Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 66: Habit Tune-Up: Bullet Journaling vs. Trello

Episode Date: January 28, 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.- Taking notes in meetings. [3:41]- Switching from Bullet Journal to Trello. [8:42]- Speeding up time blocking. [13:56]- Scheduling daily tasks. [23:41]- Avoiding hard assignments (plus: a comment on YouTube addiction). [28:26]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. They're shorter. I take voice questions from listeners where we dive into the nitty, gritty details of the types of habits we'd like to geek out about here on this podcast. Let's start, as always, with quick announcements. Announcement number one, If you like the type of things we talk about on this podcast, you will love my upcoming new book, A World Without Email. It comes out on March 2nd. I've talked about it before, so I won't go into too much detail now. But if you pre-order it, hold on to your digital receipt. I will soon be announcing on my newsletter and then subsequently on this podcast, a very exciting pre-order

promotion. It involves something known as Email Academy. So stay tuned for that. Quick announcement, two, I believe I have the team in place that is going to help me with the video component of this podcast. The goal is starting in February. Pretty early in the February, we will begin posting video of the any deep dives I do as well as some select questions from the podcast. We'll also get up a backlog of all of the deep dives I've done so far. All that video is coming soon, so stay tuned. Let's do a quick summary of the show. Looking at my question list, we have some good ones this week. Among other topics, we have someone asking about their fear of moving from analog to digital productivity tools. We have some deep diving geek questions on Trello and something here

about taking notes in meetings. As always, if you want to submit your own question, be it audio or written, you can find out how at calnewport.com slash podcast. So before we get started with this show, let's take a brief moment first to thank one of the sponsors that makes it possible. I am talking about Magic Spoon. You know the drill here. I talked about Magic Spoon on Monday. This is the company that somehow offers that type of sweet tasting cereal you loved as a kid,

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There's peanut butter. There's cinnamon. So I'm definitely interested to hear if some of you think that Frosted should no longer have the top spot as the best flavor. Now, how can you build your own variety pack to check out MagicSpoon and get your own moment of escape? Well, you can go to MagicSpoon.com slash Cal. To build that custom variety box, use a promo code Cal at checkout.

They will give you free shipping. They're so confident their product that it's backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked, except for maybe the question of why your heart is so black and there is no joy in your life. So that's magic spoon.com slash cow and use to code Cal for free shipping. All right. So let's get started with the show. Our first question has to do with taking notes in meetings.

Hi, Cal. I know in your study hacks days, you wrote several blog posts about taking notes in classes, but I was curious if you had any tips or best practices for taking notes in meetings at work. I prefer to take notes by hand in a notebook because it helps me focus on the conversation. But then I find that I have to rewrite many of my notes into a digital. format or an email to either share with my colleagues or capture next steps in a Google Doc. Any thoughts or tips on how to make this better? Thanks. I'm back in my early study hacks days, as you pointed out. I used to give advice for students

that gave very specific note-taking formats depending on the type of class. So for technical classes like mathematical classes, I had a very certain type of notes to take. For humanities-oriented classes. I had my infamous QEC question evidence conclusion clusters. These are all detailed also in my book How to Become a Straight A Student. When it comes to the professional context, however, I don't have such a detailed format to recommend, but I do have something to suggest about how you capture notes and a suggestion about what to do after you are done capturing those notes, which I think will be helpful. So when you're capturing notes in a meeting, the format's kind of up to you. It depends on what this meeting is, what type of information you're dealing with, but you want to come away from

that meeting such that anything that represents an obligation in your life is in some way captured or pointed to in your notes. Your head should be clear. And by your head should be clear means there's nothing that came up in that meeting that you're responsible for that exists only in your head. So this David Allen style full capture should definitely exist with all of the information task and obligations that are flying at you in an ad hoc fashion during your meeting. Now this could take two forms and it's important to differentiate between these two. Sometimes it's a clear task. Okay, I agreed to send the numbers from the Johnson file, you know, to Suzanne. A very clear task. Very clear what you're writing down. A lot of times,

what's going to come your way is going to be temporarily ambiguous. So you know there's an obligation, but you can't quite figure out exactly what that obligation translates to. So someone throws on you, let's say like, okay, look, the Johnson file is a mess. We need to figure that out, right? Hey, can you handle that? Now, that's not a clear task yet. So that's okay.

You don't want to get paralyzed by the ambiguous task. You have kind of a category of things you're recording, you think of as to use a column I often use in my Trello boards to process. It's kind of roughly capturing like figure out Johnson file. Now the idea with these is I don't quite know what that means. I'm going to have to spend time to figure out what it means. I mean, if anything, the task, the task represented by these ambiguous, temporarily ambiguous request is figure out what it actually means so that you can do something with it. That's fine. Some people get thrown by the ambiguity.

Fine. Throw down that mess of ambiguity. It's just a stake in the ground. All right. So whatever format you've used, you're capturing tasks, but you're also capturing these ambiguous requests that need to be later clarified. Second, and I think this is really important, every meeting needs 15 to 20 minutes scheduled after the meeting for processing what happened. So when you're blocking out time for a meeting, oh, this is going to last an hour. Not really. It's going to last an hour in 20 minutes. you need to have that meeting, you're taking these notes, and then you've got to process all these things in your notes into your system. You should do it more or less right away. If you have back-to-back meetings, you can do it a little bit later, but not too much later. You got a time block off processing time where the tasks from this meeting get clarified and put into your systems, the ambiguous request get clarified and put into your systems, or added to a two-process column. I mean, if it's very complicated,

like in my example, what it means to fix the Johnson file, it can go to a column in one of your Trello boards or whatever tool you use for the configure step, you can go to, you can go into a holding pin for stuff that needs to be refined. That's fine. If it's too complicated to refine the 15, 20 minutes, but everything gets looked at and processed and clarified and moved into systems. Now you're done with the meeting. If you just go meeting the meeting, the stuff just kind of exist in your head, in a notebook that you don't get back to in some emails you send yourself, A, that's disorganized, so stuff's going to get dropped or get done poorly, but it's also very stressful. The median has become a ball of anxiety that has been increased in size. So that's the

other thing I want to recommend here is however you take your notes, process those notes, almost right? However that means, and I think 15 and 20 minutes is usually enough. All right, let's move on here to a question about digital versus analog when it comes to productivity systems. Hi, Cal. I'm Suzanne. I'm a small business owner. With regard to productivity, I've really made some huge steps like starting to bullet journal and time blocking. The podcasts also have been a tremendous help. I do struggle and I'm overwhelmed with all the tasks and roles I have as a small business owner and I'm thinking about implementing Trello using that to give me a bit more insight into the different roles and tasks and keep me on track but i'm also a bit afraid to go back to the technology after analog has brought me so much and i also stopped all the social media from i banned from my telephone which has also been a great help so i'm a bit hesitant about that do you have any

tips or advice for me, I would really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Well, Suzanne, first of all, congratulations on taking social media off of your phone. Even aside from issues of business productivity, I'm sure that's something that's made your life a lot more livable recently. So congrats on that. When it comes to switching from an analog system like bullet journal

to a digital system like Trello, when it comes to organizing what's on your plate, it's important to understand the advantages of digital versus analog and the advantages of analog versus digital. So what I like about digital, using a tool like Trello with multiple boards, the multiple columns within each board to keep track of my professional obligations, is that, A, I can type faster than I can write.

I can very quickly capture things. I can flip a card over and have pretty long notes. Two, you can reorganize and augment easier when it comes to digital. So if you want to add a note to a task, you can just put it on the back. If you want to change the status of a task, you can just drag it from one column to another. You can attach a file to the task. You can change or elaborate the description. This is all a little bit harder to do if they're handwritten on a notebook page.

The advantage of analog, however, as you know and as you like, is that it gets you out of the digital. so that you're not in this ecosystem that also includes distractions, that you also associate with shallow work and administrative nonsense and emails and slack. It gets you out of that world. It gives you this nice, clean, analog interface where your life lives, you make sense of it, and then you go and execute. And some of that execution involves computers, and some doesn't. And that is the magic in particular of writer Carroll's bullet journal system.

So which is better? It just depends how much. stuff you have on your plate. So the typical thing that happens with bullet journal is there is a certain level of obligations, professional obligations, where for someone with the right personality type and good handwriting, the bullet journal remains optimal. They're very popular, for example, among freelancers, where you maybe don't have a ton going on. You have a few projects, some calls to follow up on, but your life is controllable enough that you don't have 150 mutating tasks. Maybe you have 12 or something like this.

At some point, however, if your business gets complex enough, it's just too much rewriting and handwriting and trying to augment and change things written, and the bullet journal is not enough by itself to keep track of everything that's going on, and that's when a shift towards something like Trello or whatever tool you want to use for capturing and organizing and categorizing your task begins to make more sense. It sounds like you're at that point. So Suzanne, based on your question, it sounds like you have enough roles with enough stuff going on and it's complicated enough,

you're starting to feel overwhelmed. Those advantages I talked about for a digital system will help. It'll be quicker, it'll be more agile, and it'll probably help you have a sense of control. That being said, you do not need to abandon your bullet journal altogether. I know classic bojo has everything in the notebook.

I'm very interested in ways that people adapt this system, who like this system, to accommodate things like calendars with calendar invites that are digital or very large digital task lists that have to keep moving. And I think it's completely fine if you want to have your task live digitally, maybe even your calendar lives digitally, but everything else about your life, like other things you're going on, how you're tracking it, what you're doing each day,

tasks that have been captured, notes that you're capturing, all of that can still exist in your bullet journal. I once used a phrase bojo pro to talk about some of these type of approaches, professional bullet journal or bullet journal professional. Look, this is something you can just mess with and experiment with, but if you like the bullet journal or just overwhelmed on task, come up with some sort of hybrid like that. So you can keep the best, you can keep the best of both worlds. All right, moving forward, we now have two questions from the same listener. We will take them one by one.

Hi, Cal. My name's Mark, and I'm a consultant to non-profit organizations. I've got two questions I'm asking, and I think they might be related. So the first is how can I speed up my time blocking? I've got tasks written in my time block planner, and I've got three main trello boards for different clients I work with. I go through all of those and condense them into like items that I write down as blocks. It seems to take me a half hour to time block initially, and that seems too long. Well, let's start with this first question.

first of all, I appreciate the reference of time blocking. Here's my obligatory promo. You want to find out more about time blocking? Go to timeblock planner.com. This is the website for my time block planner, but the video on there will just teach you about the method more generally, whether or not you use my planner. So getting to this specific question,

I do think 30 minutes a day is too long to be spending building your time block plan. I think what you probably need to do is move more of this thinking to a once per week, weekly planning session, which should take a little while. The weekly planning session should take an hour, maybe even 90 minutes. Now, one of the things I do during my weekly planning is I go through my calendar. So I sort of see what's on my plate, how busy some days are versus other days. My calendar has deadlines or important reminders.

So that's where I might recognize, like, okay, I have to work on letters or recommendations for the student this week. I shouldn't forget that I have to submit my merit report, so I have to put that in there somewhere. So I'm capturing stuff my calendar has told me has to get done. I'll typically turn these things that have to get done during the week into actual appointments on my calendar. So they'll sit there along with other meetings. You know, if this needs to get done this week, let me figure out when I'm going to do it. You know, Tuesday afternoon, after I record my podcast, but before I do this meeting, that's why I'm going to do my letters or recommendation.

Friday, right after my faculty meeting, I'll do the merit report. I'll often put those onto my calendar. You know, at this point, I'll also look at my strategic plans or quarterly plans. We call it different things here on the podcast, but my plan for the quarter and remind myself, okay, is there big projects I'm working on that I need to make progress this week and what type of progress? And I'll look through my task list. So if I use Trello like you do to configure my task, so I'd be looking through my various Trello boards.

What I will often do is sometimes if the thing that I see on my quarterly plan is somewhat time sensitive, like this has to get done this week, or I just need one big block, I'll sometimes turn that into an appointment on my calendar. But if it's more just like make progress on this book chapter, make progress on this research paper, make progress on this article. I'm not going to put particular time yet on my calendar. I'm just going to write down somewhere. As I'm working on my weekly plan, this is what I'm focused on.

progress has to be made on these things. When I look at my task list, I will often create a column in Trello for each of my boards, one board per roll, and I'll have a column called This Week. And I will go through and update and make sure I understand what's on my task board and I've seen everything and there's no open loops

and then I'll move things over to this week. These are the things I want to get done this week. Now again, occasionally if something is time-consuming and very time-sensitive, I might move it also onto a calendar, like put an appointment for it on the calendar, but often I just have a list, a fair, reasonable-sized list of stuff

to get done during the week. All right, so you do all this work. Now let's just get to a day of the week and it's time to time block. All right, you're building your time block planning. It's Wednesday or what have you. The first thing you do is you put all of your appointments from your calendar onto your time block plan.

So there's your meetings, there's your calls, but also there's the time-sensitive things that you wanted to make sure it got done. Now those are just getting blocks automatically. You don't have to think about it. You did all that thinking during your weekly plan. You're just copying stuff from your calendar. In the time that's left over,

you're going to put aside some of this time for making progress on whatever big things you identified during your weekly plan that came from your quarterly plan that you want to make progress on, like work on your research paper, work on this book chapter. And you want to put, I typically call these deep work blocks. I mean, get a deep work block here or deep work there. Let me work on my research paper today, what have you. And then for the tasks, like these loose tasks that are on my Trello board,

I don't go through them all every day when I'm building my time block plan. I just put on what I call admin blocks. And I have a particular format. I do double wide hollow border blocks. Say admin. And during that time, I know, like, yeah, go to my Trello list, see what's due this week, make progress. Sometimes I will specify a particular thing, so I'll put like a number in an admin block and then up in the upper right hand corner of my time block plan.

I will list some of those things. But, you know, oftentimes I don't. So what I'm hoping to convey here is that this doesn't actually take up a ton of time. I mean, I'm copying calendar and stuff for my calendar. That takes four minutes. I'm putting in some admin and deep work blocks. That takes five minutes. You know, 10 minutes, I'm done.

So hopefully that's useful. You know, I just, I really like to spend a lot of time up front. So each day, it's like relatively automatic what I'm doing. I'll throw out one more optimization. When I look at my quarterly plan, while I'm building my weekly plan, if I see like, oh, I want to make progress on X, Y, and Z, I'll sometimes sketch out in my weekly plan a little bit heuristic for how to do that. Like, work on this research paper, like on this proof, first thing each morning on your walk. So if I have a little heuristic in my weekly plan, when I'm building my daily plan, then they'll just tell me when to schedule that time. So that's another thing you might

have your weekly plan can even think through, how are you going to spread out progress on your big things you're trying to make progress on? That makes the daily planning, the time blocking even more automatic. If you're throwing in some admin blocks for the time that remains, boom, you go for it, adjust as needed, schedule shutdown complete, and the day is done. All right? So 10 minutes is fine, 30 minutes is probably too much. Offload that time into a much more involved weekly planning, and I think your balance there of overhead to execution will be much closer to optimal. Before we get to the second of the two questions, let's take another brief moment to thank

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available on their regular website. So you'll save up the 40% and get free shipping if you go to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep. All right, returning to our questions, let's go to the second of the two questions asked by that listener. The second is I've tried organizing my Trello lists different ways. And currently, each board has seven lists back burner slash deadline TBD next week this week waiting today try today must and done i find that i've got a ton of things i should do today but i can never get to them all so i break them into must do today and try to do today should i just dump the try list and leave things under this week but move them to the top of the list,

would you consider this extra list a waste of time in Trello Board real estate? Thank you so much for your work and consideration of my questions. I think it probably is a waste of Trello real estate to have a column for what you want to do in that particular day, especially to have a column for what you want to do

in that particular day, and then a separate column for which of those things is particularly important. What I would do instead is first, what I suggested in my answer to your first question, which is they're really time-sensitive or time-consuming things that need to get done that week. Maybe they make their way onto your calendar during your weekly plan. So they're sort of out of the what are my tasks this week type of universe and instead they feel like they're in that appointment universe. So the time in which

they're going to get done is already put aside and protected on your calendar. That will get translated into a time block when you do your time block plan for that day. And those important big things or urgent things will for sure get done. Now, these can still exist on your Trello board for things you want to get done that week. It's just that you don't have to worry each day about should I make progress on these because you know they are scheduled. You can even have a separate column if you want for things to do this week that are already on the calendar. That might be a good use of real estate. For the rest of the tasks, you know, that you want to get done in a given week, you know, you're putting admin blocks in your time block schedule, and during those

blocks, you're trying to churn through as many of those things as possible. Sometimes, as I mentioned, I'll annotate my admin blocks. So as I talk about the intro to the time block planner, for example, I'll put a little number in the admin block. Then I'll put a copy that number up in the upper right of the time block planner page. So my planner, this would be in the upper right of the time block grid where it's not going to get in the way of fixed, fixed schedules as the day goes on. And I might list suggestions. Like, we'll do this and this and this and this. I'll jot down a few things for my bigger Trello list that I want to prioritize or do in that order. And then when I get to that admin block, I might go in that order, but I'm not messing around with these things on

Trello. This is just within the world on my time block page. Yeah, try to do this, this, and this. And if you can get to it this during this block. But sometimes I don't even. even do that. It's just an admin block. Let's, let's churn. If you find that you're not getting things done, you get to the end of each week and there's still a lot left on your to-do for the week list, you just need more admin blocks. You know, so when you build your next weekly plan, you might want to remind yourself, I need more admin blocks, I'm not getting through everything. Or, you know, if you're out of time or don't want to do more admin blocks and put less on your plate to do that week. One way or the other, you're facing the productivity drag in here. If you're time blocking,

you're executing your time intentionally. You're putting aside a certain amount of time to work on small tasks. And if that's not enough time to get the small tasks you've scheduled done, then either you have too many small tasks. You need to spend more time. If there's not time, you need less task. And if there is time, you need to schedule more. Or maybe you need to make other changes. Like this is a good back pressure, a good source of back pressure that might tell you I got to say, yes less often. I'm doing too many calls. I'm agreeing to too many, you know, coffees where we're just talking business. I'm not getting my stuff done. It's a great back pressure where you're figuring out, oh, here's what's happening, here's what's not happening. So it can actually be quite

instructive if you're not getting these things done. You can really figure out what's going on or why. So that's my suggestion. So don't get so fine-grained on your Trellaboard. Important stuff goes on your calendar. Generic admin blocks when you should churn through things. You can write in your time block plan suggestions for what to do into admin block, but those are just suggestions. If you're not getting through what you planned at the beginning of the week to get through, then you need to give yourself more time or give yourself less to do. All right, let's do one more question here. This one has to do with adjusting the writing jobs you take based on their perceived difficulty. Hey, Cal, this is Jacob Tulles. In a recent podcast episode, you gave me

permission to stop using YouTube. And since then I've started to break that addiction, your podcast has been a massive help in both my personal and professional life. So thank you. Now, as a freelance writer, I appreciate your analogy of writing being like lifting weights in a gym to point out that sometimes it's easier and sometimes it's harder to get those words down and write. Now, I've noticed in my case recently, that some genres, such as fiction, have become much harder for me, and others, such as certain kinds of nonfiction, have become much easier for me. And so my question is this, if I start avoiding writing fiction and take only nonfiction jobs with nonfiction writing clients, am I just wimping out? Am I just taking an easy road, so to speak? Is that just a

form of avoidance or procrastination, or would it be wise for me to play into what seems to be my newly discovered strength in order to build career capital as a freelance writer? I really respect you as a writer, and I'd appreciate your thoughts. Bye. Well, Jacob, first of all, let me just briefly mention YouTube. So I am happy to hear that you are breaking your YouTube addictions. It's a bad one. As these various online entertainment attention economy addictions go, YouTube addictions can be pretty bad because these videos have a way of sucking up your time. And the auto recommendation, you jump over somewhere else and that sucks up your time

because it requires less outlay of energy to watch than it does say even to read something. You can go down rabbit holes on YouTube that tend to be much longer than, let's say, on Twitter or Facebook, because there at least you have to read, right? There's like more energy that's being expended. So I'm glad you recognize the challenge of YouTube, and I'm glad you listen to my advice to take that seriously. I want to throw a caveat in there for other people who maybe are wary about YouTube

but not having quite as strong as a problem as you had, which is there is still a use for YouTube. You have to be careful. The way I like to think about it is YouTube can be a library or it can be a channel. So when it plays the role of a library, it just means it's a place in which videos on most topics can be found. It has a really good content delivery network,

so videos play really quickly. It has really good support on smart TVs and browsers and phones, so it's a very convenient library for looking up and watching video. So if you've heard about an interview, for example, with someone that you want to see, huh, YouTube is great to go find that interview. If you need to figure out how to fix something in your house, you can probably find a YouTube video that shows you exactly how to do it.

When you're using YouTube as a library to go look up particular things, is great for that because as a video platform and has really good technology. Where it causes trouble is if you use it as an entertainment channel. Like we used to use channels on the television, where it's, I'm going to aim my attention at YouTube and let it entertain me. I'm looking for distraction. This can provide distraction. let me spend some time on YouTube, and that's where you fall down the rabbit holes.

That's where it becomes really addictive. That's where you also run risks of things like intellectual radicalization on all sorts of topics. That's dangerous. So for those who are wary about YouTube but feel like there is some use, this is how I think you can navigate between those cost and benefits. Use it as a library. Never use it as an entertainment channel. If you need to find something, go find it on YouTube. If you need to distract or entertain yourself, find something.

else to distract or entertain yourself with. If you do not trust yourself to ignore those auto recommendations, get a plugin, only access it on your computer, have a plug-in like distraction-free tube that strips the website of those auto-recommendations. You can search for a video, find a video, watch the video. Nothing else starts. Nothing else is recommended. An easier way to do it is just to have a hard rule. I never, ever, ever click on a recommendation. I always go to look something up and I leave when I'm done. For a lot of people, like myself, that's enough. I just have a rule that I don't follow those links.

Then all I have to do is just not follow that rule. But if you have a habit around it or have a really hard time resisting those links, then use a plugin. But anyways, this is an aside, but I think it's a very important distinction. YouTube is a great video library. It is a terrible television channel. So that is a good way to think about how to use it. All right, let's go to your actual question here, though, Jacob, which was about avoiding hard writing assignments.

I don't really care so much about how difficult a writing assignment feels to do, like whether it's a strain or it rolls easy. I care instead about two things. How good is the quality of the output? And how does that type of writing fit into a larger plan you have for your own deep life? So let's say you're finding that your nonfiction writing is much better than your fiction writing. you're getting better assignments, your quality is higher, you're more respected in nonfiction writing, then I think it is completely reasonable in that instance.

They say, I'm going to do less fiction writing because my nonfiction is better. So let me double down to what I'm good at. But on the other hand, if that's not the case, if it's just the fiction writing is hard in the moment and the nonfiction writing seems less hard, I don't care so much about that. That's not a good reason to do or not do work. You mentioned the weightlifting analogy. It's the right analogy. Feeling strain in the gym, it's hard, my muscle burns is a good sign.

And that's often the case when doing intellectual work as well. Something being hard might just be that you're pushing yourself to a new level. You know, I feel this way when I write for harder publications, it's harder. There's more strain, but it's good for me. So I'm not particularly liable to connect difficulty in executing with whether or not I should be pursuing that activity. The other thing that's important here is what is your vision? If your vision is, you know, I really want to write fiction as part of my vision of a deep life, then you might persist with that even if your stuff is not as good because you're trying to build up that skill.

So the quality of your output and your vision should dictate what work you do. Whether it feels hard or not, whether you feel blocked or not, whether it is like pulling teeth to get this article to work, but this other type of article came real easily. that's all somewhat incidental. And I wouldn't put too much stock into it. And I certainly would not avoid a particular type of work that otherwise you're good at or otherwise you think it's important

just because it's hard to do because, hey, hardness means you're actually doing something worthwhile. The Marines used to have this saying that pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body. In the knowledge work context, I like to think about cognitive strain and resistance as being the feeling of your brain, learning or improving new skills, which is an important thing to do. And with that, let's call it a wrap on this week's habit tune up mini episode.

To find out how you can submit your own questions, go to cownewport.com slash podcast. I'm going to be away on vacation this weekend, though I should be back on Monday and should therefore get our next whole length episode live by Monday, Tuesday morning at the latest. Until then, as always, stay deep.