Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 61: How Should I Tackle Big Projects?

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.Deep Dive: Executing Big Projects [10:18]WORK QUESTIONS - Is pairing a problem for programmers? [20:21] - When do you review past time block schedules? [25:46] - How do I force myself to execute my plans? [29:48] - How do you figure out what projects to pursue? [36:38] - Should you take personality traits into mind when choosing a job? [41:39] - Organizing rapidly expanding research rabbit holes. [47:27] - How do I pursue depth surrounded by toddlers? [54:53]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Why do I use Overleaf as my LaTex editor? [59:40] - How do I stay informed about current events without falling into the "Twitter Trap"? [1:02:26] - What is the deal with Zettelkasten note taking? [1:09:10] DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Should I time block personal time? [1:16:54] - Should I relax between college and my first job? [1:20:39] - How can I develop curiosity? [1:22:38]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 61. We begin, as usual, with quick announcements. In fact, I have just one announcement, and it is a big one. You probably have heard me obliquely reference in various recent episodes, my quote, new book coming out soon, in quote. Well, today I want to officially announce the book. It is called A World Without Email. reimagining work in an age of communication overload.

This book comes out on March 2nd. Now, I've been working on this book for a real long time. It was actually what I began working on immediately following deep work. I have interviews for this book to go all the way back to 2016. I actually put the book on hold to write digital minimalism, because I felt that the trends relevant to a world without email were very long-term trends. And it wasn't like that was going,

something was changing really acutely in the moment. It was a long-term trend that was coming and it was going to continue to go. I also felt like with the world without email, where I am on this topic, no one else is. So it's not as if someone was going to scoot me. So I put a pause to the book to write digital minimalism because that felt very timely.

There was this shift happening right then. in this period of like 2017 to 2018, this acute shift where people were becoming more uncomfortable with their devices. And so I put World Without Email and Hold, wrote Digital Minimalism, then got back to it. I'm really proud of the book. I'll be talking about it, obviously, a lot more on this podcast as we approached a publication date. But I'll give you the high-level summary now.

There's two parts to the book. So the first part is looking at the world we are in right now. And I began by doing something that no one else has really done. I pull together all of the extant research on email and its potential impacts on our ability to produce work. All of the data we have from all the different sources, including I've talked to a lot of these professors about how much we use email, how much that has changed and increased over time. I get into what happens to the brain from the psychology perspective. I get into what happens to the brain from a neuroscience perspective. And I really lay bare the argument.

If you have an approach to work in which you must constantly be tending ongoing ad hoc, unstructured, asynchronous communication, be it through email or Slack, whatever tool you want to use. But if you must constantly be communicating, it really makes you much less productive. It really reduces your ability to actually produce high value. value cognitive output. You've heard me say this. In this book, I actually pull together all the evidence and make the case as definitively as possible. I then make a big argument about why this approach to work makes us miserable. There are several different ways why having a work life in which you have this ever-filling inbox or channels full of communication where people need things back for you.

We need to hear from you. And there's no friction. It's constantly coming in. It just fundamentally mismatches with our long-evolved neural and psychological realities. It makes people really unhappy. Not a good research to show why that is. And then the final part of this part one of the chapter, the final chapter of this part one of the book, rather, makes the somewhat aggressive and I think very interesting argument that no one actually decided that working this way made sense. you go back as I did and watch the evolution and spread of email in the workplace. You don't find people saying this is great. This will now allow us to check an inbox 175 times a day.

If we could just communicate more, if we'd have more fragmented communication, if we could just do that, we would be more productive. No one ever said that. That behavior emerged. It emerged on its own, and it emerged haphazardly. We are basically adapting now to a world of work that no one really constructed. I make that argument. I try to make it with care.

I'm actually working right now on an article. I can't say much more about it, but I'm working on an article that's going to encapsulate part of that message, I should say, for a larger audience. So I'll keep you posted on that. So you put these things together. I'm basically saying, look, this way we work arose haphazardly and is making us miserable and making us actually worse at doing our job. Therefore, we should give it some scrutiny and maybe see if there is better ways of organizing work, and that is part two of the book. I lay out this framework.

I call attention capital theory where knowledge work you have to think about the human brain as your main capital resource and design how work unfolds in such a way that not only gets the most value out of those brains, but is sustainable. It doesn't burn out or make those brains miserable. I have a principle in there about processes, a principle about protocols, and a principle about a return to more specialization. The content in that second part hits at a bunch of different audiences. A lot of it can be adapted to individuals.

Some of it can be adapted if you run your own business or your solopreneur. Some of the more aggressive advice can apply to you where you can make big changes. A lot of the advice is also meant for people who run big teams or run big companies. So I'm trying to hit all of the scale. So whether you're trying to just personally improve your relationship or you're a C-suite executive trying to gain a lot more productivity for your company, there is advice that's going to be relevant. Anyways, this book is sort of my opus on this topic.

It is if Deep Work sort of was a warning shot across the bow, had some big ideas, got people thinking, a world without email is my definitive claim that the world of work will evolve. If you've been reading my New Yorker pieces this year, you've seen some of the ideas work through. That's just a sampling of what's to come to this book. Okay, we'll talk more about this book.

obviously as the weeks go on. If you pre-order it, which I appreciate if you do, because that does help bestseller list, which then allows other people to find a book, et cetera, et cetera. Just hold on to the emailed receipt from whatever retail, retailer you pre-ordered from. We will be announcing one of these sort of pre-order packages, thank you gifts for those who pre-order.

So just hold on to the receipt. And when we announce that, you'll be able to use that receipt to redeem. the kind of the cool things we have in mind for those who support the book with pre-ordering. All right, that is a long preamble. We'll talk more about this in future episodes. We do have ahead of us a good show. The Deep Dive Returns.

I will be looking at how to execute big projects. We also have a great collection of questions about work, technology, and the deep life. We have a question here from a parent of multiple. toddlers who's struggling with that a little bit. We have a question from a classics professor. And we're going to talk about a exciting new note-taking methodology. It's incredibly geeky, productivity, prawn style fodder. It comes from Germany. I don't even know how to pronounce it. Zettl Kostin. Maybe that's right. Regardless, it's a needlessly complicated philosophical approach to structuring information in your life that comes accompanied with really cool,

needlessly complicated digital tool. So, of course, it's something I'm really interested in, so we will have to get into that as well. So it will be a good show. But first, before we get started, let me briefly say things to one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible, and that is Magic Spoon. I don't know if you have noticed, but the news has been a little. bit grim recently. There's probably been a little bit more anxiety in your life than you would prefer, and sometimes because of all of this, we need an escape. What escape could be better than diving

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That's magic spoon.com slash cow and use the code Cal C-A-L when you check out to get free shipping. All right, it's time now for the deep dive. In today's deep dive, we will be looking at the topic of executing big projects. Now, by big projects, I mean efforts that cannot be done in one quick session. These are things that might require dozens, if not hundreds of hours of effort over an extended period of time to actually get from conception to completion. So in my own world, for example, a big project might be trying to get a research paper ready for peer review publication or research and writing a major article for a magazine or a chapter of a book. You might imagine other things such as launching a podcast or getting a new website together for a new product or putting together a new business strategy. All of these fall under the heading of a big project.

Of course, these type of projects are very important. they're what will move the needle on your career. It's what will allow your business to get to the next stage. When big projects are deployed in your life outside of work, they can be a real source of connection or interestingness or entertainment or usefulness to your communities or rolled around you. So big projects are a very important aspect of living a deep and productive life. They're also very hard to get done because they're complicated.

They require a lot of work and that work has to be spread out over time. This issue has made all the more acute when we look at the way that most knowledge workers actually approach scheduling their day. As I talk about in the introduction of my time block planner, most knowledge workers deploy what I call the list reactive method. The list reactive method to scheduling your day is where you basically say, what are my appointments? Like what's on my calendar? Okay, I need to do those meetings or do those calls. And outside of that, I just sort of react. what's coming into my inbox, what's coming into Slack, there's more than enough stuff for me to respond to

or move things around that I'm just busy for most of the day. The problem with this list-based reactive method when it comes to big projects is that when are you going to make progress on a big project? When you're sitting there on Tuesday, reacting to your inbox, trying to answer messages and looking at Slack while waiting for your next Zoom call,

nowhere in there you're going to say, you know what, I should stop all of this and put in a non-trivial amount of effort for a project that's due in two months. Right? Just reacting to things and jumping from appointment to appointment, it's hard to make steady progress in long-term things. So what should you do instead? Well, let me tell you about my method. It has three scales of planning, and it requires all three scales of planning,

and once you master it, it is a powerful way. to ensure that your progress on big things is steady. So at the very highest scale of planning, we have what I call either a quarterly or semester plan. I internally use the term semester plan because I'm an academic. I think people in the world of business are more comfortable with quarterly. But you imagine it's a plan for, roughly speaking,

to current season. So as I'm recording this in January, my plan is for the winter and spring. All right. There's a lot of things you do with these plans. I've talked about a lot of the things you should do with these plans on my podcast and in my, my newsletters. But one of the things that should exist in these plans, and I say plans, because you should

have one for your professional life and one for your personal life. One of the key things in these plans are the big projects you're working on during that quarter, during that season. Right. So I might, for example, have in the plan, I want to try to get this general topic I've been working on into shape for submission. There's a, deadline in March. I want to have a paper ready to submit for March, right? A big project. And when you think about these plans, when you're at the beginning of a season, constructing one of these plans, you should do serious thought about what are the projects that you actually want to do. You can see them all written out. You can avoid having too much on your plate. You can also

avoid doing nothing. You can be strategic. This is a really great time to figure out, like, what is the mix of projects I want to execute? It's tractable. I could actually get it done, it's going to make the most difference. Like, what's the best use of my time? If you're not planning at that scale, you're just spinning your wheels. You're just, you're letting your energy diffuse. You're just hoping to randomly stumble into something interesting, right? So you have your quarterly plan. You've thought about what big projects you want to execute that quarter. You've written them down there. Okay, good. Let's move down a scale. Weekly planning. At the beginning of every week, you should create a plan for the week ahead. This can just be

in text, I don't think there's any special format that's going to look different depending on the weeks. My time block planner has pages for weekly plans every week, but you can do this on a text file, you can do this in your own notebook, wherever you want to do it. You need to make a plan for your week. When you make a plan for your week, you should be looking at that quarterly plan. So, ah, you see when you're looking at your weekly plan, you see, oh, these are the projects I'm trying to get done. And so you look at the week ahead and you look at what's scheduled and how busy it is are not busy it is, and is it a vacation week versus a work week? Are you away at a conference? What's going on? You look at all these factors and you say, how am I going to make progress on these

projects this week? And maybe I'm only working on one project this week, or maybe none of them, or maybe I'm working on all the projects this week. But what am I doing this week to make progress on the projects I identified at that higher scale into quarterly plan? Now, the answer to that question just depends on the week. So you might say, all right, I want to make a good progress on my research paper this week. I have a call scheduled for Friday with my collaborators. I want to get in some good hours of thinking of where I'm currently stuck, this, whatever it is. I mean, I'm making this up.

But this particular proof I'm stuck on this key. So here's what I'm going to do. Every morning, one hour, first thing I do, a walk, thinking. through that proof. Boom, right there in your weekly plan. Or maybe your schedule's a little bit more rusty than that, and this is something I've done before. So you're saying, okay, not rusty, I should say crowded and maybe you don't have time in the morning. So you say, okay, just in this example, for the sake of example. Tuesday afternoon, that looks open. Let me block that off and I'm looking at my week and say, I'm going to go to this park and I'm going to spend a few hours hiking with my notebooks and

try to make progress that way. Or Thursday and Tuesday, I'm going to have a big thinking block. whatever you want to do. The point is you're looking at your week, you're looking at its reality and saying what's the right way to make progress this week given its realities, right? It's written down it's in your weekly plan. Move down a scale. Now you're at an individual day. You're at Tuesday. What am I doing today? Well, this is where you have a daily plan. Here is my plan for the day. I am a big believer in time blocking as the best way to make your daily plan. actually sit down and give every hour of your workday a job from here to here. I'm working on this. During this time, I'm working on that. I have a meeting here. Actually block out the time and actually assign specific work to specific times. When you're creating your daily schedule, you look at your weekly plan. So when you get to Tuesday and you're trying to make your daily schedule, you see on your weekly plan, oh, I'm supposed to spend the afternoon at the park trying to make

progress on this proof. Or in our other example, you're making your daily plan, like, oh, I'm supposed to spend the first hour on a walk thinking about this theorem I'm trying to solve. So then the ideas for your weekly plan get integrated into your daily plan. And that's it. That is it. That partitioning of your project planning thinking, where you have the big thoughts about what you showed or shouldn't be working on, what's going to best help your career, your life. That happens seasonally and goes into your quarterly plan. you get strategic. Given what I have going on this week, what's the best way I should make progress

on these projects? Which project should I push? Which one should I pull back from? The strategic thinking happens out the weekly plan and the daily plan is much more wrote. Bam, I got to make my plan. Let me look at my weekly plan. Okay, here's what's going on. And you work it all out. Now all you have to do is just trust the system. Do the planning at these three scales. Get used to doing the plan at these three scales. Get used to this is just how my professional life unfolds. I go from quarterly to weekly to daily and then I just do my best to execute the daily. And if you can commit to just following this multi-scaled approach to productivity, guess what? Progress on projects happens. Not always the way you hope. Not every project gets done. Some turn out

to be more complicated. Sometimes that proof is never solved. Sometimes you have one too many projects on your quarterly plan and you just consistently cannot find enough time to get it done. but you are going to be making much more effective and intelligently allocated progress on these big projects. If you use this three-level approach to planning, you're going to make much more progress this way than if you instead just sort of look at your day, look at your inbox, look your calendar,

and just say let's rock and roll. All right, so that is my method for big projects. It's a little bit of overhead to get used to it, but if you lock it in, you are going to lock in a lot more useful and important accomplishments. And that's it for today's deep dive. Video of this deep dive will be available soon.

I did tape it, just like I taped the last deep dive series on the deep reset. I'm just waiting to get some help on getting my video present set up. But once that set up, we will be getting these videos uploaded on the regular. So stay tuned for that. But for now, let us move on with the show and get going with some work questions. Our first question comes from Alex, who asks if pairing programmers is a problem. So I should elaborate a little bit what Alex is talking about here, because there are two related, there's two related methodologies here that are both common in the world of computer programming.

The first is pair programming, where you actually sit two people at a monitor, a single monitor, two computer programmers working together to write computer code. There's also pairing, which is what Alex is talking about, which is where you have, let's say, another member of your team who's not even necessarily co-located. Let's say it's a remote office and they're in some other part of the country or world. And you're paired in the sense that you keep a chat window open. So you can just chatter back and forth sort of throughout the day. The idea with pairing is, well, this way you can quickly, for example, tap each other's expertise on different topics and ask quick questions.

And if you're remote, you can still sort of simulate being a team working in the same room. So I think the first of those two options, pair programming, where you have two people at the same monitor, this is actually increasingly. incredibly effective. I have come to believe that it can significantly increase productivity. I write about this in detail in a world without email. There's a practice called extreme programming, XP for short. And one of the things deployed by extreme programming is this two people at one screen. I get into it into the book, but essentially the practitioner I was talking to who's an extreme practitioner of extreme programming, interesting guy. you meet him in the book. He was saying people, maybe logically, but incorrectly think if I put two programmers per

screen, I'm going to cut my productivity in half because now instead of them both producing their own code, they're producing half as much because they're working on the same code. But it turns out that the focus achieved when you're both looking at the same screen is so much higher than when you're just by yourself, kind of writing code, kind of checking email, kind of checking slack, you know, whatever. the productivity is so much higher that you end up much better and a code is much tighter

because you can see errors and help nudge each other towards better solutions back and forth. In my book Deep Work, I call this the whiteboard effect where I note that working together with other people in the same room

on the same problem is a huge accelerant to the intensity of depth that you are able to achieve. Now let's talk about the variation that Alex asked, which is pairing, where you're in Milwaukee and I'm in Santa Fe, but we have a chat window open all day while we code.

This will have the opposite effect. This will significantly, I believe, reduce your productivity because it creates a need to constantly shift your cognitive context. You have to constantly shift your context to service this ongoing conversation, then back to your code, then back to the conversation, then back to the code. Again, another thing I detail in that new book,

this is a disaster for your ability to actually concentrate and produce valuable information using your brain. It's like a worst case scenario for trying to do something cognitively demanding like building code. The problem with pairing is that you're not in the same room. So you miss those contextual clues of, look, Cal is really locked into what he's doing right now.

I'm not going to bother him. You don't know that when you're in Milwaukee and just typing into Slack. So I am not a big believer in pairing. Alex, I think you were right to be suspicious of this. Paring is going to reduce productivity. I think you're better off just having regularly scheduled synchronous meetings throughout the day. Even if every 90 minutes you quickly jump on Campfire or Slack or the phone, like what's going on, what we have questions.

Even that will be better because it allows you in between those checks to actually get the full weight of your cognitive potential applied to the problem. I am not a fan of pairing. Mark asks, how and when do you review your time blocking? So what I think he's asking about here is going back and looking at past time blocked schedules and trying to pull some insights from the record left behind. Well, I'm glad you asked about this, Mark, because it's an important aspect of time blocking, this intelligence gathering, record-keeping aspect of the habit, and it's something we haven't discussed a lot.

It actually came to my mind recently, as I mentioned at the end of last Thursday's Habit Tuneup mini-episode, just last week I was, I guess, the very first person in the world to have the experience of getting to the end of a time block planner. So the time block planner that I sell, you can find out about it, timeblockplanner.com, of course, covers three months, and they were available in early November. So you got November to December, December to January, January to February.

So even if you got a time block planner when it was first released and you use it every day, it's not going to be until early February. That you're done, but I got one early, obviously, because it's mine and I got an early copy, so I finished it. But the reason I'm bringing this up is that I had forgotten until I finished the planner and I flipped the page that I actually have a CODA, a conclusion of sorts at the end of the planner that says, okay, what next? And it is there, I reread it because I came across it last week. It is there that I recommend, now that you have finished three months, like a quarter of the year, go back and look through the planner before you put it on your shelf. Go back at this point and look at your metrics and look at your

time block plans. There's a few other things I recommend doing, but relevant to your question mark. one of the things I recommend is looking at your actual time block schedules. You don't have to pour over these, but go through quickly, scan through them. What you get here is an amazing record of what your days were actually like. You know, most people don't have this record. I mean, they have their appointments on a calendar. They could go back and see, but they don't know what happened otherwise. Other than vaguely, they were checking email and maybe they stayed up late some nights to get something done,

but they don't really remember what that was. that most people do not have a good record of what was my working day like. If you time block plan, you have a perfect record. This is what I did, or this is what I intended to do, and I had to redo my schedule, and I had to redo it again. You can see when schedules failed and when they didn't fail. I recommend Mark having some visual border cues on your time blocks so that when you do this review, you can really quickly get a gestalt of what's going on. I darken the border, so make it extra thick. for deep work blocks and I add a double border

so I have a box and then another box within the box sort of like a hollow double border for purely administrative blocks I sometimes put a star in boxes where it's like an appointment or a call or something that was otherwise on my calendar

so I can really quickly get a sense as I flip through the pages how much deep work am I getting done when is the deep work getting done how much time am I spending on administrative stuff. How much of my days seem to have been pre-allocated with these calendar-style appointments? How often am I changing my schedule? And when I do, what is the block that busted it? That's very easy to see if you're using something like a time block planner or whatever you use, but you can see

exactly where you crossed off the rest of the schedule and wrote the new one next to it. So you can see at what point does to cross off begin. Oh, it was during this meeting block, and this weekly meeting, for example, and I always seem to blow past that and have to rebuild my schedule. Maybe I'm not scheduling enough time for that meeting, right? You get all of this intelligence, and so that's what I would say, Mark, is review like that, maybe once every three months. Go back and look at three months worth of things. Why do I align these reviews to once every three months?

Because that's also when you do your quarterly planning. So as I talked about in the deep dive earlier in this episode, you should be making the sort of big strategic plans every season or every quarter, every semester, however you want to do that, and then you have weekly plans and you have daily plans. This information, what happened with my schedule since the last time I did this big picture planning? That's really crucial. That's really the time to think about it. So the reason why I say do this once a quarter or so is that it should roughly align with you working on your quarterly plan. So that's what I would suggest. It takes about 20 minutes. Look through it. Look for trends. Think about it. Go for a walk. Give it 20 minutes. You might have

no insights. You might have some insights. Trust your instincts. It's worth taking the time. So anyways, Mark, I'm glad you asked about it. And if you have a time block planner, when you make it to the end, you'll see some instructions for this waiting for you once you get there. Lisa asks, I am working full time doing a part-time PhD and I have two young kids. I know how precious my time is, but I constantly find I can't start to execute my time-block plans. Most of the time, I block a few hours to read and write for my PhD, but in the end, I spend it all on my work. I know I'm avoiding it because I think it is hard and tiring. So, Lisa, I tackled a question that was superficially similar to this one during last Thursday's

Habit tune-up mini episode. I had a voice question from a young man who would create a time block schedule, but really couldn't get started. He would just procrastinate. He would just blow off getting started work, and this was a problem. And so I gave him a solution that involved having a set start time for work every morning, having a ritual that he did before that work began, and having some sort of metric he introduced to track whether or not he actually executed the ritual and started at his start time. All of this was a multifaceted psychological attack to shift him into a mindset in which he actually started doing his work. I think what's going on here, and I'm guessing a little bit, I'm also pulling a little bit from your elaboration for the question. I'm guessing what's going

on here is actually different. You have a job, you have kids, you're doing a part-time PhD program. I do not think your problem is just you don't like to work and you're trying to put it off. I think the problem is that there's one part of your brain that is looking at the other part of your brain and saying this plan you've put together for how we're going to make progress on our PhD, we're not on board. Right? So I don't think this is an issue of just how do you motivate yourself to actually follow your plan.

I think we need to actually work on the plan you have for how you're integrating this PhD work, this part-time PhD work, into your otherwise busy schedule. It's hard to do. You're trying to do a lot. In our brains, if there are anything, are good plan evaluation and rejection machines. And I think if you have this vague thing that shows up later in your day, like now spin two, hours reading in like a really hard and intimidating way, it's going to say, I don't think so, I don't know. Look, I have some momentum going. I have some emails I have to answer. There's a

deadline for work. I just don't want to do this. So I think the solution here is to experiment with when and how you do your PhD work. So I'm going to throw out a couple ideas based on what I've seen work for other people doing PhDs on the side. These might not fit for you, but it gives you a sampling of the type of things that might work. Typically, first thing is better. For this type of intellectual work, you get up a little bit earlier, perhaps. You know, your partner has to shift with the kids.

You go down to your basement. This is like the story of Brian and deep work where he built this sort of dungeon-like desk in his basement where he would go when he was working out his PhD. I think he would do it at 5 a.m. I write about it in that book. And it's like the first thing you do, and you do it when you get that first blast of caffeine from your coffee where your brain kind of wakes up. And it's just this ritual that you almost look forward to, right?

That tends to work better than at the end of the day. Once you have all of these other demands and deadlines and stresses of work that have been building up for hours, that's a hard time to then rinse your attention back to doing something different. So you might think about doing PhD work first. Two, you might want to get more specific. So part of what might be going on here is your brain is saying read and write is too vague and scary and intimidating. I don't even know what that means. So how do we get started? So if you can get more specific.

And again, I'll go back to my deep dive from today's episode. You have in your quarterly plan, this is what we're trying to get done this semester or this season or this quarter on the dissertation. When you get your weekly plan, that's this is what that means this week. And that could be different from week to week, right? Let's get specific. This week, it is, I have to make sense of this book. Or another week, it might be, I need to take these notes I've been taking and put together a bibliography for this particular aspect of my dissertation, or whatever, right?

It looks different from week to week, and it's specific. And then in your weekly plan, you're saying, this is what this is going to look like each day. The first three days, I need to be right in the reading, taking notes this way. the first three days, you know, day one, set up my bibliography, managing software, I need to use better software, learn how it works. Day two, move everything into it. You're getting kind of specific. So now you kind of know what you're doing.

It's much more concrete work. And then third, the one thing I would borrow from the answer I gave in last Thursday's habit tune up mini episode is do have a ritual. Do have a ritual that you do to get yourself ready. to do this type of work, brewing coffee, going for a walk, journaling for five minutes, whatever it is. Because as I talked about in that episode, a pleasant ritual is much easier to convince yourself to start doing than, let's say, open up and start reading a hard book.

So now you've reduced the willpower challenge to just do the work ritual. It's a much easier challenge. But if you do the ritual, it gets you warmed up in the momentum going that you can just roll from that ride into the work without much more willpower exerted. So a ritualized entrance into hard work, if the ritual is good and you enjoy it, and it's aspirational, it can severely reduce the amount of willpower and effort required to actually get from, I'm doing nothing related to this project to I am in it working. All right.

So that's my, those are my three specific pieces of suggestion, but the broader idea here, Lisa, is I think you need to keep working at how am I fitting this work into my day? How am I breaking up this work? How am I surrounding it with rituals? Where am I doing it? It is much more subtle than I think we give it credit. If you're going to do something hard on top of something hard, on top of something hard, it's really subtle to get these things balanced outright.

They just throw it on your schedule for three to five and say, go work, go read. It's not giving it enough respect. Your mind knows that's not a great plan. So I think you're going to find, if you keep experimenting, you're going to find a configuration here that works, and you are going to make a lot of progress on that dissertation. Our next question comes from Max, who asks, how do we know which of our ideas or projects we should pursue? I want to commit to deep work sessions, but have trouble knowing where my time is most valuably spent. I'll often commit to a deep work schedule for a week, only to feel like I might

be working on the wrong thing. Well, Max, I want to emphasize that figuring out long-term projects, deep pursuits that you want to give consistent attention to over time, figuring out what those should be is really hard. We should recognize that it's hard, and we should respect that it's hard, and that if we just randomly or haphazardly decide, let's work on this, or maybe I'm going to learn this language, or maybe I'm going to learn how to code. If we do this haphazardly, our brain figures out pretty soon, this is probably not something we really need to be doing. Why am I wasting energy on this?

You know, motivation will flag quickly. So I'm glad you bring this up. You know, there's this course that I designed with my friend Scott Young, and it's called Top Performer. It's been around for a long time. It uses ideas from So Good They Can Ignore You, My 2012 Book, to help people move to the next level in their careers. But the interesting thing about this course is, you know, we evolved it over years based on a lot of feedback from thousands of people who have been through it.

And it has evolved over the years such that a really significant part of the course is figuring out what you need to focus on. Like what is a project that if you focus on deeply will make a difference in your career. We learned working on that course that just asking someone to figure out oh, what's an important project? Great, let's figure out how you make progress on it. Figuring out what that important project is, is not trivial for most people. Sometimes it is, right? In some fields, it is absolutely clear.

If you are a theoretical computer scientist, it's papers that get cited, right? There's no mystery what you need to do. But if you're a project manager at a whatever firm, maybe it's not so obvious, right? So in this course, there's now this really long section where you're basically become a mini-journalist. You're studying people whose careers resonate. You're trying to understand the underlying backbone of what allowed them to make progress. You're reverse engineering based on examples of other people's success.

I mean, the whole thing is really somewhat involved, which I mentioned just to underscore the fact that you should really take seriously this question of trying to figure out, well, what is it worth me spending my attention on? I would recommend default to not getting started. This tends to be my approach. My default is to not do something, to not get started on a project, until it haunts me, you know, it comes back again, and I think about it again,

and it comes up again, and it keeps returning to me, and I keep getting evidence that maybe I should, and then reluctantly, I'll finally commit, but then when I do, I really commit. And that's like this podcast, for example. I can tell you how long I did not start a podcast because I default to not getting started

until I really can see the whole picture and how it would unfold and why it's important in what time I have available. Same thing with this video setup I'm doing for this podcast. I've had all the equipment here for a long time, but it took since March. I really started thinking about this video setup and having more video presence for me ideas, which I think is important. I've been kind of sitting on that until March. and I'm only now in January

starting to make very rapid progress on that just to give you some examples. So default towards not getting started. Think through ideas, get information about ideas, study people in your field. What did they do that was important? What did they do that other people didn't that allowed them to get to the place

that resonates with me? Gather information, learn about what's going on, expose yourself to different ideas and options, learn about things, default towards an action, default towards an action. And then when something rises above that noise consistently and you can't shake it. You say, yeah, this I think really would be useful for me to do. It's worth the effort. Then you lock and load and go after it hardcore.

Your mind will then trust, okay, this was worth it. We know why we're doing it. And you will probably not have nearly as many issues with losing motivation or having your commitment just just sort of trickle out. So that's my big point here. When in doubt, don't get started. Be much more picky and invest much more effort than you think is necessary when you're trying to figure out what it is that you actually want to add to that quarterly plan. What project it is, you do want to identify and make regular progress on what is the project that you're going to fight to get done. Make sure that you have done the work ahead of time to identify something that is worth that fight. Scott asks, can your personality typology,

such as the five-factor model, be useful in determining what career. path to take. Jordan Peterson has stated a person should find a career that's compatible with their five-factor personality typology. I don't know if this is a form of follow your passion or just another way of determining one's career interest. Well, Scott, this is a good question. Just to bring the other listeners up to speed, I think Scott is referencing the idea for my

2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which argues. that follow your passion is bad advice. In slightly more detail, it argues that this idea that we have a pre-existing passion that we should use as the foundation for our career choice is a hypothesis that lacks robust evidence, at least robust evidence that it is widely true. It's sometimes true, but it's much more rare than the popularity of that advice would actually hint. So he's asking, I think this is a good question.

well, if I follow advice that says think about your personality type. So the five-factor model, there's like there's five big psychologists have these sort of five big factors of personality they use. If you look at personality psychology, I don't know a lot about it. I don't know them, but whatever. There's these well-studied factors that people, you can characterize people's personality with. And Scott's saying, for example, should I think about my intrinsic personality? type when trying to match it to a job. A certain type of personality might be better for certain types of jobs and others, or is that

just getting back to follow your passion just dressed up in more psychologically complicated clothes? So I think it's a very good question. This distinction is very subtle, but important. So Scott, I think it's perfectly reasonable to use something like your personality and thinking about whether that's a good match for a type of job. I think that's perfectly reasonable. In fact, I think there's many, many traits about yourself that you should, of course,

keep in mind when trying to figure out what job you might like or what job you might want to avoid. So in addition to personality, preexisting skills. I like math. Okay, maybe jobs that reward math should be more on my screen. I'm hyper-social. Then maybe you do not want a sort of more introverted manner. type remote job where you just check in once a week and are otherwise writing long white papers or something like that. I think that matters. Interest matters. You know, if you're

vaguely interested in politics, you're like a Georgetown student, you're interested in politics, whatever interest means, I don't want to torture that term, then something related to politics. Why not? You might find that more interesting than something related to finance. Location matters. Like, I like this part of the country. My family lives near here. you know, I have a family history in this field. I come from a long line of pottery makers, so maybe I want to look into pottery making. I think all these factors are completely reasonable

to take into account when trying to choose a career. And if you take all these factors into account, you know, you probably have an improved chance of enjoying your career. The idea that I heavily push back against is the notion that there is one career for which you are most matched, that you have a pre-existing passion, and if you match that to this career, you will feel that passion and enjoy your work,

and if you miss that target, you will be unhappy. That reductionist approach to career match theory is something that I reject. I do not think that we're wired for one career. I don't think there's anything in our genetic code that maps on to the idiosyncratic landscape of available jobs in this particular moment in our technological and economic history. I do not believe that you have a very narrow window. And if you miss that window, you're going to be unhappy. But if you get just a right job, you will be happy.

I don't believe in any of that. I think for most people, there are many, many different jobs that if they're approached correctly, can become a source of meaning and satisfaction. can become a foundation on which a deep life is built. Take it into account things like your personality or preexisting skills or interest or inclinations or part of the worlds who want to live in or family heritage. Like this can all help bias you towards jobs that you might enjoy. Or it might just give you a little bit of a leg up and building up that foundation

of passion and meaning. Maybe it gives you a little bit of an accelerant to it. But I'm really lowering the bar here. I lower the bar from there's you have one true passion. If you miss it, you're screwed down to. it's a lot of jobs that you can build a good working life out of. I mean, you want to take some care in choosing it and then for sure take a lot of care into what you do once you have the job. But I'm lowering the bar from you have one shot to get it right to you got a lot of options here.

You know, be smart about it. But I think you should have no problem finding something that gives you the possibility of passion. And then if you approach that job properly once you have it, you could probably cultivate that passion. So in other words, you can't just throw a dart at a bunch of job listings and say wherever it lands, I can turn that into a source of passion. But on the other hand, you shouldn't be holding out for your dream job either. The reality of queer satisfaction falls somewhere in between those two extremes. Our next question comes from Laura. Laura says, hi, hi, Cal.

I'm a classics professor, and I appreciate your podcast for the mythological references, as well as the helpful thinking. on productivity and planning. As a professor in the humanities, I find that I'm often facing a reading hydra. The more scholarly articles I read, the more articles in books I discover that I need to read, and it is difficult to apply capture, configure control to this growing bibliography

and decide which Hydra head to attack first. Do you have advice for applying capture, configure, control to scholarly reading? All right, two quick points. One, if you're a listener who does, I wasn't listen to the mini episodes, but just to the main episodes that I release on Mondays, you might be wondering, what is this mythological references that this classics professor is talking about? That is something we do over in the mini episode.

For whatever reason, we have gone down a rabbit hole of superfluous mythological references. Laura, I think you will enjoy last Thursday's episode where I found the way to work in the Greek goddess of the harvest when talking. about, I don't even remember what it was I was talking about, maybe like making more effective time block schedule. So I'm really trying to up my superfluous mythological references game. So if you don't know what we're talking about, listen to the mini episodes. All right, onto your specific question, Laura, it's a big one. Professors have this, journalist habit too, especially nonfiction book writers.

You're trying to research a topic, but every article or book you find generates more articles and books that you could read and the whole thing becomes overwhelming. So the first thing I would say is capture, configure, and control, which you cite here, is probably not the right, that's not the right philosophy to be referencing. So capture, configure, control. I mean, I think of this as a productivity philosophy. So how do you organize, make sense of all the things you have to do and make sure progress is made? Whereas I think the issue you're talking about here is what's the right way to execute the specific activity of doing research on a topic? So within the capture configure control philosophy, doing research on a topic is an activity that gets scheduled in your time block schedule because your weekly plan says you need to do research this week because your quarterly plan or semester plan says you need to be making progress on this bigger book chapter review or whatever, right?

So what we're really talking about here is an activity, scholarly research and how you actually execute this activity when you have this hydra problem, the citation hydra problem of this paper generates more papers and they each generate more papers. I did an interview in episode 39 with David Epstein, the author David Epstein. And somewhere in that interview we get into this topic where he talks about he has a really nice method for how he deals with this citation hydro problem. Where he has this ongoing Microsoft Word document and he adds to things he finds to like a list of things to explore. And he has a whole specific process. and he's really great at exhaustive nonfiction research on a given topic. That's kind of his nonfiction writer's superpower is if he decides he wants to write about a topic, he reads everything about the topic and then meets the scholars and then writes his own papers.

So I trust his advice there. So you might want to listen to that detailed answer. I'll give you a simplified version of the type of system he talked about, however. I mean, essentially the idea is when you're tackling a given landscape, you know, as you read something and as you come across citations, that could be useful, you have basically a buffer or a stack. I think Epstein, this was just like pages and a word document. You have like a buffer or a stack where you add that citation as you come across it with a brief summary of this is what it's about. And I think what Epstein did is he had different categories of topics related to the subject he's studying. So as new citations come up at the top of each of those categories, which again could just exist as pages in a word document or something like this, he would just add that citation as something to look into.

Like, oh, as I'm reading this, oh, here's a citation on, you know, five-factor personality model. I'm saying that just because it came up in the last question. that might be relevant for this part of this research. So I'll just put that, let me copy that citation, just throw it in to the page I have for that topic, at the top of it. Oh, and here's a citation for, you know, whatever, Cal Newport's Passion Theory. All right, let me just throw a quick citation to that at the top of my document

for the relevant category there. So as you read something, you're generating a bunch of citations to get added the list under each of the categories relevant to the general topic that you're studying. Then you say what's next? Well, each of these categories have a bunch of citations under them now. So you grab one of those things. You're kind of popping it off the stack to use a computer science data structures term. You read that. That generates new citations. You throw them at the top of the pages for the relevant categories. Now, this does seem like a hydro problem at first that you are adding citations faster than you are able to

read the actual documents. However, as Epstein talks about, and as I've experienced, you've probably experienced, too. This is not an endless regression. Because a few things start to happen. One, increasingly you get to, you get the citations that are getting pretty far to the outer limits of the orbit of the topics you actually care about, and when you get to them, you say,

eh, there's nothing really here that useful. And so you've kind of popped that citation off, and it doesn't generate new citations. Two, after a while, you will begin to find that the citations that you are coming across and what you're currently reading are things that you've already processed. So if we're going to use again

sort of geeky data structure type terms, if we think of this as some sort of directed citation graph, eventually you begin to outline the whole contours of the connected component. I've already done that citation. I've already done that citation. Oh, here's one I haven't done yet, right?

And over time, you get to a place where you said, like, well, I basically have at least skimmed everything that's relevant. There's like no, every citation I now am seeing, I've seen before and I've read before. I know what this paper is referencing. I mean, Epstein talks about that as the state where he knows he's mastered the literature because every citation he sees, it seems interesting, he knows what it is. He knows what they're talking about. Now, this can take forever if you're trying to read all these papers in detail. So part of the key here is skimming really fast, slowing down when you need to slow down. But in a lot of cases, you're just throwing in like a summary, like this uses this approach to get the,

these results, because you can always go back once you really understand the literature and say, all right, now that I really understand this literature, this paper over here seems really important. Now let me go back and read that in more detail. But when you're in this initial stage of just exploring the literature, you can go really fast, get summaries, and you're throwing stuff on the citation stacks faster than you pop it, but then eventually you start the rate at which you add new things slow down, and then eventually you kind of get to the limits of the literature, and now you know what's going on. All right, let's do one more work question here.

Deb says, I'm a mom of two kids under the age of five. Also, for what it's worth, I'm the go-to parent. I do an early morning shift, but also dinner prep and post-dinner kid wrangling and emotional labor. Your system is the only way I get the same or greater level of productivity than my kidless colleagues. Also, getting up at 4.45 a.m. is the kid. heat of getting stuff done. It means I don't get to watch a movie with my partner in the evening, but I don't see another way around it, at least until kids give up naps and fall asleep at 7.30 p.m., which she says she hopes will be the case within 10 months or so.

She says, I would like a discussion of deep work and deep life while parenting toddlers. This would be greatly appreciated. Well, Deb, one of the things I agree with here is that it really would level the playing field. If we could all just agree that those who don't have kids, maybe they don't get to hear all this advice. They don't get to hear about time blocking. They don't get to hear about capture, configure control. They don't get to hear about multi-scale project planning.

Because as you've noted, it's like what lets us keep up with them. And we can get enough done with our more limited time that we can still keep up with the pack of people that really have nothing else on their day except for worrying about when should I do my Zoom yoga and what cocktail I should make tonight. So I agree with that initiative. Let's level the playing fields here by all agreeing that if you don't have kids, don't worry about this stuff and let the rest of us who are completely stressed out

and anxious have that advantage. As for your current situation, I think it's very much worth emphasizing that toddlers, like having a toddler is like a pseudo-emergency. situation. I mean, you can think of it as, especially with the pandemic and limited child care options, et cetera, et cetera. Toddlers are really hard, especially having two. I have one right now. My older kids were both toddlers together, though. It's like, it's really hard, especially if they're, especially if they're around the house, especially if their sleep is not going

so well. So first of all, thinking about this as a temporary moment, you know, like you having toddlers plus the pandemic is sort of like your very own blitz from World War II London. It's terrible. It'll get better. I think that's helpful because it sets the expectations pretty reasonably. I'm sure every listener who heard your question is probably also yelling at their podcast player right now. Spread out that work more with your partner. You know, I mean, you're doing the early morning shift and the dinner prep and the post kid dinner wrangling and you have to do all the household logistics.

you know, I mean, look, unless he's a, or she is like a frontline virologist who's working 15 hours shifts to create COVID treatments or something like that. I mean, obviously, making that more equitable if possible will help, like work on it. Like, where, what's work together? Who's doing what? How much time does that leave us? What's the vision here? What are we missing from our lives? What would it require to get those things back into our lives? I mean, it's worth aggressively fighting for those type of circumstances as opposed to just say, well, this's what we've fallen into. So now I'm just trying to cope with this particular type of schedule. So I think that is good. The other thing I would say is because you're in a temporary,

terrible situation, also see if you can reduce. You know, to take a year where you, if you're some way to reduce what's on your plate, to reduce the projects on your plate, to reduce the non-professional, emotional labor generating things, to kind of go into a foxhole mentality, we're going to cut back on this, even something, even something, you know, drastic, like temporarily cutting back hours or taking a whatever it is, right? I'm just saying when you're in a mindset of like this is an unusually hard situation, it opens up unusually radical solutions that could make a big difference. But beyond that, mainly I feel your pain. There's things you can do right now to make it better. You should do what you can aggressively. Don't tell your kidless friends about time blocking

and the other types of things we talk about here. And keep in mind, you are not that far from getting to a point in life. Those kids are a little older, and you're not worried about pandemic restrictions on child care activities. It's going to seem, relatively speaking, much, much better. All right, we're running a little long today, so we should probably move on. Let's jump over now to technology questions. Ash asks, what were your main reasons for choosing an online latex editor such as Overleaf, rather than a desktop-based editor such as Techworks.

Do you think those who are prone to rabbit hole web browsing should opt out for the latter? All right, quick background. Latek is a markup language that people who write mathematical papers, so papers that need complex equations in it, we use this markup language because it can then render all the mathematical symbols, etc., for us, in a very neat and consistent way. Overleaf is a web-based editor, so it's like Google Docs,

but for this particular markup language. TechWorks is just a, think of it as like Microsoft Word. So it's a way of using this language, this markup language, just on your computer. I have used both. I have both. Ash, there's two reasons why I use the web-based Overleaf. One, and this is primary, is for collaboration.

I typically write papers with collaborators around the world. Overleaf makes it very easy. We just share the project. Everyone then just accesses the same project. Everyone can edit it. You can even see their cursor moving on it. It just makes it easier. What we used to have to do to collaborate on these type of papers,

we used to use computer code repository software like SVN, where we would check in and check out the pages of the documents like you would code revisions, which was unnecessarily heavy-handed and annoying for what we were really doing, which was just basically group editing of a document. So that's a big reason why I use Overleaf. The other reason why I use it is that

they do all the work on the back end of keeping it up to date, of installing all the relevant packages. If you're using TechWorks, you have to do this on your own. Now you're asking, isn't going to make you prone to rabbit-hole? If you're prone to rabbit-holling,

do you not want to be doing things on the web? And I was like, that's a bigger problem to solve, Right. I mean, if I have time put aside to work on writing a paper, the fact that I'm writing it in a web-based interface versus, you know, a desktop interface, it shouldn't really matter. If I'm following my time block schedule, that's what I'm doing. I'm not web surfing. I mean, I could just as easily open a web browser while using tech works, you know, just as like, just like I can just as easily if I was somehow writing this paper with pen and paper, take out my phone and look at distraction. So I think that's a, that's a higher level. problem, and that's the problem of sticking with your time blocks. And if you're writing, you should be writing. I don't think the fact that it's like on the web is going to make me more likely to jump over to an unrelated website. So that's why I like Overleaf. It's been great since I shifted over to it. The tech works is fine too. Andrew asks, how do I stay informed about current events without falling into the, quote, Twitter trap, end quote.

Well, Andrew, Twitter need not have anything to do with keeping up with current events. The idea that Twitter is the best source of information on the news or that you somehow need the type of information coming through Twitter is simply not true. You want to stay up on current events, you know, read a newspaper. They've got teams or reporters and editors who go out there and edit the news and respond to the news. news and have standards and write it up or listen to the radio in the morning or listen to one of the news roundup podcasts like the daily. There's a lot of ways to stay informed on the news that don't involve these 256 character takes and hearts and icons and retweets. And so my general suggestion is stay far away from Twitter when it comes to news. I know it's very tempting.

like when there's something happening that's breaking news is very chemically satisfying to get into a Twitter scrum and you feel like you're getting all of this breaking news and you're more up to speed on what's going on

but you know what the thing is that's fragmented a lot of it's wrong a lot of it is emotionally charged and if you just stick with the main edited sources they'll get to the real storylines that matter

pretty quickly and in a much more condensed manner than just being a part of that scrum so just put Twitter aside when it comes to news read a paper, listen to the radio, listen to a News Roundup podcast, you will be plenty informed. I want to take a moment to thank another sponsor that makes deep questions possible, and that is

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so that site says, oh, this is who's connecting to me, here's their address. When you use ExpressVPN, you instead connect first to an ExpressVPN server. This connection is entirely encrypted, right? So no one can see what you're saying to the server. Then the ExpressVPN server, on your behalf, talks to the site. So what does the site see?

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And Jim independently asks, what are your thoughts on the value of Zetelkastin for the business setting such as knowledge work? So first, I should say I'm sure I'm pronouncing this German word wrong, so my apologies. Two, I didn't know anything about this. Note-taking method, which is what Zetelkastin is. I did not know about this until this question was asked, and I did some research.

Indeed, in Thursday's Habit Tune Up mini episode, someone was asking about some note-taking tools. It turns out those are Zettl Kasten-inspired note-taking tools. And as I said in that episode, I had no idea what they were. Now I know a little bit more about it. All right, so what's going on with Zetal-Kastin? If you want to find out more about this, it seems the book is called How to Take Smart Notes. I think it's a German gentleman. It's in translation now, and I believe that helped popularize this idea.

There's a website, zettelcasten.de. That explains the method. That's Z-E-T-T-E-L-K-S-T-E-N. So a German website, but in English, that explains the method. And there are several software tools out there that essentially help you implement these ideas. There's something called archive. There's something called Rome. There's a tool called Notion that I think is more general, but people use it for Zettelkast and style note taking.

So what's going on here? Well, look, I should say I love this type of stuff. Give me a highly geeky note taking or productivity philosophy that has corresponding technology tools. I'm in. I want to read about it. I want to see videos on it. I love that type of thinking. So there's no exception here.

So I looked into this a little bit. I'm not an expert yet, but I mean, essentially, this is a note-taking methodology that is based on bidirectional graph connectivity as opposed to hierarchical notebook style categorization of information. So in Zetlcastin, you'll create a note, and then that note might link to other notes. So then you can follow that link to another note, but that note will then have a list of things that link to it. So you can jump back to the thing you are in. And then you add in tags in a very intentional way. So instead of having strict category, something has to fall into, it can possess many tags. So you can organize your work by tags as well.

Show me everything with these tags. And then if you jump to one of those notes, you can follow links. So, okay, look, this note is about this topic. I find it when I search for a tag. I jump to that note. I see what's linked to it. Oh, one of the things linking to it is a master list of lots of notes on that topic. So I click on that link and now I jump over to a master list.

Now I can see a bunch of other things related to that topic and jump to one of those things and etc. This note mentions a person that comes up a lot in my work. So I can follow that link and there's that person and then I can follow a link from that to a list of all these people. So you're sort of navigating a content graph as opposed to a content tree, which has a strict hierarchical nature. That you're in this category, subcategory, subcategory, subcategory. So I think that's an interesting idea. The system seem to be used both for personal knowledge management, so whatever. I'm trying to organize a universe of notes about all the topics I write about as a writer.

And using this type of methodology, I have them all captured with these bi-directional links and tags. And so I'm not just looking at strict hierarchies. And I can surf through this graph of connected information and find what I need. There also seems to be a movement about building personal. productivity systems out of Zetelkastin style digital note-taking tools where you have a page for the current day. And then you can have to-dos and you can assign to-dos to-dos to various tasks and and connect to the projects you're working on and the to-do can show up in the projects as well as on your daily pages. There's a particular tool called Rome, R-O-A-M, that you can find out about at roamerse.com, which seems to be pushing this use as well.

I think all this is cool. I might even mess around with using some of these tools to organize my notes that I use for things like ideas for articles and books. I think there's something to this graph-based approach as opposed to like a hierarchical notebook-based approach. All that being said, I will add my normal caveat. This is sort of a theme I hit in my New Yorker piece on the rise and fall of getting things done, is that there's something very seductive. about this idea that with the right philosophy and structure and tool, the challenges of doing hard, impactful work will be greatly reduced.

And that's the promise when you're thinking about using a complex that'll cost in style note-taking tool, that if I'm using this tool, it's then going to be significantly easier to write that really good chapter article because I'll be able to very quickly pull the resources I use. when using this tool to organize my days, because everything is connected and at my hands, it'll be much more automated how I go through my days, and I'll just get a lot more done. The reality is that no tool can actually relieve you of the obligation of making hard decisions, dealing with ambiguous, urgent, and complicated scheduling demands, and, of course, actually just doing the hard cognitive friction work of producing things with your mind. none of that stuff can be evaded any more than if you want to get yourself into really good shape.

There is no technology system or plan that is going to increase your muscles that does not involve you eventually lifting heavy things. And so that's the only word of warning I would give. What you tend to get out of a good like information management system, for example, what you tend to get is reduced friction. That helps.

You reduce the drag a little bit. It makes things a little bit. It makes things a little bit less difficult. Sometimes you get a novelty bonus, right? Just because the tool is fun to use, you might actually, might be easier to sum in the motivation to work through your notes on an article. But these tend to be relatively modest Epsilon.

So I think, you know, I keep a lot of my notes in Evernote and files just in directories on my computer when I'm working on a book or an article. If I use a Zetel-Cast and Scal scheme, which I might try, it's not going to ultimately improve the quality of my articles. I don't think that it will significantly reduce the time required to write my articles, but it might make things a little bit more interesting, reduce some friction, make things a little bit easier when I'm working on. I mean, that's a non-trivial benefit,

but it does not substantially change what the challenge is. Same thing with the type of personal productivity systems I talk about using capture, configure control, using multi-level planning. these type of ideas, they're going to help you make progress on the right things. They're going to help you not waste your attention. They're going to help you organize what's on your plate and reduce cognitive stress, but still,

they're not going to make the plans for you. They're not going to help you avoid having to confront all of the complicated stuff on your plate during the configure step and trying to figure out what you should work on and shunnen and what you should cancel and the social capital involved in that and the guesses you're making about what's important and what's not. All that hard work still happens. And of course, the hard work of just sitting down and doing the work never goes away. Now, of course, it helps when you're time blocking and you know this is what I should be working on next.

And you get rid of some of the friction. You get rid of some of the overhead. But again, that's my only warning here is I think all these philosophies and systems, they're about epsilon improvements, about not wasting energy, about making some things easier. But don't think that they are going to substantially change the challenge of doing challenging things, the challenge of actually trying to live and organize a deep and productive life. So I will mess around with that'll cast him. And if you're a productivity nerd like me, might as well. It could be fun. But it is not going to be transformative in the sense that it will substantially change

what it actually feels like to do hard things. All right, cool. I'm glad I got introduced to that new technology. I look forward to geeking out on that some more this weekend. But for now, let's move on to questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from from Casey. She asks, does anyone use time blocking for personal time? I work part-time and my other job is being a stay-at-home wife and mom. I've been using your time-block calendar for my entire day, not just my work hours. Have you known anyone else to do this? What are the best practices? Well, my normal answer is you don't want to time-block all of your hours. You don't want to be time-blocking your leisure time. You don't want to be time-blocking all of your weekends.

because running a time block schedule is intense and you will eventually burn out. Now, in this particular situation in which you are working part-time and you're a stay-at-home parent during the other time, what I might actually suggest doing is defining a workday that includes the part-time hours for your outside-the-home work, but also includes the non-trivial number of hours for sort of. to stay-at-home parenting work and has a clear shutdown, right? So let's say your part-time work is from 9 to noon. Maybe you would time block 9 to 5.

So you're time-blocking hours there that are outside of the time that you're dedicating to your part-time job, but are dedicated instead to the household-related work or tasks. See, why that might be an advantage is, okay, of course, you're time blocking your part-time work time and you get all the advantage of that, but time blocking some hours every day for all the other myriad obligations and tasks that comes with parenting and running a household means you can get really effective work done in that role as a stay-at-home parent, and yet still have a clear cutoff when you're done. Now you're more into sort of personal time, leisure time.

Obviously, there's still a lot of family time to family obligations even after those hours, but now you can handle it a little bit more loosely without that intensity. So the metric I'm working backwards from here, Casey, is that, you know, if you're time blocking about eight hours a day, and that's pretty intense, that's good. And if you then have eight hours after that and what you're not time blocked, that works out to be about right, lets your brain recharge. So if we're looking at an eight hour period each day in which you're only spending four with your outside the house work, let's use that other four and get to that nice round number of roughly eight hours that our brain can handle just to get the extra productivity pop that time blocking gives you. Right, the more you time block,

the more productive you're going to be, it's just the more exhaustion you're going to be. So exhausted. So this is just this tradeoff. So this is why, you know, it's a harder situation. If you work a full-time job and then have to squeeze in all the family stuff,

it's harder. Because you've probably exhausted that productivity boosts from time blocking, just getting through your workday. And so then when you're done with your work day, you know, I typically recommend you schedule on your calendar during your weekly plan,

the sort of big rock things you need to do as a family and then try to like do a little bit of small productivity task every day. And you have to be a little bit looser so you don't burn out. So Casey, you have the advantage of having some cognitive energy to spare. And so if you take some of that extra cognitive energy and say, I'm going to do some hours every day, very well scheduled for my household, I think you're going to find that, wow, you really get on top of things. And those evenings, when you get to the evenings, when you get to the end of your eight hours, it's probably going to feel more relaxed and less anxious and less loaded than some.

who has to spin that time-blocking energy only on work and come home and face the household or parenting task after that. So that's what I'd suggest. Kind of time block out a normal work day that's split between part-time work and stay-at-home work and then shut down to be less structured for the time that follows. The next question comes from Relieved College grad who says, Hi, Hi, Cal, I love your podcast. I'm a recent college graduate and I'll be starting a software development position in March because the last fall semester was very stressful for me. I'm relieved for this much awaited break. However, I don't want to let this time go to waste. How would you put these two months to use if you were in this situation?

Well, I think what I would do in your situation where you're transitioning from college into the world of work is I would probably dedicate this break you have to focus on the deep, life more generally. If you listen to the podcast, you've heard my prescription before, you figure out the areas of your life, what I call buckets, that are most important to you. You try to identify a tractable and persistent keystone habit in each of those buckets, and then you spend some time with each of those buckets one by one, trying to overhaul that part of your life.

Do that now. You have a couple months. You can get through probably a pass of getting some habits. habits in place and spending a couple weeks, two or three weeks on each of the buckets. This is the time to do that. Now, first of all, this will not be exhausting. It's aspirational. It's completely autonomous. It's going to expose you to things. It's going to make your life better. It's going to build your character. It's going to give you a foundation for the difficulties that follow. There's a great time to lay these foundations of depth before you get back

into the busyness of having a job. And it's also not going to take a ton of time. It's not like you're going to be doing this all day long. But I think you're going to come out of this period feeling independent and efficacious and autonomous and it's going to be good. So that's what I would do. Get these habits in place, spend two or three weeks per each bucket depending on how many buckets you choose and how much time you have left and really hit the ground running in March, having perhaps for the first time in your life really given some thought to what matters to me and what do I want to do about it. Speaking of living a deep life, I have other things I need to go do. So let's wrap this up with

one last question. and this final query comes from Dev, who says, how can I develop curiosity? Well, Dev, I actually wrote about this in a book you probably have not seen or read, but should, and don't be turned off by the title,

but it's called How to Become a High School Superstar. It's the third book I wrote. Obstensibly, it is taking a sort of contrarian Malcolm Gladwellian look at competitive college admissions, it tries to deconstruct how this group of students identified who did well in college admissions but being genuinely relaxed and not overstressed. How did they do that? And because of that, it becomes an interesting eclectic meditation and investigation on things like

interestingness. Like how does someone become like an interesting person involved in things that's attention catching the type of person where an admissions officer says, huh, this is something different. This person catches my attention. attention, they would help make our class more interesting. All right? So because the book dealt with that topic, I actually literally have a chapter in there where I'm trying to understand how do you become an interesting person, which is a question that I think is quite congruent with what you're asking here about developing curiosity. And the answer I basically gave there

is you have to expose yourself, get in the habit of exposing yourself to lots of interesting information and kind of see what sticks and follow the threads that catch your attention. So how do you expose yourself to interesting information. You read. All right, that's a big thing. And you read what's interesting to you. Like, just what catches your attention? Let me read that. Let me go down rabbit holes of book topics. So you develop a reading habit. That's big. You also develop a listening habit. By listening habit, I mean, you know, in the book I was talking about, you would go to talks. But in our current technological age, that could be listening to interviews on podcast or watching people's lectures on YouTube, things that didn't really exist back when I wrote that book.

But you expose yourself to interesting people talking about interesting things. So you're reading books and you're exposing yourself to interesting people talking about interesting things. Third, find interesting people to hang out with. You're around people who have interesting habits or interested in ideas and are out there engaging with the world of ideas. You do these three things and you do them regularly. you will start to find different ideas catch your attention.

You follow those rabbit holes and a different idea that catch your attention. You follow that rabbit hole. And as the amount of information you gather builds, your curiosity will grow, what you know will grow, your interestingness to the world will grow. It's like you're opening up your mind to like, yeah, there's interesting things out there in the world that are worth understanding, worth exploring.

At first it'll be uncomfortable. I mean, especially if you're really attuned to just distracting yourself, assuaging boredom with, like, what a screen offers you immediately, that type of numbing, distracting behavior that we get out of technology, which can be antithetical to true curiosity. But when you begin regularly exposing yourself to more interesting information, putting more effort into that exploration, your brain develops a taste for it. And it wants to read that article in the newspaper. And it wants to listen to that interesting podcast interview. and it wants to buy that new book that you just heard about. So curiosity is contagious. Curiosity can grow.

It can grow with exposure and experience. And so that's what I would say. And it's a great time to do it. Today is as good a time as any time. So you should get started with that right away, Dev. I think a life exposed to a lot of ideas is a life that has a lot more options and sees a lot more of just interestingness and goodness in the world. So I will be curious, Deb, to hear how this goes. as you attempt to actually open your mind to all of the different interesting things that are

out there in the world waiting for you to discover. And with that, I should probably leave you to go discover these interesting things. Thank you to everyone who asks questions. To find out how you can ask your own questions for the podcast, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. I have all the instructions there. I will be back later this week with a habit tune up mini episode. and until then, as always, stay deep.