Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 56: Habit Tune-Up: Escaping Academic Twitter, Time Blocking During Vacation, and Making Time for Big Projects

Episode Date: December 23, 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: - Using task boards to plan big projects. [2:49]  - Academic Twitter. [8:31] - Time block breaks + Workflowy vs Trello. [13:04] - Deep work while traveling. [19:46] - Setting aside time for big projects. [26:02]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 episode of the Deep Questions podcast is brought to in part by PolicyGenius. I mentioned on Monday's episode that PolicyGenius saves their users on average $1,000 a year on their insurance. I want to tell you briefly a little bit more about how they do that. You go to PolicyGenius.com. You answer some questions about your property. You answer some questions about your car. they go out there and look at over 30 major insurers to see, can we get you a better deal? A licensed expert helps you find bundles that could make those savings even more.

They come back to you, they say, here's what we can do. Here's exactly how much money you would save. If you like the number, they help you switch for free. It's a simple way to potentially save a lot of money. So if you're feeling the pinch, you want to find out how much you could save on home and auto insurance, go to policygenious.com. Remember, they've saved their home and auto insurance customers an average of $1,000 a year by reshopping. Policy Genius when it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions, habit tune up mini episode.

The format of these mini episodes, as you know, is that I answer voice questions from my listeners, where we dive into the nitty, gritty details of tuning up. their productivity habits. Two quick announcements. Number one, we need more voice questions. I'm actually running quite low on the questions I use for these many episodes. This is your chance to cut to the front of the line to get a question answered on one of my podcast.

Go to speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. You can record your audio questions straight from your browser. That's speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. Questions that are about details, sort of nitty-gritty details are preferred. If you can keep it under a minute, that helps. But right now I'm down to a week or two's worth of questions. So again, it's a good chance to cut to the front of the line in terms of getting one of your questions on the show. Second announcement is that I am releasing this episode.

You may have noticed a day early. I believe the normal release date would have been Christmas Eve. I figured people might have been a little bit occupied that day, so I would release this episode a little bit earlier. This also gives, of course, Santa Claus something to listen to while he loads his sleigh. All right, enough announcements. Let's get started with our first question. Hi, Cal, thank you so much for all of your tools and suggestions. They've made a tremendous difference for me. I have a question about how to effectively use boards to maintain a 30,000-foot view of my various projects and their statuses. If I understand correctly, you use Trello

with a board for each role in your life and then an agile style setup to show the status of tasks and projects. I use workflow-y in a similar way, although my goal is to have a meta board or a board of boards that shows the status of tasks and projects from a variety of obligations and projects and roles. I wonder if you do a similar thing or if you simply have multiple boards

and then collect your to-dos in paper form on your top. time block schedule. Any suggestions you have or clarifications about how you specifically track what's next across many rules and projects would be greatly appreciated. Well, this is a good question because it's asking about a productivity technology that we haven't discussed a lot, which is the ability to create different views of your task landscape. So for example, what's being asked here is how do you create a setup where maybe you have tasks. that are living on lists associated with different roles and associated with different projects within those roles. But what you want in the moment is to pull out tasks from all those different

roles and all those different projects that are, let's say, urgent or things that need to be done soon. So this notion of having tasks that can be shown in multiple different context, this was really at the core of omnifocus. So omnifocus, which rose to popularity, during the early 2000s, this was the main thing it was offering, the ability to have tasks that were labeled with

many different, we could call them tags. I don't know if that's the official term that Omnifocus uses. And then you could construct views. Well, show me all the tasks now in all my various list. Show me all the tasks

that are both urgent and involve phone calls. And boom, you create a view just of those tasks. Or show me all the tasks that are, you know, associated with meetings I have to do and are due within the next week.

And boom, it'll create a new list showing you just those tasks. So this was a really big push in productivity technology in the early 2000s, this idea that you have almost like a database of obligations with different attributes. You could create complex views of this data and somehow this would help you, it would help you be more productive. I don't do a ton of that. I do a little bit, but not a ton of that. So let me get more specific.

So in Workflowee, you can approximate this type of behavior in a way that I think is quite simple and quite intuitive. You can add hashtags to any task you want. You literally put like the hash sign and then a label like hash urgent or whatever. And then if you click on one of those tags, it will automatically show you just the entries that have that hashtag. So I do use this as I'll like. elaborate in a question later in the episode, I use workflow still for non-professional tasks. And what I do is I will hashtag during my weekly review. I will hashtag things I want to get done that week. I'll use the hashtag usually urgent or maybe this week. And then each day when I want

to figure out, oh, what household or non-professional tasks that I work on, I'll just click on that hashtag and it just shows me the things I selected as being relevant for that week. So that's a simple version of this recontextualization. Trello doesn't really do that at all. So, you know, most of my professional tasks are in Trello. As you mentioned, I have a board for each role, and within each role, I have a column for different statuses. What I actually do there is I do this manually. I create a column on every board for what I want to get done during the current week, and I physically move cards to those different columns. And on purpose, I only want to be using one board at a time. I don't want to pull in

urgent tasks or tasks to do this week from all of my different roles and mix them together. I like to keep my different roles separate. I think psychologically that helps. So say, okay, now this morning I'm doing writing stuff. What writing stuff is on my plate? Okay, now this afternoon I'm doing professor stuff. What like administrative professor work is on my plate. I actually want to keep those things separate. So I just manually create list each week of what I want to get

done, and I keep those lists within individual roles. So those are your options there. You can use a tool like Omnifocus if you want something really complex. I think modern productivity hackers are now using things like Airtable More, they're essentially building custom database systems. I had a whole thing about this in one of my New Yorker articles recently that we cut it for space. But I went down this whole rabbit hole of Airtable and you build these databases of stuff in your life and it automatically generates views. And I think that's where a lot of the productivity hacker, productivity pran energy is right now. If you use workflow 8, you can use the hashtags to create some simple recontextualizations. If you're using Trello with boards for roles, I don't think you want to

pull task off of those roles. You want to keep tasks within those contexts. So you will do things more manually. All right. Let's move on to a question now about a topic I always enjoy talking about, which is the role of Twitter in academic life. Hi, my name is Jane. I'll be starting an assistant professorship in an area of climate science next summer. My question is about Twitter and especially academic Twitter. I followed a lot of your advice with regard to social media. It's been helpful in streamlining my productivity.

But the one thing I have trouble getting out of is academic Twitter, as I'm often asked to advertise conference sessions I'm organizing or papers I've been part of or use it to try to find grad students. So I'm trying to figure out if there's a way I can remove myself from it and still do my job just as well or better. The main problem I have with it is if I'm trying to sit down and get my work done. If I do check academic Twitter, what I find is I can get distracted by feelings of competition or stress that I'm not getting enough done. quickly enough. So any advice would be very helpful. Thank you. Well, Jane, first of all, congratulations on the new job. Landing an assistant professorship into sciences is never an easy

task, so congratulations on that. To talk about Twitter in particular, you mentioned three reasons why you thought it was potentially useful for you to be using Twitter, advertising papers, advertising conferences, and finding graduate students. My take on this is that none of those three reasons are nearly important enough to justify, I would say, the negative aspects of being on academic Twitter as a new assistant professor. Those three activities you've described are activities that professors have been doing for decades and decades. Twitter has only been widely used for whatever it is now seven or eight years. People will still find good papers even if you're not tweeting about it.

People find out about conferences not just from Twitter, but through professional correspondence. And of course, the way you find graduate students, it has to do with the admissions process at your university. They're not just coming in over the transom for the most part via Twitter. So I would, if I was you, I would significantly cut down my Twitter use. I would take it off my phone. Like one hack I might give you is so that you don't have to bother explaining to people that you don't use Twitter.

Keep your account. And if people say, can you advertise this conference or advertise our paper? Send out a tweet, sure. Just don't go on there. Don't interact with people. Don't read other people's tweets. Don't follow other people's feeds. I would put my head down and focus as an assistant professor on writing papers that get cited.

They get published in the best possible places and get as much. citations as possible. That is the foundation of assistance professorship is establishing your ability, establishing your ability to make an impact in the research literature. So that's what I would do. I think a lot of academic Twitter, I mean, maybe this has been a little bit cynical, I think a lot of academic Twitter is just academics feeling good about themselves. It sort of makes them feel like there's an audience out there that really cares. It's more gratifying, just more immediate feedback to getting those likes and those retweets from other people. It just feels better than the really slow, quiet process of publishing papers and having to wait two years to see how much they get cited.

But as I've talked about before, it is that slower work that really is the main work of the professor. And I really do worry about the distracting potential of Twitter, not just that it's going to fragment your attention, but it also psychologically, as you noted, is going to make you feel bad. It's going to give you sort of envy. The other thing I've noticed from, heavy academic Twitter users is they also get really angry. You know, Twitter presses certain buttons that makes people angry. Those buttons are really sensitive and really smart people in particular. And you're sitting around angry all the time.

A, that's really bad for your mental health. And B, that's really going to cut down your ability to actually apply your expertise to produce new ideas and papers that can move a field forward. So that would be my advice. Significantly cut back on Twitter. turn your attention to the slower, the harder, but ultimately more satisfying and impactful work of serious academic publication. All right, moving on here, we have a question that gets back into the weeds of productivity geekery. Hi, Dr. Newport. This is Dennis from Germany. I have two

questions for you. One is about time blocking. The other one is about your past productivity these systems. So, so with the first one, due to the coronavirus and the holidays, I'm off work, as a fire engineer in a consulting firm for the next three weeks. But I'm also doing my master's thesis in this time. So my question is, should I time block this time? Besides, it's like private holiday time or shouldn't I do this and just work my way through the thesis parts I still have to get done. Second question is about your past productivity systems. So I've recently seen a video where you speak of your usage of workflowy and from 2019 I think. And I started using workflowy afterwards and it really suits my needs for my project work as an engineer.

I really like it. I also tried Trello like already two times. Kind of liked it but I just didn't stick. So my question is, do you still use workflow as a backup system somehow? Or do you think like Trello is the non-plus ultra solution for every productivity question? Well, Dennis, I'll start with your first question. In general, I think it's good when you are on some sort of vacation or other type of reduced workload period. I think it is good to modify your productivity system. to be less intense. Seasonality is important. I think a lot of jobs don't have seasonality.

Those that do, so you have slow periods and then more busy periods. I think it's better for the natural rhythms of our brain. It can prevent burnout. And so I would probably in your situation, not time block every day in the way you would during any normal work. We put on the other hand, maybe not have it be complete vacation where you do very little. I would do something in between, have some sort of simplified structure for your vacation period

where you're making progress most days. You know, and by I say most days, you might put aside actual pure vacation surrounding, let's say, Christmas. Most days you're doing some work. Maybe one thing major, a little bit of admin work, maybe you have a clean shutdown, but I just, I finish by 11 a.m.

or I finish by noon and then I take the afternoon off, or whatever you want to do. Have some sort of structure, but you can keep it a little looser, maybe something you don't time block, just like I work in the morning, I check my email and try to work on one thing

and then go for a walk and then switch over to family stuff, whatever you want to do. Keep it simpler and catch a little breather. I mean, I certainly do this. So professors, one of the great thing about Professor Life is that there is a lot of seasonality. So for example, December for my university's academic schedule, it really runs down, calms down in early December.

So you sort of have like you have, have here, Dennis, three weeks of much less work, and I really do try to rain it in. I don't completely time block every day. I switch from my metric of checking my to-does every morning, and at the end of every day, I simplify that and just check it once a day. I lower the bar for my shutdown ritual. I, you know, I have a few heuristics for like when I work and et cetera, etc, but I bring it in. I don't stop working, but I rain it in. And then typically when classes start back up in January,

then I get back to full time block planning. The summer is similar. I switch to a summer schedule over the summer. I work a lot during the summer, but not as much as during the school year, and I tend to switch towards more restrained work schedules. I tend to end my day earlier and have more light days, etc. the pandemic has made the seasonality psychologically little more difficult

because one of the clear signals I had for normal versus reduced periods was going into campus. Right. So during the semester, it's, well, I'm going into campus to teach, I'm going into campus to do meetings, I'm going into campus for student gatherings. And then when you got to a break, like December break or the summer, there's a clear change where you don't go to campus anymore. And so you had a clear cue that you're in a different state. Now, in the pandemic in which my university has been largely virtual,

these divisions aren't so clear because I'm at home anyways. And so it takes a little bit more effort to remind and convince myself that we are changing modes. But I think seasonality is good if you are able to do it. And so I'm glad I had a chance to talk about that point more generally. Now, to get to your second question about productivity systems, I do use Workflowee in addition to Trello. I use both tools. I use Workflowee, as I mentioned earlier, for non-professional tasks, and I use Trello boards

for my various professional roles. I like both tools. If you're finding a lot of success with Workflowie, I think it's absolutely fine to keep working it and keep using it. I have heard, for example, that project managers, like not really complicated big project managers where you have specialized software, but people who are managing smaller projects like workflowy, some of the collapsible list and tagging, I guess they find to be particularly suitable for certain project management strategy. So I think it's completely fine to use it.

The reason I use Trello for professional things, I would say, is because often I have tasks, which are represented as cards, in which there's a lot of accompanying information. and I like in Trello that I can flip the card and paste in full emails and attached files and do that type of thing. Now, you can do this in workflow where you can just indent under a task and write lots information and then just collapse that bullet and not see it when you don't want to see it. But I just think there's something cleaner to have this information standalone on a card. Also, I got in the habit of using Trello. I started using it a year and a half ago when I was early in my role as a, director of graduate studies at Georgetown because it was easy for me to share my board with other people.

So other people, you know, my program manager, we could share the same board and sort of see what was going on. It has good features for that. But you know, they're both great. So whichever one is working with you, I would say go for it. All right. Moving on, let's go to a question that hasn't been relevant recently, but hopefully will be relevant again soon. Hi, Cal. This is Emily. I'm a social scientist in California. And my question is regarding a new job that I'll be starting, that once it's safe to do so, will require a fair amount of travel. In the past, I've often been thrown off my deep work game when I'm traveling for work and when my schedule is quite a bit different than a normal life. So my question is in, you know, sort of normal non-COVID. life, do you pause your deep work efforts when traveling? I know that you often go on book tours,

conferences, lectures, or if you do still engage in deep work when doing this traveling, do you change your process or when you do it? I mentioned my schedule is often thrown off for things like air travel, catching up with friends at conferences, giving presentations and lectures. So any tips on keeping the deep life while traveling would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Emily, I do continue to do deep work when I travel. I find plane rides to be conducive for thinking. I bring my notebooks with me in my carry-on bag because I'm often trying to get things done in airports. I've done work roaming up and down the terminals while I'm waiting for my flight to board. I also make a point of when I travel to interesting places to get out on foot and walk and to explore the cities.

And I will do deep work on foot. While I do that, I do deep work in the hotel rooms, conferences. I'm often working on problems in the back row. So I do a lot of deep work when I'm traveling. I sometimes find traveling to be even more conducive for deep work because it's different. You're a different location. It's a different routine. you feel some dispensation to not spend as much time on email and other shallow work,

so your mind's a little bit fresher. All that being said, it's a little bit catch as catch can. So I'm not super structured about it, and I'm not super strict about it, because as you say, it can be unpredictable. Maybe the security line is long. Though I will say I have indeed worked on proofs with a handheld notebook while in the security line at Dolis International Airport here in D.C., but, you know, whatever. Or you're at your conference and some friends of yours like, hey, we're going to go grab

lunch or do whatever and you were planning to do some workup in your hotel room and you do that instead. Like, all of this happens. So I'm not super strict about it. I don't have like a very careful schedule for here's what I'm going to do on this trip. But in general, I do associate travel with a nice chance to actually get some interesting work done in interesting circumstances. And so, you know, I would say the more that you can take advantage of the uniqueness of the physical locations you're in to help induce states of depth or to

get new creative insight, I would do that. Try to make deep work a part of every day, but don't be too hard on yourself about how much of that deep work you do, how effective it is, or attempting to schedule that too much in advance. I want to take a moment to talk about another one of this week's sponsors, and that is My Body Tutor. As I mentioned Monday, my body tutor was founded by Adam Gilbert, who back in 2007 used to guest post on my study hacks blog. He was my health and fitness guru. He would help give advice to students about how to get into better shape. So I've known him for a long time, which means I can say with confidence that this company is doing something The whole idea with My Body Tutor is that you are given a coach and it's 100% online,

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motion this three months free for any three month plan, go to mintmobile.com slash deep. That's mintmobile.com slash deep. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month. Get three free months at mintmobile.com slash deep. Our final question concerns how much time you need to put aside to work on a really demanding project. Hi, Cal. My name's Nevik. and I'm doing a PhD in political science on a part-time basis. I've been doing that since 2013, and I also work part-time in my own business. I've really enjoyed doing my PhD research, reading widely, attending international conferences, and producing a podcast in my field, amongst other things.

My thesis is due in at the end of 2021, so I've taken your advice and withdrawn from all of my extracurricular activities so I can focus on writing. I'll still need to work part-time, but my main focus in 2021 will be completing the partially written chapters, finalising my analysis and writing up my empirical work. Whilst I use time block planning, I'm used to moving between multiple different areas daily, and I usually work in maximum blocks of two hours. I'm thinking it will be a challenge to be focusing only on one or two broad areas each day and maybe needing to do deep work for longer periods. I'm hoping you can give me some advice.

both practically and psychologically to focus my time and attention on getting my thesis written. So my concern here is that you might actually be inflating to some degree the challenge ahead of you in completing this thesis. I think this is quite common because it seems like a very large thing. It's very quite common among people who are approaching their thesises to think of this as something that's going to need most of their free time, that they're going to have to read. that they're going to have to really clear their schedule, that this is going to be, you know,

most of the day, all day they'll be working on the thesis. And I'm going to encourage you to perhaps abandon that mindset. I think probably what you need is two hours a day, maybe first thing in the day, most days, occasionally having to go more, if there's a push that's going to require more consecutive hours, maybe you have to go down a research rabbit hole, or you're trying to wrangle a chapter

and it's better just to keep going while all the ideas are still in your head. But I think most days, two hours a day with some sort of structure in place to help you get accountability, so this could be maybe a more regular series of check-ins with your advisors or joining a writing group just to make sure that you don't procrastinate

too much on the work. That should be sufficient for getting a thesis done. And I'm saying this coming from experience just because I've heard from and worked with lots of different people who have written dissertations under lots of different circumstances, and the two-hour daily rule seems to be pretty consistently sufficient, again, with occasional harder-push days, but seems to be pretty much that right balance of regular progress, but not also burning yourself out or overloading yourself with work. So when you see your thesis writing this way,

it seems a little bit less formidable. And when you see it as something that's a little bit less formidable, like a part of your day, something you do in the morning, and then move on to other things, you're actually better able to make progress. There can be something paralyzing when you take a project like writing a thesis or writing a book and you make it into this big thing that can't possibly get done unless it's your main focus, unless it's where you put all of your time. There can be something paralyzing about that. You say, I don't want to take that on.

It's hard to get started. It's easy to write off days completely. if it quickly becomes clear that this is not a day that you can give all of your time to the project. And you can paradoxically actually slow down your progress by trying to put more emphasis on the project. So that's what I'm going to recommend here, two hours a day unless you need to go longer, accountability structures in place. You know, my own personal experience is I was writing a book at the same time I was writing my thesis. And I kind of downgraded the thesis writing as just like this is how I start my day.

and that was sufficient. I've also, because I write books at the same time, I'm a professor, all throughout my career as a professor, I usually have a book. I mean, not usually, but I'd say probably about 50% of my time as a professor. I have a book in some sort of progress that I'm writing. I kind of just got used to, this is something that happens in the background, spend a little bit of time on it every day, progress builds up, and that's how I want you to think about this.

But more generally, I think this is a good point for the audience beyond just thesis writing. Inflating what you think is involved for a project may seem in the moment like this is going to help you get it done, but it often is counterproductive. So, I don't know, a major computer program you have to write, a new skill you're trying to learn, a major report that you're trying to pull together, whatever it is. Almost certainly, it does not require you to spend most of your day every day working on it. In fact, your brain probably cannot support working most of the day, every day working on it. One of the two hours a day, most days, again, will accomplish, given enough time, most complex intellectual task at a sort of optimal trade-off,

an optimal trade-off of mental efficiency and time spent. So that would be my advice. I don't know that you need to clean off all your extracurricular activities. I don't know that you need to get too worried about how am I going to work five or six hours in a row, because you probably shouldn't be doing that most days. So hopefully this is an optimistic answer. I'm basically saying this is not going to be as hard as you think. You know this stuff. You've been working on these subjects. You have another job you work. You've been producing a podcast. So you're used to getting things done on a schedule. I think you're going to find that if you try this steady progress approach, that things are going to move really well. This thesis is going to be really good. And that you will move on

the really cool and interesting things in your life, and more generally for everyone listening here, let's avoid inflating the difficulty of what we face in terms of what is going to be required with our time, putting your head down, grinding, a little bit this day, a little bit that day. Really intense focus, but only for an hour. Really intense focus, but only for two hours.

Then on with the rest of my life. Doing this consistently has this great effect of when you put your head up a month later, three months later, you look back and say, my God, look at what I did. That wasn't as scary as I thought. Here is a thesis. Here is a book. Here's that report.

Here's this new skill I learned. So I'm glad I have a chance to talk about this more generally. Slow, steady, and deep. Really is a sweet spot for producing very high quality cognitive output in relatively reasonable amounts of time. All right. That's all the time we have for this mini episode. Remember, I need more questions.

Speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport to submit your audio questions. For everyone who celebrates Christmas, Merry Christmas. For everyone else, happy holidays. Enjoy the break. Drink some eggnog, watch some bad movies. Take a deep breath. We'll be back next week. And until then, as always, stay deep.