Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 62: Habit Tune-Up: Managing Information in Your Inbox

Episode Date: January 14, 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.- "Thank you" emails and overload. [3:14]- Managing information contained in emails. [5:35]- Dividing time into ten minute chunks. [13:30]- Restarting a drive toward digital minimalism. [26:07]- Personal metrics and weekend planning. [34:21]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 a deep questions, habit tune up mini-episode. The format of these mini-episodes is straightforward. I answer voice questions from listeners that get into some of the nitty, gritty details of the topics and strategies we like to discuss. Quick announcement this week, as I mentioned in the main episode on Monday and on my email newsletter, my new book, A World Without Email, is coming out on March 2nd. I'll of course be talking about these ideas more as we get closer to that release date, but I just wanted to reiterate now that if you pre-order the book, hold on to your email receipt.

I have a really cool idea about what I want to offer to people who pre-ordered as my way of saying thanks. It's going to be something that I think you'll enjoy. So just hold that email receipt. We'll tell you more about the pre-order bonus. once we have worked out the details. All right, we have a good show today. I have a couple questions about email and something about time blocking.

We have something here about personal metric tracking and whether that can happen after you do the shutdown complete and a question from someone who was a failed digital minimalist who wants to get up and try again. If you want to ask your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how to submit both written and voice questions for this show.

So we have a lot to dive into, but before we do, let's briefly take a moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible. And I am talking about Magic Spoon. As I elaborated on Monday's episode, Magic Spoon, offers that sugar cereal experience we all loved as a kid, two adults in a package that is, somehow healthy. Zero sugar, 11 grams of protein, only three net grams of carbs in each serving. It is

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That's magic spoon.com slash cow and use the code cow to get free shipping. All right, so let's get started with our show. Our first question is about when it is appropriate or not to send an email response. Hi, Cal. My name is Amy Castro, and I'm a PhD student in nursing. I have an email etiquette question. In the age of email overload, when is it appropriate to send a thank you reply email? I'm particularly thinking of team projects where you ask all members to complete a few tasks. When they send you the completed forms, et cetera, should you send each of them a quick thank you back?

Thanks. Well, I think it's always appropriate to send a thank you email, and I want to worry about thank you emails contributing to the problem of email overload. And one of the ideas I get into in my new book on the topic is I look into the psychology behind our relationship with this tool. Overflow an email inbox does create a lot of psychological distress. But the factors that create that distress is not just the mere presence of a message. In fact, most people find it enjoyable.

If there's a short message there, it's someone saying thank you or it has some interesting information. That's nice. It's a nice diversion. They consume it. They're done with it. The thing that causes distress that leads to the overload problem being a problem is when a message brings with it an ambiguous obligation that has now been put on your

plate. When it's asking a question, you don't quite know how to answer. when it's making a request of you that you're now going to have to decline, but it's not socially obvious the best way to do this. When it puts something onto your plate that now you have to remember, it has to go into a system, you have to find time for it, some of your limited cognitive resources have just been carved up into something even smaller, and you didn't even have a say in it.

Messages that bear these types of ongoing obligations is what piles up, psychologically speaking, creates a sense of overload makes people miserable. So the thank you email, that's great. In fact, by contrast compared to other messages, nothing makes someone happier in their inbox and getting something that's nice or interesting and requires zero response back.

So I think you are always fine to send thank you emails. Just don't add a coda to that thank you email where you say, and while I have your attention, can you come speak at this meeting? Do you want to jump on a call? Can you also tackle this project? All right, so let's stick with this email theme for one more question. This one has to do with dealing with the information that these messages can contain. Hi, Cal. My name is Pamela, and I have a question about how to organize information that comes to me via email that I may need to reference later.

I work in human resources for a large company, and especially with working remotely, I just feel bombarded by details of benefit plans and union agreements and decisions from executives and others. and not to mention details on my own projects. Managing all this was pretty tough when I worked in the office, and it's so much harder now that I'm working from home. I don't want to spend time categorizing emails, so instead I find myself wasting time doing useless searches and outlook to try to retrieve information. There has to be a better way.

Can you help with this? Thank you. Well, Pamela, the first thing I'll say is that your email inbox is a terrible knowledge management system. a lot of people use it this way. Oh, the information I need exist as emails in my inbox. The task I'm supposed to do exist in emails in my inbox and I look through my inbox to see, you know, what email is in there to think about what to do or looking for someone to prod me with an email to remind me that something needs to be done. When I need to find information, I search for it and maybe I can categorize the emails and outlooks that are easier to find. You can do this, but it's an incredibly inefficient knowledge management systems. What you really need is a good system that is

optimized for each of the different processes that you are involved with in your job. Now, I promise not to make every question relate back to my new book, but this is one of the big ideas in the new book, is that you need to be explicit about the different processes that right now that you are implicitly involved in. You know, I'm involved in tracking contract terms. So what's my process for how I keep track of contract terms. I'm involved in being up to date on the latest HR policies so that when people come in with questions, I can answer it, or if there's compliance issues, I'll be able to notice them, et cetera, right? So in your example, these might be examples of roles you have and you have some sort of implicit process for how you deal with each of these things.

When you don't actually make these processes explicit, we tend to fall back on what is the lowest comment denominator, most convenient, most flexible, possible way of dealing with things, which is just, I don't know, I'll be in my inbox and I'll get emails about things and I can find things in my inbox. And if someone bothers me about it, I can find a right message. It's a workflow that I call the hyperactive hive mind in my book. And it's just based on, let's figure things out on the fly, sort of unstructured ad hoc messaging. So what I argue for is now you identify, here's the processes I'm implicitly involved in. Let's optimize them. What's actually the best way to do them. And when you're optimizing a process, one of the key questions

you have is how do I want to actually deal with the information flow regarding to, regarding or I mean relating to, I should say, this process. How do I want information about this process to be inbound? How do I want to store it? How do I want to later reference it? You have to actually answer these questions. And once you start asking these questions, you will get answers that are better than just, I don't know, it's in my inbox. So for your contract terms, if you actually sit down and think it through, you say, you know, I think the right process. here is that these new contracts, they're sent to me via email. Maybe that's not right. Maybe the right thing to do here is to have a shared folder. And when paperwork is processed, look, I'm making

this all up, by the way, Pamble. I don't really know your job, but just to just to try to make this idea concrete. You know, hey, when paperwork is completed for a new hire, they, so-and-so, who does that, puts it into this folder of new contracts and maybe there's a cover page of here's points to look at. And you just check that folder once a week. You check it on Monday. You bring out those new contracts. You have time put aside on Monday morning to look through the new contracts.

And you file it into your system. And maybe you have a master list, like a word document or something where you keep track of contract points that are worthwhile or a spreadsheet or something. Whatever. The point is you've thought it through. How do I want the information to come in? How do I want to organize it? How do I want to come out? What makes the most sense to do this role in a way that I can be very effective?

And I can minimize cost like context shifting or stress of not knowing what's going on or having inconveniences of having to hunt down information. Maybe when it comes to like promulgating new HR compliance terms, again, you say I'm going to build out an information system. I have a shared folder directory based on categories and subcategories where new regulations go. I have a document I keep that updates a log of changes that points to these documents. like others, a new change to this type of policy, see this document in this folder.

Maybe you use a wiki for this. Maybe you use something like Evernote. Maybe you use OneNote if you're within the Microsoft family. Again, the specifics here don't matter. What matters is you say, this is a process I am involved in. What's the best way to do it? That includes managing the information flow. And one of the things that happens,

when you get explicit about every process that you are involved with in your job, and you optimize each of those, is you find that the importance and centrality of your Slack channels or email inbox is significantly reduced. When you have thought through information flows for each of these processes that you've optimized and experimented with, this idea that it just all shows up haphazardly in this inbox, you constantly have to monitor, that goes away. I think this is one of the big problems with the email issue is that a lot of people,

when they're approaching the problem of email overload. Assume that this notion that everything just comes in an undifferentiated manner through their inbox is the only way to work. And then they just try to say, how do I tame that reality? Just like when your knee is really hurting, you say, what can make the pain go away? Should I take Advil? Should I take put ice on it?

People do the same thing with the email issue. Well, maybe I should batch my email. Maybe I should only check it twice a day. Maybe I should have better etiquette about how. I respond so that, you know, maybe it generates less responses. And that's like finding, you know, deciding between Advil and ICE for your knee. Whereas if you do what I'm talking about, say, what are the underlying processes I do? How do I want to optimize those? Including what's the best way to have information come in and out of these processes that minimizes

the amount of context shifting and overhead and stress, the pain goes away, right? You're now healing the knee instead of just trying to mask the pain. And suddenly you don't have to worry so much, about norms and etiquette and batching and moving to lower friction email clients that have key, stroke, shortcuts that means you can get through your emails even faster. That's like making the top easier to remove from the Advil bottle. Not a bad thing, but I'd much rather actually have a surge and fix the torn meniscus than just try to get Advil into my mouth faster. I'm really trying to, I'm torturing this metaphor at this point. But I hope you get the underlying point here, Pamela, which is, you know, I'm not telling you specifically what to do because I

don't know your job, but I'm telling you in the audience more generally. You think about your different roles and the different processes these roles involve, and you start optimizing them, all aspects of these, including the information flow. Then these problems of just having like overloaded email inboxes where everything live and you cause you to be stressed and that you're buried under. These problems really, really begin to dissipate. So that's exactly where I would direct you to go. And of course, I would self-interestingly say, you know, buy a copy of a world without email when it comes out because that's going to walk you through the gory details of it. But those details aside, that's the big picture idea.

All right, let's be done with email for now. Let's move on to a question that has to do more with how you organize your time. Hi, Cal, this is Kevin. I really enjoy your books, your blog, and your podcast. I recently came across a quote attributed to the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Comprad, And the quote is, quote, you can do so much in 10 minutes time. Ten minutes once gone are gone for good. Divide your life into 10 minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.

I'm interested in your perspective on his comment about dividing your life into 10 minute units and trying to fill those with tasks. Thanks a lot. Happy holidays. I would say that quote from the IKEA founder is an example of what I tend to call first generation, time management thinking. So if you want to think about the history of time management, which actually you probably don't, but it's something I have because I'm a geek about these things. You have for most of history, not a lot of systematic thinking about time management because it wouldn't really make much sense. I mean, most people were farmers, and there was just always stuff to do. you didn't really have to plant it. It just kind of knew. It had been handed down to you. The seeds have to go in today or whatever. I obviously know a lot about farming here. You have to gather the wheat. You have to do this. You have to fix the things that's broken. You worked all day. And there was a never-ending flow of things that had to be done. And that was basically it. And maybe you took time off to go to church or something like that. Right. So we didn't really think a lot about time management. Then you have the rise of office work as well as the rise of office work as well as the rise.

for entrepreneurship. You have these two things happening at the same time. You get by the early 20th century people starting to think about, well, what should I do with my time? Like, I have a lot more autonomy now. There's not obvious hay to be bailed or wheat to be thrashed. It's not the same task that we do the same time of year all throughout my life, the same way my dad did it the same way that he did it before him. You had a lot more flexibility in figuring out what should I do with my day and what should I do with my time? A lot of this first-generation time management thinking really just centered on what to us seems like an obvious idea, but I think it was important at the period in which it was introduced,

which is you should be, you should use it. Like, you should take your time and treat it seriously. Now that you're not being forced to do things just by the demands of not starving to death if the wheat doesn't get thrashed or the Higginy Bale, now it's up to you to convince yourself, do stuff productive with your time. like don't let time be wasted. I think that's the attitude from which the IKEA co-founder is coming here. He says every 10 minutes should have something productive to do, right?

Arnold Bennett, How to Live in 24 hours a day, a book I've talked about in several of my books, same sort of idea. He's telling the early 20th century British salary men in the suburbs of London, don't just drink and smoke and play cards in your eight hours you have after work and before you go to sleep. Like, use that time productively. It wasn't a problem that a farmer had 100 years earlier. It's a problem that the salary man who had a 9 to 5 job suddenly was facing. And so kind of had this idea of like, hey, don't be lazy.

Use your time. It's up to you. Again, it's up to you and not external forces to actually do productive things with your time. And I think especially for people who were very successful in the culture like the IKEA co-founder or Bennett, that part of their success was they worked really hard at things. They weren't lazy. They kept trying to do productive things. post hoc, ergo proctor hawk after this, therefore because of this, you should be very productive too. By the time you get to the second generation of productivity advice, much more attention is paid to not all tasks are created equal.

So now you get to the prioritization systems you see in the 1970s and the 1980s where we realize it's not just a matter of do stuff with all of your time. you know, don't drink in the saloon for hours every day, be productive. Now it's make sure you do the most important things first. Or make sure that all of the different important roles in your life are serviced. I think the model of the second generation thinking is probably Stephen Covey. So he had ideas, for example, like the quad, where you have the two-by-two grid. And on one axis, you have important and non-important and on an un-important. another axis you have urgent and not urgent.

And his whole thing was be wary about getting too stuck in the important and urgent. You can fill all of your time, all of those 10-minute chunks that the IKEA co-founder talked about. You could fill all of that time with urgent, not important things, but that you also should think about putting aside time. So like aggressively putting aside and protecting time for things that were not urgent but important because sometimes that's what moves the needle. you should also be pretty ruthless about not spending time on things that are both non-urgent and not important.

So we begin to get nuance in not just work because the distinction again, the distinction in the early 20th century up to the mid-century might just be, hey, don't be lazy. You should work versus not work. Fill your time with productive things as opposed to, you know, drinking and smoking cigars. You get to the second half of the 20th century as well, look, you could fill your time over 10 times. 10 times over, you could fill your time with different things. So what should you do? And let's worry about the quads. Covey also had the really important idea of roles.

You should identify these different roles and make sure that you are servicing each of them. So that you're not just focusing on one type of work. You need to focus on all the different types of work. So we get that nuance to the second generation. I would say in the third generation, which is where we are now, and it's probably the generation I'm much more closely aligned with, you see work. and organization of productivity as part of a broader initiative to build the best possible life. And of course, from that perspective, the notion that you would fill every 10-minute chunk of your day with work,

like your job-related stuff seems incredibly, probably ineffective if your goal is to build the deepest possible life because there are other things in life that matters. Another aspect of the third generation of time management thinking is that it's much more psychologically aware. right, you're going to burn out. You know, you need breaks. You need rest. You need a variety. You need other parts of your life to be serviced.

There's much more psychological awareness that would now look back at this notion of divide your time in the 10 minute chunks and fill it all with different work. It's like, oh, how long is that going to last? You're going to burn yourself out. You're going to be unhappy. What's the point? So I think things have gotten a lot more sophisticated. So if I didn't look at this advice through that lens and the type of things I'm talking about, I would say, first of all, 10 minutes is way too small if you're going to break up your work.

There's too much overhead and switching your attention. There's too much imprecision and estimating how long things take for you to successfully predict how a day could unfold in 10 minute chunks. It just doesn't seem very effective. You know, I typically argue if a task is going to require some thinking, if it's non-trivial, you need at least an hour. The smallest chunk you ever want to schedule if you're using like a time block planner is 30 minutes. Like that might be appropriate for, I've got four or five tasks I need to knock off. And I don't

really care. I don't need all my cognitive faculties and resources to knock off these tasks. I'm mailing a bill and I'm transferring money. So I can just jump in, do them. Even if I'm paying a cognitive context switching cost for the first 20 minutes of that 30 minutes, who cares? I don't need all my cognitive resources to do these tasks. Jump in, do them, move on to something else. So 30 minutes is the smallest chunk I recommend. It's the smallest chunk that's actually delineated in my time block planner. hour to 90 minutes is preferable if we're talking about anything that actually requires some thought because again, there's a cost of just switching context and getting into the new thing and getting your brain ready to work on a particular task. So from this third generation perspective, a 10-minute

chunk is sort of psychologically non-aware. And also from the third-generation perspective, I would say you don't want to fill all your time with work. As we mentioned, you want to have craft be one aspect of the elements you focus on in building a deep life. filling every minute of your day with work is not by itself going to be probably an optimal strategy. So I think we've come a long way from those early thinkers on productivity, but we still have a lot to owe to them because these were the first thinkers who started at least introducing this idea that what you do with your time matters. You have control over this in a way that you used to not. And so it's at the very worst, at the very least, I should say, you need to consider

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in your life outside of work. Hi, Cal. It's John here from Northern Ireland, from the province of all sorts of I can't give you, you know, Greek myths, but I can give you some interesting Irish myths. I feel a bit like Kulhulin, who's a bit like Heracles or maybe a little like him, in the Greek myths. And, you know, Kuhlund was known as the Hound of Ulster, and he got that name and reputation for killing, you know, quite scary beasts at one point in its very young life. and I feel like I'm at this point now where in my slightly much older life that I need to kill some beasts again and those beasts are those social media hounds that chase me down

and distract me and disturb me and to be honest I suppose having lived through the trials and tribulations of Brexit and all of your wonderful politics there in the US it does suck you in so what would you suggest would be a good approach to revisiting digital minimalism more successfully, a second time as a field minimalist.

I would love your advice on that. Many thanks and take care. John, I really like that image of social media as hounds that chase you down brain until they finally bring you to the ground. I think that's a pretty good description of what these services can feel like sometimes, especially in recent days, where they have no... shortage of attention capturing details to be barking about. So what should you do if you've tried to be a digital minimalist and you've failed? Well, I will tell you from my experience.

Now, the number one reason why people fail in a commitment to be more minimalist and how they interact with tools outside of work is that they try to solve the problem piecemeal from the top down. This is most people's instinct when they feel overwhelmed by their apps and their websites and their tablets and their phones. They will, let me start putting it in place some new rules. You know, I'm going to take some apps off my phone or I'll move some apps to a folder on the back screen of my phone. And I'm going to have a rule like, don't bring my phone into bed. You just kind of come up with a bunch of rules you've heard that you think combined will maybe aggregate to reducing the impact of all of these sources of digital distraction.

The problem with this top-down piecemeal approach is that the issue is just accrete again bit by bit until you're back to where you were. You don't stick with it. You bring the app back on your phone. You use the website more than you want to. You bring the phone back into the bedroom. It doesn't end up being the long-term fix you hoped. So the idea that I outline in my book, digital minimalism is that what you really need to do is something that's more intense. The specific exercise I recommend is called the digital declutter. And what you do is you take an entire month and say for this month, I'm going to avoid all optional personal digital technology.

This is kind of a vague term, but basically it means all of the technologies in your personal life that you can get away without using, like social media and online news and streaming videos on the internet and video games. These type of personal, non-urgent technologies, they aren't really critical to your job or your family life or whatever, but they're the types of things that are really trying to bring you down like those hounds you talked about. You say, I'm not going to use them for a month. And if I have to use one of these in maybe a very limited way, like my work requires me to do

a social media post or whatever. I'll put a lot of fences around it. Great. Once a week, on Monday on my desktop at work, I do the social media post I'm supposed to do. Right. So for the most part, you're stepping away from a lot of these optional personal digital technologies for one month. And then, and John, I think this is what's important. During that month, you have to aggressively explore and experiment and reflect and try to figure out what it is you actually want to do with your time. what is it that you find important? What do you value with this time you have outside of work? What matters to you?

What brings you satisfaction? What brings you pride and how you're living, etc. So you focus on the positive and you experiment with things and you go on long walks. And if you're from Ireland, I assume you walk through, you know, grass-covered hills up to a grove of oak trees where druids are casting spells and fairies are being kept to bay. And, you know, I assume it's what it looks like all over Ireland. So it's a very conducive for this type of reflection. I probably just offended almost everyone in Ireland right now. All right.

My apologies. I blame John. But you reflect and you experiment and you figure out what you really care about. So you focus on the positive. Then when the month is over, you say for each of these things, I really want to spend my time on, that I want to build my life around. What is the best way to use technology to support it? And then you bring back in some of these technologies in.

much more limited ways to support the things you care about because now you know why you're using these technologies. You can have really clear rules around, you know, when you use it on what type of device, how often. Because you're not just using Facebook for the heck of it. You're using Facebook groups that check in just on updates from the Druid core that you're a part of. And so now you know, if that's the reason why you're using Facebook, it doesn't need to be on your phone and you don't need to look at the news feed and you can just bookmark the events page and you can just check in, you know, once a week. All right. And that's how you reform your digital life. The key thing here is A, you're focusing on the positive. So you're rebuilding around the things you really care about.

That's much more sustainable than focusing on the negative, looking at behaviors you don't like and trying to just reduce those behaviors just because you don't like them. B, you're going from the bottom up. So you're starting from scratch and saying what tech do I want in my life after you've done this exercise as opposed to going from the top down and trying to just put little bandaid fixes and all the tech that you're already using. And see, when you do the digital declutter, you also, as one element of this whole process is get a detox type exposure. The addictive urge to look at your phone and look at tabs minimizes after about 10 to 14 days. Now, a lot of people often focus on the detox is the only thing that's important about this declutter. It's not. If you

don't do the other stuff, you don't focus on the positive, if you don't rebuild from the ground up, the detox by itself won't last. But if you do those things, the detox gives you a really good psychological foundation on which to succeed. All right. Now let's say you've done all this before and now you find yourself falling back into bad habits. Well, I mean, of course you are. The world is kind of falling apart right now. You cannot be blamed if the new digital life you built in the spring of 2019 isn't quite working in the spring of 2021. So what do you do? You do the declutter again. In general, digital minimalist, check back in on these questions of what I really care about, what tech do I use to support these things, what are my rules. They check back in on these things

all the time. I mean, I would suggest you do it every quarter when you're already doing your quarterly plan. You got to keep be checking and modifying. And if you really fall off the wagon, because of, you know, terrible world events or whatever, then do the whole declutter again to get that reset and sharper. So don't feel bad about having to do this again and again. But I think the full declutter is critical for making these changes last. You need to keep checking in and modifying these every few months. And if you really fall off the wagon here, going back to the full declutter is probably the right way to restart. All right, we're running a little long here, but let's do one more quick question.

This one is a little bit more technical so we can get a sort of quick and technical answer. Hi, Cal, and once again, thank you for the podcast. I really look forward to every episode like they are from the Sirens, the grief mythology and reference. I have two timebook questions since I am a happy user of your timebook planner. You emphasize the value of daily metrics, and I do track some as well. However, many of the metrics are non-professional and I can only record them at the end of the day. I do want to do the shutdown for my professional life much earlier than that.

So, is it okay if I do the shutdown complete once I'm done with work? And much later in the evening before bed, track my metrics. And my second question is about the weekend. Do you use your time block planner for your weekends, even if you're not time blocking? For instance, doing a sketch, some kind of rough sketch about the weekend. what you go to do for the weekend. Thank you very much in advance. All right, let's tackle these two technical questions, one at a time.

The first question involved when you're tracking personal metrics in your time block planner, some of these metrics are going to capture behaviors that happen after your work shutdown. So what you're saying is, do you have to wait to do your shutdown complete until after you have recorded all of your metrics for the day? Or should you do your shutdown complete after your work is done, even if you might track metrics later. All right, the second answer is the right answer. The shutdown complete is tied to your workday.

I am done with the professional aspect of my day. I have closed all of the open loops concerning work. I process the notes and tasks in my time block planner. I've taken a look at my inbox. I've taken a look at my calendar. I've taken a look at my plan. I am good to stop working. Schedule shutdown complete.

Now you can still use your planner. So as other thoughts and ideas come up, like during the evening after you do your shutdown, for example, you can write them in your planner. The trick there is now you write them on the notes or task pages for the next day, right? So if you have an idea or a task that comes up on Monday after your shutdown complete, you write it on Tuesday's notes or task capture. Because that way you know that when you get to the shutdown complete on Tuesday, you will check those notes right below the shutdown check box and see it. so you know it won't be forgotten. But the other thing you could do after shutdown complete is write down your personal metrics. I do that at the end of every day, and it's independent of your work shutdown.

So don't worry about that at all. Recording, you know, did I exercise? How many steps that I take? Did I eat? Follow my eating guidelines today. You can just write that down at the end of your day. It is unrelated to the shutdown complete, which is really just about making sure that the professional aspect of your mind can with confidence,

wind down and not be a drain or a source of anxiety through your non-work hours. That's a good question. For your second question, for weekends, you should do some planning on your weekends. You shouldn't time-block them. So you can still use, I think, the capture pages for your weekend. So thoughts or ideas you have can be captured very cleanly. And you can still process those when you shut down into your systems. I typically recommend, depending on what's going on, that maybe you, you, you, you block out time for one or two major things you want to get done, you might put that specific time on your time block grid, but then be much more flexible about the other times in the day. You might have like a loose task list you write in your planner for the weekend day.

Like I kind of want to get these things done. I know for a fact from two to four is when I'm going to Home Depot. So it's a sort of a pseudo plan. One complex nuance is shutdown completes with weekends. So one way to do this is to actually do a shutdown complete. on a weekend day where you're just making sure that, okay, I've processed the task or ideas that have shown up, sort of done with productive stuff I want to get done, and now I can really relax tonight without any sort of productive things I have to work on. I think that's fine.

So in this case, your shutdown completes a little bit different because you're looking at the productive task you wanted to get done during the weekend, which might have nothing to do with your work, but the same principle applies. I want to enjoy this evening with my family. So I just made sure that, yeah, I took care of the task that I had to get done this weekend. I've written down things that popped up so I don't have to remember them. And now I'm free for the evening. The other school of thought is to essentially wait until your next workday. And when you complete that shutdown complete, let's say on Monday, you also go back and look at all of your tasks and captures from the weekend.

And that's when you process those back into your system. The third way I've heard people do this is when they build their weekly plan. Let's say on Monday morning you do your weekly plan. That's where you go through and process anything you captured during your weekend. Just depends on what you want to do, whatever you're most comfortable with, how much you actually care about a shutdown mentality when's your weekend days. But the big picture point here is you're not time blocking every minute during the weekends. You're scheduling much more loosely.

One, maybe two things that happen at a certain time. a rough note on some tasks you want to get done, and otherwise you give yourself some flexibility, allow your brain a little bit more breathing room. And with that in mind, maybe it's time for me to give you some breathing room and call this episode closed. Thank you for everyone who submitted questions

to find out how to submit your own questions. Go to cowleuport.com slash podcast. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of Deep Questions. And until then, as always, stay deep.