Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 60: Habit Tune-Up: Getting Things Done on Distracting Days

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.- Reflections on productivity during distracting events. [3:35]- Trouble getting started. [12:09]- Dealing with cognitive exhaustion after hard periods. [18:01]- Avoiding tool overload. [27:10]- Focused work that's not demanding. [32:01]- Metric tracking tune-ups. [39:58]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.

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I'm Cal Newport, and this is a Deep Questions, Abbott Tune Up mini episode. The format here is straightforward. I answer audio questions that get into the nitty, gritty detail of the type of topics we like to discuss. If you want to learn how to submit your own audio question for this mini episode or a written question for the full-length episodes of this podcast,

go to calnewport.com slash podcast, and I have all of the directions on that page. Before we dive into the audio questions, I wanted to address one that came to me from many different people via many different mediums over the last 24 hours. I like to try to keep these episodes evergreen. I don't try to date them into a particular moment in time, but I will violate that rule today

to note that I am recording this on the day it is being released, which is Thursday, January the 7th, and I'm recording this in my Deep Work HQ here right across the border from Washington, D.C. So obviously the last 24 hours here has seen, to put it mildly, some distracting events taking place in the immediate environment. So a lot of people are asking me, just out of curiosity, especially as yesterday was unfolding, are you still working? Are you still time blocking? How should one deal with more generally trying to get things done?

there is very distracting and emotionally arousing news unfolding, unfolding around you. I think it's a really good question. It's been relevant probably many more times than we wish it would be in recent months or this year in general. So let's tackle it real quick. I tend to have two rules of thumb and then I have a bonus third rule that I'll add in here. The first rule is it's very difficult to do deep work. So work that requires sustained concentration and cognitively demanding thought.

It's very difficult to do that in a state of emotional arousal. This has to do with the neurochemistry of the brain. But if you're very worried about something, if you're very upset about something, if there is something anxiety-producing unfolding, not surprisingly, that is not a conducive neurochemical context for having a good thought. having an original thought putting together pieces and an interesting original configuration. So I think it's completely fine that when you have a day when it is very distracting, to cut back significantly, if not eliminate altogether most of the deep work you hope to accomplish,

assuming you're able to do it. Assuming, for example, you're not, let's say, a cable news producer who needs to be doing his job that day, or a writer who has a column due and she has no choice, she has to get it done. But assuming it's not something you have to get done, I think that's completely fine. There's not a great time to concentrate, don't concentrate. Simplify your workday. I'm a big fan more generally about seasonality, which is a topic we're going to get into in one of the audio questions later in this episode.

We have hard days and down days. You offset really intense periods with less intense periods. And this is just that in a microcosm. So completely fine. stop trying to do hard work if hard things are happening all around you. The second thing I would note, however, is that it might seem like when things are very distracting or very distressing, that the appropriate response is to give up all structure and say, look, this is just what I'm doing.

Twitter's open, CNN is on, and I just, it just does not feel like a time when I should be, thinking about capture. There's not a time when I should be thinking about time blocking. It's not a time in which my calendar inbox should be relevant. And I think paradoxically, actually, you will feel better if you leave in place minimal structure. So you say, okay, obviously my original plan for the day, my original plan for the day has been thrown out the window.

But instead of going all the way to, so now I'm just going to freestyle. You can imagine stepping back and saying, all right, I'm not going to get anything deep done. Let's try to take that off the calendar. But you know what? I do need to. I'm going to have to find 30 minutes in here to follow up with some people and tell them that I'm going to be delayed about this. And I have to touch base with this person. And, well, it would be better if I got these.

I need to pick this thing from the pharmacy. You know, this is really the day I need to do that. Okay, let me make a schedule. I'm going to watch news for the next half hour. Then I'm going to take 30 minutes to do this. And then I'm going to watch news for another hour. Then I'm going to go run some errands. You can also schedule time just to clear your head.

I'm going to go for a walk. Let me just get out of Dodge and go for a walk and clear my head and listen to music. To do some sort of light scheduling with some light productivity, and here's one of my shutdown is going to be. And tonight I'm going to put aside 30 minutes just to read, this book that has nothing to do with politics, right? Something like this. That little bit of structure, it actually is going to make you feel better.

It's going to make you feel better because when there is disorder in the world around you, adding some order to what you can control can counterbalance a source of anxiety. And you can actually feel better. So that tends to be my response. The third bonus piece of advice I was going to give about hard times is stay away from Twitter. You know, Twitter is an anxiety magnification machine. This is just, look, I never need an excuse to try to tell people. to stay away from Twitter, but it never helps. It never helps. It makes things worse. You know,

stick to the radio, stick to TV, stick to the newspaper updates, allow information to be filtered just a little bit through some repritorial standards before you bathe your brain in it. The algorithms for Twitter, which again, we're designed to try to keep people engaged and aroused and looking at this service as much as possible. It's a commercial goal if you actually combine those algorithms with a time of real sort of emergency distress. It doesn't do great things for your brain. So that's my bonus piece of advice. So to answer the question for all the people who wrote me and said,

well, what are you doing? That's basically what I did. I had a lot of deep work on my plate. I took almost all of it off. I put in some structure still to my day. Well, I still need to talk to these people, and I still need to shut this down. And I still need to logistically, some family logistic stuff

that I still needed to do. So I put a little bit of structure with a shutdown. I tried to do it. It was an experiment. So I went for a walk and I was doing some work. I was trying to figure out. It was actually kind of a really interesting math problem. I was trying to make a connection between a distributed algorithm task and a notion of

entropy from information theory. Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. Go well. So then I just turned that into a walk to think about. things that were less cognitive. I put aside some reading time. I grabbed the book I grabbed. And let me just put as a quick aside. One of the reasons why I live in the town I live is that it has an incredible density of little free libraries. So these small boxes that people post on their

yards just full of books, you just take one if it looks interesting. If you have extra books, you put them in there. So my walks are literally walks by free books. So I grabbed James Stewart's Disney War. I'm on a Disney kick right now. I read Bob Eiger's book, and then I read a book about Disneyland, like the story of Disneyland, and now I'm almost done with the sort of epic Neil Gabler, Disney Empire of Imagination, the definitive biography of Walt Disney. And so then I kind of picked up Disney War because I said, huh, this will be interesting. Stuart writes with like a narrative momentum, but it also, the issues just seem so divorced from anything going on in the world. It's, you know, Jeffrey Katzenberg trying to take too much control over Disney animation.

It just seems so innocent and divorced from anything happening in the world that that's the book I picked up and scheduled some reading time in that book. So that's what I ended up doing. All right. So bonus question, bonus answer that for those who are wondering, that is my recipes for days when things are very distracting. May we all hope that this advice, becomes a lot less relevant as soon as possible. All right, enough with that. Let's get into our audio questions. Hi, Kyle.

Thanks for your podcast. I think it's great. I have a problem with, I don't know if time blocking or starting my day, I'm not quite sure what it is. I definitely see the benefits of time blocking, and I don't want to quit it, definitely. I think it's one of the most powerful tools you've taught us,

and it's not easy to master, but I think I'm close there. I think there are some issues I'm having. I'm having issues starting my day now because I sort of like anticipate the challenge or maybe like the pain of doing time blocking and things like that because it's, I mean, although it's powerful, it's not easy and that's why you recommend the shutdown. And I definitely admit that I haven't been perfect about shutdowns and I definitely don't time block my leisure time or weekends.

but I was wondering, what do you do to, I don't know, motivate yourself to start working? Well, I think we need to do some psychology hacking here. Now, what I'm going to recommend is that you have a set start time for your weekdays when you start your work every day. Don't leave that up to your mind to decide each day. Are we ready to start? Should we start?

Because now you have opened yourself up to an internal an internal confrontation every day where one side of your mind is trying to convince the other side that this is the right time to start and the other side has a point it can argue, which is why not later? You don't want to have to have that battle every day. So have a set time to have a ritual

that leads to the start of the workday. I'm going to give you a good one. Go for a walk. Brew a cup of coffee or walk by a coffee shop and pick up a cup of coffee go for a walk on a given route, get out there, get some fresh air, get some sunshine, about halfway through the route, turn your mind to the workday ahead and start getting your cognitive context into the work mode while you're moving while the blood is getting pumping,

and you come in from that walk straight to the place where you work, and you are immediately into your work. Now, where should your time blocking happen? Do the time blocking right before the walk, so that when you come in off that walk, the blood's going, your energy's up, you've shifted your context, you're feeling good, and it's right to the screen, right to the paper, right to whatever tool it is you use to do your work. Third, track a metric in your daily metric tracking about whether you did the opening ritual

and got right into your time blocking. If you're using a time block planner, which you can find out more about at timeblockplanner.com, if you're using your time block planner, there's a space for the metrics. If you're not, you should have some place for your keeping metrics. That then becomes a key. That then becomes a key on which this entire time blocking habit rest is, do I get to write down that little metric on my thing,

put the little checkmark next to it or draw the circle or whatever symbol you are using? Do I get to draw that or not? And your mind really can key in pretty quickly on that key thing. I don't want to miss it. I don't want to put an X next to that. And then everything unfolds from there. So you want to get that metric. So that means you do this ritual

and this ritual helps you get work going quicker. All of these things will work together to be an effective psychological hack because again, you're getting rid of the need to have a general open-ended argument with yourself every day about when to start. You have simplified this argument down to are we going to follow our rock solid, never changing,

this is when and how we start to workday rule or not? That's a harder argument for the procrastinatory side of your mind to win. You have this key habit of a metric, which makes it even harder for you to ignore the habit. And you have a ritual that is going to not only get you into a work mode, but the thing about rituals is a good ritual like this pre-work walking ritual. The ritual itself is enjoyable. it's nice to go for a walk with a cup of coffee, right?

So it's easy to motivate yourself to do the ritual. I'm going to go for a walk. It's nice that. I'm going to drink coffee. I love it. But then that ritual gets you ready to do the hard thing next. So you've put this intermediate stage that's easy to start. And then that gets you going so that you can get bridged the motivational gap over to your work.

So these are three different pieces that are all coming together. I think if you do those three things, you do those three things, you're going to be much more consistent about getting going with your time blocking. The final thing I'll add, though, is that time blocking is very intense. And we want to make sure that you're not overtaxing yourself. So if your time block schedules or maybe if they're too intense and they run too long, your mind that is trying to delay you might actually have a good argument. You know, I might be saying this is too much.

So if that's the case, I want you just to be careful that you have some variety, some days not as hard as others, and you have variety even within the day. There are some breaks. There's a long lunch. I'm going to go to a log in the woods and read for a half hour on Thursdays and Fridays, whatever you need to do. You know, make sure that these days that you're trying to avoid, that you're not avoiding for a real reason. So I would throw that in as well. I don't know if you have that issue, but I want to say that more generally. You know, keep the day reasonable because if the day is unreasonably intense, you know, your mind has a lot more ammo for its argument.

All right, I hope that helps, and I'm pretty sure it will. Now, what I want to do with the next question here is elaborate on an idea that was hinted at in this first question, which is seasonality in general, balancing the hard with the not hard. Hello, my name is Isabel, and I am listening from Spain. I have started my career as a lawyer this year in 2020. And the problem I have is that sometimes I have a deadline or I have an important event like a hearing in the courthouse for which I have to work very hard in advance and I put on a lot of hours and a lot of days working on that case. and when it is over, the deadline is over, I find that there are one or two days afterwards that I can't do any work. It's like I'm drained and I don't have any energy and I am sitting at my desk just looking at the screen and doing nothing even though I have a lot of work to do obviously and it would be nice to catch up with things that are not very urgent in that moment. Well, Isabel, the optimal thing to do after those hard periods is to rest. And I mean rest in a cognitive sense to, if you can't take a day off to give yourself as close of the equivalent as you can, a day in which you do whatever 90 minutes of catching up on email and that is that. The problem, of course, is that so many companies and organizations don't accommodate that. I know. I know.

This problem is particularly acute in your field, the legal profession, but it's common in a lot of other places as well. We have this misguided metaphor for the human brain where we think of it like a computer processor. It's something you give task and it executes them. And the nice thing about the human brain is that it's adaptable so it can take a lot of different tasks and execute it. And the way management often thinks is, well, we want this computer processor running. you know, we're paying for it to run for at least eight hours a day. And so as long as we have, we're paying for you to be here for eight hours. Let's make sure we can move as many tasks as possible through it.

So we're getting our money's worth. And we can, of course, identify and deliver and check in on these tasks. We can use things like email and slack. And it really picks up the pace at which we can throw things. And in this computer processor metaphor, it feels like, yeah, we've taken all of our processors and we're keeping them running all the time. We don't want down cycles. That will somehow produce the most value.

for our company organization. This metaphor is misguided because the human psychology, the way the brain actually functions, is much more complex. Our brain does not agnostically execute tasks with a relentless, repeatable rapidity. It instead operates in a way that is much more idiosyncratic. We can have a goal. The motivation for the goal matters. We can then kind of work towards that goal, towards some type of completion, and then put that aside before we can pick up something else. That's the way we normally operate. So quickly switching between 30 different things is not great for the brain. Our brain does not like having more on our plate than it can reasonably imagine accomplishing. Again, from the computer processor metaphor,

just fill the inbox, fill the inbox with endless things so that there'll never be any down cycles. I'm just constantly trying to do some stuff and make progress on something. all the time. It feels like that's a good thing. The human brain gets incredibly stressed out by that. The human brain also requires cognitive variety. The things you do in a knowledge work environment is almost certainly a very strange and strained activity from the perspective of neural evolution. Working on a legal brief is an incredibly unnatural activity, at least if we put that within the context of our species' entire history. Even just reading, it's a really unnatural activity that we have to essentially hijack other parts of our brain that were evolved for other

purposes and through intense training and concentration contort them into the ability to actually do written linguistic processing. And they sit there with words and processing words and applying very strict logic and legal standards. Like this is a very unnatural behavior. It's great that humans can do it. It is unlocked a lot of progress for our species, but you can't do it 12 hours a day every day. It's crazy. The brain, of course, was not meant to constantly be locked into repetitive activities that have nothing to do with the type of things that we were evolved to do. So what I'm trying to say here is this metaphor of, oh, the brain's just a computer processor. We're paying a lot of money to have access to your computer processor. I want to make sure that you're

always doing stuff. It just does not respect neural or psychological realities. and what you get is burnout. That feeling that you have, Isabel, that feeling of I don't want to do any work after I just got off a really hard period is the same feeling as if you had just finished a marathon, your legs would be saying, I don't want to go hiking today.

I'm exhausted. The muscles need to rest. We need to rebuild. We need to maybe even get some growth on top of the extreme use we just did. It's the same thing that's happening with your mind. So you need time off. You need time off for your mind to recuperate.

You need time off for there to be actual growth, right? There needs to be time there for your brain to actually consolidate things you may have learned during that hard push, new knowledge, new information. You need time off. Now, if you want to have a deeper take on this topic, I'm going to point you towards a book. It's a book called Peak Performance. It was co-authored by my friend Brad Stolberg, who I've interviewed on the podcast. before if you want to go back to that interview, and he co-authored it along with Steve Magnus. And a lot of what they did in this book is they took ideas that were really well understood

in the world of physical performance. I think Steve in particular was an elite athlete. And they adapt them over to the world of highly demanding cognitive efforts, like what you would have in the world of knowledge work. Brad, for example, was an elite management consultant at McKinsey. So one of their big ideas is these notions of rest and recovery that we really understand as gospel in physically demanding pursuits make just as much sense in the world of the cognitive. This idea has not widely percolated the world of organizational thinking. I think in general our approach to productivity is scandalously oblivious to psychological realities. I have been pushing for psychologically aware productivity

where we actually think about what's the right way to design work if we're trying to keep in mind the reality of how human brains actually operate as opposed to just trying to force them that some sort of metaphor that makes sense to us like a computer processor. By the way, these metaphors just evolve

with whatever the time is. So this computer processor metaphor arose in the 80s and 90s, because we thought a lot about, computer processors. In the 90s in particular, this was the era of the processor war. This is back when people actually knew the cycle count of processors. Remember this? The 286. No, now there's the 386. No, now there's the 486. Now there's the Penteum, right, where people actually really would follow the cycle speed of processors as if it was, you know, whatever, a new zero to 60 time evolving in muscle cars or

something like this. And so we thought a lot about processors and processing power. And naturally, our work metaphors began to build around that. If you went back to the 1940s or early knowledge work in the 50s and 60s, you would see a lot more of industrial metaphors, because that's what people were thinking about back then. Think more about the way that you might optimize a factory assembly line and the physical construction of things. And you had that type of mindset. So these metaphors are just changed by the culture. But they often have nothing to do with reality. So, okay, Isabel, this is a rant that goes well beyond your question. My short-term answer is rest and don't feel bad about resting. In fact, that is your optimal strategy. If you can't get explicit permission to do this,

just do it secretly. You know, I'm going to check in on email three times during the day so that the partner thinks I'm around or that I'm working on something. But you know what? I am going to the park and I'm going to read and I'm going to watch a movie with lunch because Cal told me that was okay. The broader point, just to summarize here, is that in general, we get into these issues because we do not think enough about the actual nature of human beings when we design the way our organizations run. I think that's something that is hopefully going to change. It's definitely a drum that I have been beating loudly. All right, let's go on now with a question about tools. Hi, Cal. My name is Josh and I work in public policy doing research. What do you think about when considering a new tool in your protocol? Motivity tool belt. There are too many flashy new tools to count. Roam, Notion, and Obsidian are three

similar options for just note-taking. You talk about this sometimes in a slightly different vein of the colored folder problem, but I think that seeing past the hype of new tools is a distinct challenge for knowledge workers. Hypothetically, if everyone says that a new tool will help you memorize all the gods in Greek mythology, how do you know that tool is going to deliver before you invest a lot of time in a dud? Well, first of all, Josh, I think a tool that would help people make really awesome Greek mythological references in inappropriate context would be amazing. So if there's any investors out there looking to invest in a surefire software hit, give me a call. Moving on to your actual question, I typically emphasize process trumping

tools. Tools can help a little bit in terms of how well a process functions, but it's the process itself that is going to give you the bulk of the benefit. So I think the difference between a good process with clunky tools and a good process with really optimized tools for that process is maybe the latter is 10% more effective. But having no good process versus a good process for getting the tools for now is a 90% increase to your effectiveness. In other words, most of the big gains is in process. Tools are subordinated the process. What I typically recommend is that people focus on their process. And just get it rolling with whatever tools are obvious or that you have on hand.

And then once you've really validated that a particular process is working well, so the way that you take notes and write books is working well, the way that you organize your to-dos as a project manager works well, whatever it is, right? You have some process. And then once you feel like this process works, it's tractable, it makes you more effective, it is, you know, working with your particular work demands, then you can say, oh, maybe I can optimize some of these tools,

and you'll get some epsilon more improvements. You start with the process and then go back to the tools. So you might work with, let's say, you know, my multi-scale planning that I recommend in my productivity philosophy where you do quarterly, weekly, daily planning. If you want to experiment with that, you just jump right into that and say, like, whatever, I'll just grab some tools. I can write my plans in Microsoft Word.

I can do my daily plans on, I'll just grab some printer paper. It doesn't matter. Let's just get in this flow and see if it works for me. And then if it does, you can say, all right, now I might want to optimize things a little bit. Maybe I'll replace this random paper with a time block planner for the daily planning because there are some advantages to that. And that'll add up over time. And maybe I don't want to just use this word document.

What I really want to do is have this nice notebook for my quarterly plans or I'm using an online. I want to use Google Docs because you know what, I have to access this plan. Sometimes I want to look at it on my phone and I want to look at it on my laptop and Google Docs is in the cloud. You start to make those improvements. And that helps and it makes it better. But the tool by itself is never going to make a big difference. In other words, if you're just really disorganized and you really get obsessed about what's the right cloud-based note-taking tool, there's nothing really to optimize there.

It's not going to make a big difference. So I would say Start with the processes, get processes you like Once you like a process, feel free within reason to optimize tools But keep in mind that that makes things a little bit easier But it's not where the bulk of the improvement is So there's no reason to try to get the tool just right You know, if something seems better, yeah, switch to it

But don't think that I wouldn't obsess about it Well, what if there's something that's even a little bit better? So like those note-taking things you just mentioned You mentioned three pieces of software I've never heard of any of them and I suspect even if I learned all of those software, found the one that was just right for me in my notes, that the change in my productivity, that that is the ultimate output of valuable articles and books or what have you, would, that change would be hardly noticeable.

Probably the clearest and definitely not superfluous way to understand this issue is to look to the Greek goddess, the meter. We could learn from her example that when it comes to, harvesting the fruits of productive labor, no amount of polishing or sharpening your scythe will allow you to avoid the hours of actual labor in the field. All right, let's move on here with a question about work that is neither deep nor shallow. Hi, Cal, my name is Ben. I'm a PhD student in Australia. My question is about my experiments. I do what is called intracellular in vivo electrophysiologist. which basically means I stick electrodes into animal brains to record the neural activity.

So this is a very attention-intensive but cognitively simple task. While searching for the right part of the brain that I want to record from, I need to pay close attention to my oscilloscope, while not much is actually happening, so that when I do find the right spot, I can act immediately. The problem is, depending on the day, it can be anywhere between three minutes and three hours before I actually find that right spot. And during this search process, I often find my attention waning and my mind screaming out for anything to happen. So my questions are, how should I be categorizing this task?

Is it deep because it's so attention intensive or is it shallow because it's very cognitively simple? And also, how can I keep my mind from wandering around during these long periods of needed attention where nothing is happening? The lab sciences have this almost unique position within academic endeavor. in that there is two different types of skills that must be cultivated and combine to create a successful academic career. And one of those two categories of skills in the lab sciences is often physical. People don't really realize the degree to which a lot of the success of a very successful lab is that they have trained, their postdocs have trained their grad students and the postdocs learned from the professor, these techniques that are incredibly dexterous and physical.

the way that you cut up the planarian very carefully and move them among the petri dishes for experimentation, the way that you very subtly like a surgeon move that electrical probe or watching what's happening on the oscilloscope and trying to find exactly that right neuron to put it in. The success of a lab often comes down to this is that we have a team that knows how to do this and it's physically very demanding and they get better at it through experience. It's an incredible bit of capital. It's not something you can just easily replicate by reading some instructions. instructions. So those skills matter. And so in some sense, when you're working on that skill,

you're mastering that skill of doing neural probing and trying to find exactly where the right neuron is for what you're trying to do. It's deep in the sense that it is demanding and it is skilled and you get better at it. And the better you get at it, that's going to be useful. But in the lab sciences, there's the other aspect, which is we can think of it more as the traditionally cognitive skills also required for success. And this is where you learn to and you learn what other people are doing. The skills that allow you to design a good experiment, to take the data, to work with it and analyze it, and to understand when the data is good or bad, or if you have what it takes to pull together

a nature paper, whether you're just looking really at noise. And that comes through working with those above you, reading papers, helping to write papers, helping to analyze data for papers, going to conference talks, listening to colloquia, etc. right? You need both of those skills. So I would say you can think about what you're doing the lab is deep and therefore don't be frustrated with the time it takes, but also make sure that you recognize that in your field, this particular endeavor is not comprehensive. You also need to be aggressively seeking deep work on this cognitive skills aspect, to build up your ability to work with experimental data, to design experiments and work with the data and produce papers.

In terms of how do you keep your focus, it's a tough one. You have to treat it meditatively. So as long as you're going to be there doing this, you're basically doing an exercise and meditation, in particular mindfulness meditation, where you can notice your attention wandering and without being too judgmental, you sort of bring it back to the thing at hand.

You do this, what you're really doing is getting in a healthy dose of training in finding separation from rumination and having a little bit more control over what unfolds in the focus of attention within your mind that will be useful for a lot of things. It'll be useful for reducing stress and anxiety outside of life because you can separate from the anxiety-producing ruminations,

but it will also become useful when you are trying, for example, to read something hard or make your way through a paper. When your mind wanders, you'll be much more used to noticing that and bringing your attention back. So if you think of these as meditation sessions that you're being paid slash forced to do and you think of this work, you're mastering a skill that itself is important, hopefully that will reduce the frustration you feel around that time you spend doing that lab work,

which is, you know, if you're a grad student in a lab sciences, that's what you're going to be doing. Reduce your frustration, make you feel a little bit more positive about it. Then just make sure that you are also aggressively trying to put aside for an attack sessions of deep work for these other type of skills that have to come together with your physical skills to succeed in your field. I want to take a moment to talk about another sponsor that makes this podcast. possible, and that is My Body Tudor, T-U-T-O-R. As I mentioned in Monday's episode, My Body Tudor is a way to become more healthy and to get in shape that actually works.

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D-D-E-R-life.com slash deep. Go to ladderlife.com slash deep. You get instantly improved for life insurance today. All right, we have time for one more question. And this one in the spirit of the new year is about some of the nitty, gritty details of tracking the metrics you're deploying to make your life better. Hi, Cal.

I have a question about, tracking metrics and keystone habits. I'd like to start 2021 by tracking keystone habits in each of the four buckets that you talk about, craft, constitution, contemplation, and community. I've identified two keystone habits in each bucket. Some of them are things I'm adding, like writing for three hours a day, that's in my craft bucket. But other things are things that I want to reduce. So, for example, in my community bucket, I want to not have my phone in the room

when my kids get home in the afternoon. But I'm wondering if you think that's too much to track two keystone habits in each bucket. And if so, what would be the ideal number of metrics to track every day? Well, if you were new to metric tracking, I would start with one per bucket. To start with more than four or five total habits to track, it can be overwhelming, and you have too many variables that you're trying to balance or optimize.

So I would try to get one good habit in each of those buckets that works. Now remember, your goal here is not to capture all the things you want or don't want to do in a metric. because just to make sure that you have something that is tractable but non-trivial in each of those buckets that signals to yourself that A, I am the type of person who can take non-required, non-urgent, but consistent action on the things I care about. So that self-signal is important. And it gets you in the mindset of making progress on things that matters every day, whether it's a good day or a bad day, that in itself is going to change the way you understand your capability of affecting your circumstances is that's all really important.

One keystone habit per bucket will get you there. Once those are really cemented, I tend to have a division between the core set of habits that I for sure do and what I think of as the experimental habits, the sort of metrics I'm seeing, I'm seeing if they're useful or not. So I'm going to experiment with this metric here

just to see this seems like it might be useful and it might be a good addition to my ensemble. But it's not permanent. I'm trying it. Do I really follow it? Why am I not following it? Is it because of an issue on my end, or is it the metric is not very good? And I have a clear division.

And if something lasts for a couple months in that experimental category, I might then move it into that core set that's originally seeded with the Keystone Habits. So in your case, I really would, if you're new to metric tracking, just one rock solid consistent metric for each of those buckets that gets at the core of your thought of what's important in that bucket. So it's daily writing for writing. It's the phone foyer method for community that I really do. Did I succeed in putting my phone plugged in in the foyer at five after work and left it there, right? Whatever it is. Once those really seem to be hooked in, I would probably recommend that as you then go through, if you're following my sort of general advice for deepening your life, you know, it says you start with these keystone habits in each of these areas that are important.

Then you take areas one by one and try to. overhaul them. When you're doing the overhaul of a particular area, that's when you might try to add in some more of these experimental metrics to track for that area. So it's during a month or a week or however much time you're dedicating to this particular area. During the time where you're focused on just that area, you're maybe trying to experimentally add a few more metrics, see what last, see what doesn't. The things that really work get moved into your core habits. You move on to the next area. That's probably how I would add new metrics to track beyond the original core set is that when you're focusing on that area for two, three, four weeks, you experiment,

you see what works, you see what doesn't. So it's a more gradual approach. If you do this long enough, yeah, you might end up with in some of those categories, two or three metrics you track. And in other categories, you might just have one. I probably average about two metrics in each of the sort of main categories I care about, but some have less, some have more. The number of experiments I've done however is much bigger. There must be 40 habits that I've come up with metrics for and tried and ultimately decided this should not be part of the consistent rotation. I think at the moment, I don't have my time block planner in the studio with me right now. It's in the other room in my bag, but I'm just thinking back to it. I'm conjuring the metric tracking space of my time block

planner in my head right now. And I probably have eight or nine. metrics I track. So anyways, it's a good question. That's how I would recommend sort of easing in the metrics and making sure that set grows intentionally and in a way that is sustainable. By the way, just as a bonus observation, speaking of my time block planner, I finished my first time block planner last week. And I think, I guess I'm probably the first person in the world to actually get through an

entire time block planner because, of course, the planner was released in November, but I got my copies earlier. And so I started with my first time block planner copy. I was able to start earlier than when the planner was released. And I recently hit that final page. So if you actually make it to the end of your time block planner, you'll see, and I had actually forgotten about this, you get to the end, there's actually a little discussion at the end about what to do next, how to go back through and review your planner and to look at your metrics in particular and try to learn from it and make plans for the future. So it was nice. nice coincidence that that first time block planning period ended right around the new year for me

because it was a good time to do that reflection. So, okay, so it's nothing to do with your question, but just a bonus thing I thought I would put out there. I thought that was cool to think that, okay, I'm the first person ever to get to the end of this particular planner because I'm the first person to have it for more than three months. All right, so there you go. So I hope you find that useful. All right, well, we've gone long enough. So let's call it here for today. Thank you for everyone who submitted questions. To find out how to submit your own questions, go to Calnewport.com slash podcast.

I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.