monday is they have guided meditation specifically for focus to help you clear your mind so that you can focus more intensely on a difficult deep work style challenge. I have been experimenting with the focus meditations, I think they're onto something here. You know, guys, we don't think enough. And I talk about this all the time. We do not think enough about the psychology and neuroscience behind actually doing high-level

elite knowledge work. We sort of just go after it. We have slack open and email and we're looking at our phone and trying to produce something creative, produce something original, produce something high quality at the same time. We got to get more serious about taking care of our brains if we want our brains to take care of us professionally, so I was very excited to see Headspace have focused boosting meditations in their app. I think they are onto something big there. So if you want to try out Headspace, you can go to Headspace.com slash questions. That's headspace.com slash questions

to get a free one-month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every situation, including boosting your focus. That's the best deal. You're going to find anywhere right now, that's headspace.com slash questions. And speaking of questions, let's get back to the episode. Hi, Cal, thank you so much for your podcast. It's one of the podcasts I look forward to listening to as soon as it comes out. My question has to do with what habit to choose for craft. And I'm finding it difficult to find an activity that's hard enough, but not too difficult to make it a regular habit daily. My current situation is I'm staying at home to take care of my two-year-old daughter.

I'm planning to transition into working in two to three years. We have another child coming on the way. And through this time, whatever free time I have available, I want to take some time to develop some skills. So I've tried some activities, but either it seems too hard or too easy. Either it's too easy to move the needle or, you know, I'm having trouble finding that sweet spot.

Well, in general, it is very difficult to build, up useful professional skills entirely in the abstract. Now, what I mean by this is the situations in which I think it is easiest and most effective to build up a particular rare and valuable skill is when you're right there. You're in a particular job and you have clear evidence that if I could learn this, I could tackle this type of project and I would get this benefit. or you want to get a very specific job. And you realize, you know, if I knew how to do this system would really help me.

I've talked to someone there. I know having this very concrete skill would help me get this very concrete job. That's the environment in which it's easier to get real motivation to keep working on something. But more importantly, it's a situation where you have enough specificity to actually effectively learn. I'm learning this because I know it's useful. I have contours around this and I can really get after it and learn to skill.

When you're operating entirely in the abstract, when you're saying, I plan to go back into the workforce three years from now. So let me just get some skills dusted off. It's just really difficult ask. Your brain is pretty good at saying, why are we doing this? Where's our evidence that this Coursera course

we're taking is actually going to have a payoff? It's also really hard to identify, as you're pointing out. it's really hard to identify the right skills to get better at when you don't have clear concrete feedback that's right there in front of you. You know, again, this skill is going to get me this position. I talk to someone at this company, this is important. Or I'm, you know, a reporter working for this newspaper. And if I could master this type of economic reporting, I could get on this beat. Without that specificity, it's just really hard to figure out what to work on. So what I'm

basically suggesting here is I'm sort of letting you off the hook, saying at this moment, when you're taking care of a two-year-old, at this moment when you have a new baby on this way, at this moment in which you're maybe three years away from going back to the job force, maybe right now is not going to be the most effective time to be trying to invest energy sort of abstractly into skills you might think are useful in the future. I mean, when we're talking about the craft bucket, you mentioned craft. So when you're talking about like the craft bucket, that element of life. I mean, right now a lot of craft is trying to keep a family together and running.

It's complicated and a really demanding job. And really, you know, this is something that requires a lot of energy and a lot of focus. So I don't want you to feel guilty that you need to be learning about computer programming at the same time. That being said, I also want you to get very aggressive about building. building up relevant skills as it gets appropriate. And so when you start thinking about heading back to the workforce, you know, I'm going to suggest that you get very concrete. You begin to identify these are the options I'm thinking about

for how I want to reenter the workforce. I'm going to talk to people. I'm going to talk to people in these type of positions at these organizations. I'm going to get real evidence about what's valuable and what's not. I'm going to get real feedback about what's the biggest hurdle I will have to leap, maybe because I've been out of the workforce for three years, or I've been out of the workforce for four years. What are they going to be nervous about? How can I address that?

So what I'm going to suggest on the flip side here is that right now, when you're many years away from reintering to workforce, you kind of back off the let me just work on generic skills, you focus on other aspects of life. But as you get closer to reintering to workforce, you've got to get really concrete. What's valuable, what's not? If I want this job, what's the biggest thing in my way? What could I do in the next six months? What would I have to do in the next year? What would I have to do in the next six weeks to overcome that particular objection?

And then you allow this sort of concrete feedback to give you really clear guidance on let me master this skill, let me master this system, let me master this information. And you're going to find it much easier because it's, A, it's going to be a lot more specific. You know, what you're trying to get better at will be a very specific thing. and B, you're going to have way more motivation because you're going to have concrete evidence that mastering this statistical tool is going to get me this job three months from now, and I really want that job. So in general, I guess that's my point for the listeners more broadly than just this particular situation. Don't underestimate the difficulty of trying to all on your own identify and polish professional skills.

So you want to be pretty picky about when and how you do that. But on the flip side, you also want to be incredibly focused and aggressive once you do get good evidence that this is a skill that matters for what I want to do. Then you have to go in, all in, after it. All right, I think we have time for one more question. Let's do one on different philosophies for organizing your life. Hi, Cal. My name is Levan. I am a PhD student in cognitive.

of neuroscience and my question is about organizing one's life from a top-down versus bottom-up approach. This is a question that David Allen discussed in his book, getting things done. There he recommended taking a bottom-up approach at first, which means developing personal organization skills in order to capture, clarify, and deal with everything that comes up in life and be organized, such that you later have time and mental capacity to deal with bigger issues, such as what are you generally about in this life, or your principles, your ethics, your career goals, are you actually doing what you'd like to be doing, et cetera? I'm curious as to what you recommend for somebody who is, let's say, about to start resetting

their life and getting things together. Well, I think David Allen is right. Generally speaking here, if you do not have a foundation that gives you intention and clarity over what you're doing with your time, it is very difficult to do anything else effectively. So earlier in this episode, I talked about this, where I said, what you want to start with is semester, weekly, daily planning. and let that be the foundation on which everything else in building it more organized, a more effective, and a deeper life. Let that be a foundation on which all of that is built. That answer applies here as well.

Now, what I'm going to further suggest, because it sounds like from your question that you're doing a pretty big reset, what I'm going to further suggest is that when you have this semester or quarterly plan, however you want to build it up, that you actually bifurcate that into two, plans, one for your professional life, and one for your life outside of work. So that when you do

your weekly planning, you were looking at both your professional and non-professional quarterly or semester plan, and then you look at that weekly plan when you do your daily time block planning. This allows you simultaneously to begin working on optimizing and improving your approach to your professional life, while you are also optimizing and improving your approach to life outside of work. Now, what you get out of having this foundation of multi-level planning is a structure in place

in which you can say, this is what I'm trying. You know, maybe in my professional life, I am trying to get my productivity game sharpened. And so I'm going into capture, configure control-style productivity, and that's what I'm focused on this quarter, I have my time block planner going. I'm using Trello for my configure. I have a few habits I'm trying to do where I, you know, I do a shutdown routine every day. I do a weekly plan. You know, whatever it is, right. So maybe you have that going on. Or if you're a, you mentioned you're a PhD student. Maybe you're a late stage PhD student. So, you know, in your professional quarterly or semester plan, you are really aggressively trying to get your research productivity up higher and you have things you're experimenting with. And then maybe over in your personal life, you're like, I'm really trying to exercise more. And so I have. have my quarterly plan this experiment that's, you know, every morning I'm going to walk 10,000 steps and do a calisthenic workout. Or you are trying to, in your evenings, you're working on

building up a high quality leisure skill just for the appreciation of it, or whatever it is, right? But the point is when you have these plans at these multiple scales, you have a structure in which you can actually have these experiments specified. You will see them. You will know why you're doing them. They will be integrated into your weekly plan and that weekly plan will put them into your daily plan. So once you have the structure of quarterly, weekly, daily plans in place, you can actually start working on really cool things in your professional and personal life. If you don't have that structure in place, you're just randomly, you're randomly trying things. And you hope you don't forget and you hope you don't lose steam. So that is my answer here is start with that planning

because you're starting from scratch with lots of aspects of your life, have two separate quarterly or semester plans, one for your professional life, one for your personal life. And the pressure is now, it's off a little bit. You might not get it perfect.

Your first swings at getting a capture, configure control system in place, or your first swings at getting your research productivity higher. Maybe they fail, so you try some other things. But the key thing is, you're coming back to these multi-level plans day after day, week after week,

quarter after quarter, so that you are going to keep trying and documenting and adjusting and learning from your past habits. The same thing in your personal life. Maybe you're going through, you know, the deep life transformation style steps I often talk about. You have your buckets. You have your keystone habits. You're working on optimizing different parts of your life. You know, you don't have to get it right as long as you have a structure that means you're going to keep trying to get after it.

That when one thing fails, you see it fails and you update your quarterly plan and do something. something else. Something sticks, you say, okay, I'm going to make this into a permanent habit. So that's my answer. Alan is right in the general sense here, that without an organized structure, it's very hard to make progress on the big picture things that really matter. One other piece of advice I would give you is when it comes to this plan for your life outside of work, carry a small notebook with you, like a moleskin or a Fields Note, field note notebook where you can take notes exclusively on the deep life. This resonates, this doesn't. I like this idea that I one day live by the water like a monk. I want to spend more time socializing.

I was inspired when I saw this documentary because of X. When you're in this early stage of trying to figure out how to optimize your life more generally, it's good to have a place to collect your thoughts. And you can just review that notebook when you review your quarterly or semester plans. and it will help inform those plans. So that's a little hack. That's something I started doing in grad school. And it has been and continues to be a key habit for me in terms of just making sure that I am capturing my evolving thoughts on what life should be.

So I will give you that hack. But again, the foundation here, quarterly, weekly, daily, quarterly, weekly, daily. Get intentional and clear about what you're working on, when you're working on and why you're working on it. and then the rest of the details will sort of sort of sort itself out as you learn more, try more, and get more experience with the quest to build an effective, productive, deeper life. All right, that is all the time we have for today's Habit, Tune Up mini episode.

If you want to submit your own voice question for future habit tune up many episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Tal Newport. If you want to help this podcast grow, please subscribe or leave a review that really does help. We will be back on Monday with our next full-length episode of deep questions. And until then, as always, stay deep.