Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 7: Habit Tune-Up: Time Blocking, Document Collaboration, Protecting Time and Doing Too Much

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

In this mini-episode, I take "calls" from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.(Going forward, I plan to occasionally augment my standard full length weekly episode, where I go deep on many different topics, with these shorter mini-episodes, where I can focus on specific themes and experiment with new formats.)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.

My dilemma is one that's been longstanding ever since I was in graduate school. And I find that I am interested in too many different things. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions mini episode. So of all the topics that I write about, there's one that seems particularly relevant in our current times, and that is how to stay productive in a world that is increasingly, distracted. Now given how much everyone is struggling with new work configurations like work from home arrangements, work with your kids around, completely up in to what work even means, that this would be a good time for me to focus in a mini episode on questions that listeners have

about how to tune up their productivity habit. So I am calling this mini episode format habit tune up. we're going to take a handful of real live questions actually recorded. We'll hear their voice from actual listeners about issues they are having with their work set up and productivity, and I'll do my best to give them some advice. My plan is that maybe I'll do these many episodes, maybe not every week, but a lot of weeks, I might release these midweek. And of course, we'll still release the standard full deep question podcast episodes where I go deep into a lot of different questions. I will still release those on Sunday or Monday of each week. All right, let's give this a try. Our first habit tune up question comes from Sydney. What's on your mind,

Sydney? Hi, Cal. My name is Sydney. I'm a full-time college student, and I also work remotely in marketing. I love your advice to time block, and since I have a pretty busy schedule, I time block just about every week. However, I'm not very good at it. I have two issues with time blocking. Firstly, I find it difficult to accurately estimate how long a task or project will take and how long I should dedicate to it. And I end up with tasks that bleed into the next time block or don't fill up the whole time block. The second issue I have is that I'm always tempted to shuffle around the time blocks or work on things in a different order than I originally planned. I'm wondering if you have any strategies for using time blocking in a more efficient way. and getting better at it so that I can use it to maximize my time.

Because I think it can be great if it's done right. Thank you so much. Well, that's a good question. Let's start with a quick reminder of what time block planning actually refers to. So the standard method a lot of knowledge workers use to deal with their time outside of already scheduled meetings and appointments is what I call the reactive list method. Now this method says, okay, I have some time before my next meeting or my next appointment. What should I do? The reactive list method says you have two options.

You can go into an email or Slack inbox and start reacting to information. Or you can turn to a long to-do list and try to pull something off of it and make progress on it. Now, the advantage of the list reactive method is that it solves a problem of making sure you have things to do. You will feel very busy if you use the list reactive. method. You will turn through a lot of small things if you use the list reactive method, but it turns out to be a terrible way to deploy the limited amount of time you have available to produce the most possible valuable output. So my alternative to the list reactive method is what is called time block planning. Now the idea here is that you actually look at the time

that is available outside of meetings and appointments and you allocate specific work to specific times. So you might see you have 90 minutes in the morning before your first meeting. You actually decide what do I want to do specifically during that 90 minutes. Well, maybe I want to spend the first hour, for example, working on this report and then the half hour before my first meeting catching up on urgent emails. And then maybe you only have a 30 minute block between that meeting and the next. And you say, you know, I'm going to take that time and I have a real small thing I'm going to work on. And then maybe there's a larger block after that. You decide, okay, I'm going to go do deep work.

I have two hours here. I'm going to do a little ritual at the beginning. This is my time to make progress on something particularly cognitively demanding. This is what I call time block planning. It is more difficult. It is a more difficult discipline than simply opening your inbox or occasionally looking at a to-do list. But in my experience, if you time block plan, you'll produce about two times more valuable

output in the same amount of time as compared to someone who is using the list reactive method. So it is a very powerful method. It's what I use. It's what a lot of my readers use as well. So let's go back to Sidney's question, which is, how do you get better at time block planning? And I always want to offer a few pieces of advice for you, Sydney. I think this is advice that is relevant for anyone who is using time block planning. First, if you are new to this method, take whatever block size you initially choose for an activity.

and inflate it by 50%. People that are new to time block planning consistently underestimate how much time is actually required to get things done. So just bias towards that. Say, I'm assuming my instincts here are wrong. You have to treat it like that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza did the opposite of all of his instincts and suddenly was very successful in life.

Well, it's the same thing with your time block planning, at least at first. You say, this is great. I will just slip this into a quick hour. Your instinct should be, okay, then I better get myself at least 90 minutes. Or this will just take a half hour. Let me just slip this in between these two blocks.

You should say, now I need at least 45 minutes or an hour probably to get this done. Right? So at first, that's what I'd recommend. Should always be feeling like you're giving yourself too much time. You'll realize that almost always that's not going to be the case. The second thing I would recommend is conditional blocks.

So one of the big busters of time block schedules is where you have something really deep and long to work on. So maybe you give yourself, let's say, two hours to work on you're doing a writing project. Now, the issue is, if you really get on a roll, you might have a hard time stopping right at that deadline. Or maybe it just takes a lot longer to make the type of progress that you wanted to make because it's a difficult task. So long, difficult blocks are hard to get right. Well, one trick that a lot of time block planners do is what's called a conditional block. Maybe you give yourself two hours to work on this hard task, but then you add a,

one hour long block after that that has two possible purposes. If the first task is still going, then use that second block to continue the first task. If you're done with the first task, then you have a backup activity that's less urgent to do in that block. Like, okay, this would be a good time to catch up on some process that's maybe not due the next day, something that it would be okay if you didn't do, but would be useful if you did. By using conditional blocks, you can give yourself really long chunks of time for things that are hard to predict. And in the cases where something takes a long amount of time, there's a conditional block waiting for you there.

It's not going to bust your schedule. And in the cases where it doesn't, you have a perfectly good activity waiting to switch over to. And third, what I would recommend, Sidney, is that you study your plans after the fact. So one of the key advantages of time block planning is that it gives you a concrete. record of what you get done and, crucially, how long that work takes. So if you go back and study your time block plans, you can do this when you do your weekly plan. How did it go Monday? How to go Tuesday? How to go Wednesday? Where did I go over? Where did I have to redraw my plans? What days did I have to redraw my plans four or five times in a row? Which days was I frustrated

because I could get barely anything done? You need to do a postmortem on your completed plans. what you get from that postmortem is a lot more awareness and wisdom about your actual work habits. You get a lot more awareness and wisdom about the reality of your schedule, and you get a lot more awareness and wisdom about how long things actually take. As that wisdom accumulates, your time block plans get smarter. You find that you no longer have to apply an extra 50%. You find the conditional blocks are maybe a little bit less necessary. You just become better at understanding. understanding your time and how you use it. And it's really there that you get the real superpower at a time blog planning because not only are you using your time better, you're gaining a much

better understanding of how your time actually works, which is why people who use this method are often viewed by their peers as some sort of productivity ninja. People don't know how you're getting it all done. Well, this is how you're doing it. You're controlling your time and you're learning about your time. You do those two things. You'll be okay. So Sydney, keep at it. Practice, use those techniques I gave you, and I think you're going to find you're going to get better and better at this fundamental technique. All right, let's move on to our next listener question. Hi, Cal, my name is Joel Sanders. I work as an outsourced COO that is a fractional chief operations officer for small businesses and startups. And I believe the answer to email and Slack message overwhelm for

small business teams is working with well-structured online documents and holding well-structured meetings. So more time thinking and collaborating through documents and less time reacting to incoming requests. Now, my question is, what can small businesses learn from academics to better manage their business operations, specifically as it relates to documents? Well, that's a good question. I mean, for the most part in most areas of our professional life, academics are not very organized and we're not good productivity exemplars. We are, however, as you point out in your question, good at bringing together far-flung people to collaborate on shared documents, right? Because we write papers. That's our main academic activity is writing peer-reviewed papers. We write them with collaborators. More often than not, these collaborators are spread around the globe. So we have to get very good at exactly what you're talking about, which is organizing work using a document as the central tool of organization. I mean, I'm just looking back at some of my recent papers I've written. I have co-authors in Iceland, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Switzerland, and all across America as well. And so, of course,

we're not in the same building. We're not constantly jumping on meetings. And we certainly do not try to make these complicated papers unfold as a series of ad hoc email exchanges. We use a more sophisticated approach. So let me just briefly explain, at least in my field of academia, how we approach document-based synchronization and collaboration, and then I will maybe talk a little bit about the tech we use to implement it, though I think the tech is less important than the high-level approach. So when we're working, at least in my circle of collaborators, when we're working on a paper, there is a shared document that is the central repository of all of our thinking. Now, back in the olden days, because we're computer scientists and always try to overcomplicate

anything technical, we used to actually use software version control management software so that you could actually check out a copy of the document and make your changes and then check it back in. And if two people were working on the same document at the same time, this version control software could help you avoid conflicts or maybe merge those simultaneous edits. Today, there's a lot of web-based tools that make this a lot easier. But we have a central document that we share. When we're working on an idea, we add a section to the paper, we put in our working thoughts. We then refine that section. As we develop the information or results relevant to that section, we refined a section.

So it's a refinement process. So at the very beginning, I might add a section that says, huh, I want to look at something like this result. Here are some rough thoughts about how we might make progress. And over time, I might put in some strategies. And then over time, I might get in some proof sketches. And over time, those will evolve into fully formed proof. and over time, all these sections will get polished into a submittable paper. Now, how do we actually coordinate about this work that's going on?

Well, technical questions. Like, what are you doing with this proof here? Or what if you tried this? Or I don't understand what you did here. These go into the document. So you'll actually go into a section that someone's working on and add a comment. In the particular software we use, these will typically be a special tag. so it'll be colored a different font color than the rest of the document.

So it really stands out. So technical questions or observations get put into the document at exactly the place and the information where they're relevant. So what is email used for in this process? Typically email is used to flag people's attention about what has happened recently in the document, right? So we would not use email for the most part once we really get rolling on a project.

We would not use email necessarily to have a, extensive back and forth about the actual content of the paper, but we might send an email to say, I just dumped a bunch of new results in the section four. Or I just finished reading over your section 3.1 and left some comments. And maybe you would elaborate a little bit in the email, but the information itself is in the document. Detailed questions and notes are in the document. Again, that's the central repository of all relevant information. It is not spread out over a bunch of emails in an email inbox. And what happens if there's a real complicated, like I don't understand what you wrote here or I can't make progress on this result.

I need help. I don't know how to get this proof working. Then we schedule synchronous meetings. So we all get together on Skype or on zero on face time or whatever it is. And we sit there and we work back and forth and try to help each other make progress where we're stuck. Now again the specific technologies don't really matter. We use very special markup tools for mathematics papers because we have to have a lot of complex mathematical equations in our paper. So we can't use something like Google Docs. We actually use a software package called Latex and there's different ways to actually share or collaborate with latex documents. But for most people, something like a shared document tool like Google Docs is fine or actually having a document that you put in, let's say, a shared Dropbox folder.

And then we use email as mentioned to flag each other's attention to what's going on the document. And then for meetings, well, if you're in the same office, you can do this in person. Otherwise, you can use whatever your preferred meeting tool is. All right, but Joel, that is the the three-part approach that academics I know use to organizing collaboration around a document. And again, just to highlight these principles, all of the information is in the document that's shared. All of the questions, comments, and notes live in the document. It's all there. It gets refined over time. It evolves over time. There's no hunting down information about what you're working on. is mainly used to flag people's attention. Very asymmetric tool, not bi-directional. It's, hey, look, I

added something here. Real-time meetings, synchronous meetings are what's used when actual collaborative thinking is needed to make progress. This works great in academia. People have been doing this for decades. It's what we do. And I think you're very smart to think about that as a central metaphor for organizing projects in a small business. It is much superior than just having an asynchronous ad hoc conversation that unfolds over messages and randomly organized meetings. All right. Let's do one more habit tune up question from the C-suite. Hi, Cal. My name is Joe Fuscoe, and I'm a senior executive at a medium-sized publicly traded company. I often like to build fences around large blocks of my time to do or a

attempt to do deep work. Despite these good intentions, other people and other problems sneak through these fences too easily. Do I need to replace these picket fences with razor wire, or is there another strategy I can use to protect my boundaries? Well, Joe, if we're going to stick with a fencing metaphor, the issue I don't think is replacing a picket fence with razor wire, but instead moving where on your property that you have these fences. I mean, for someone who is in your position, so in an executive position at a publicly traded company, it is not going to be easy to have arbitrary times within the week for during which you are not available and that you're doing deep work. It will be a problem.

Now, there's ways to solve it, but the ways to solve that long term are going to involve actually having new processes in place for handling incoming issues, for handling emergencies that no longer require people to gain ad hoc access to your time. But this is actually, that's a complicated overhaul. And there's a simpler solution that you can put in place right away, which is, and I've seen a lot of C-suite types do this, put aside the same time every day for doing deep work and make that time be either at the very beginning or the very end of your day. So one terminology I sometimes use for this strategy is called the Monk Mode Morning. I actually learned this from a CEO, not of a publicly traded company, but of a smaller startup,

but I think the idea still applies. And basically his strategy was his staff knew and his clients knew before 10 a.m. He was not available. Do not schedule him in meetings. Do not try to get him on a call. Do not send him an email in which you were expecting a response. on the flip side, after 10, he was in standard executive mode. Okay, I have an assistant scheduling my time.

My calendar is all over the place. The type of fragmented schedule that is unavoidable at the executive level. This is what I meant by saying move the fence to another part of the property. By making the fence very clear, oh, it's at the beginning of the day. It's a rule that everyone can learn and understand. And then it's very easy to work around. They just think, okay, you know, the first hour or so of the day, I can't bother. there Joe, but I can get them after that. Sure, I get that. It's very clear expectations and it's

very easy to actually deal with. Now, for you, now suddenly you have deep work time every day. Now, if your fence is at 10 a.m., you might want to start work at 8 or 730 a.m. so you can get a non-trivial amount of deep work. You can flex this. Maybe there's a really big thing coming up that's going to require a lot of deep work. Well, that week you might be getting up at 5, my friend, but you don't have to change the fence. It's there. It's at 10. Everyone, knows it. You're not retraining people. You're not re-informing people. You're not complaining to people about being bothered. They just see those very clear fences at the corner of your property. They have no problem avoiding it. So, Joe, that's my short-term solution. Put aside set hours, either at the

beginning or end of your day and train everyone. That's when you were not available. There are long-term solutions. You know, this is the bigger thing I've been preaching that work in general needs to be much more structured. Most people should not be in a situation where many parties need on-demand ad hoc access to their time just to keep the wheels of progress rolling in their organization. But that's where we are today. So this strategy will gain you some breathing room. Okay. So I just want to do one more question in this habit, tune up mini episode. Hi, Cal. My name's Kathy. I'm an executive in the social service agency. My dilemma is one that's been longstanding

ever since I was in graduate school. And I find that I am interested in too many different things. And probably there are about 20 things right now that I'm deeply interested in. And what I would really like to do is to be able to focus on one thing for a long period of time or for a period of time

and then move to something else and focus deeply on that for a while. But instead, what I find is I am much more scattershot. I will read half a book and then move on to something else. Well, Kathy, there's two points here, I think, are relevant for tuning up this particular habit. So first, I think it's important to recognize that when it comes to building up skills or mastering areas of knowledge or building out philosophies or whatever your disciplined, diligent pursuit of something hard, wherever that takes you. It's important to realize that the satisfaction comes from the mastery more so than the specifics of the material. So there's a rewiring

of your mindset that might help here. If you think about this in terms of what makes me feel satisfy is the fact that I pursue mastery, I pursue competence, I pursue expertise. I'm the type of person who is able to diligently return to something again and again until I can do it at a non-amature level until I can understand it at a non-beginner level. Then you're going to be less tempted by, well, this thing seems a little bit more interesting. So maybe I will switch over to that book because that topic might be a little better. And then, oh, no, you know what? That skill might be even better to learn, that seems more interesting. So why don't I go do that? That type of bouncing around mindset is really driven by the idea that the value comes out of what it is you're learning. And that's why

you will switch because if you see something that might have more value, then you're going to switch over to it. But when you're coming from the mastery mindset, what I call the craftsman mindset in my book so good they can't ignore you, you just enjoy the diligence. You enjoy the sense of I'm getting better and that I've come back to this. You enjoy the sense that most people you know won't that I've returned to this book again and again and again and again. Then I read this one, then I listened to this lecture, and then I read that one, and then I wrote this. Now I'm a master of this topic, or at least I'm at a non-beginner, non-amateur level, and I get satisfaction out of that effort. Then you're going to find yourself not tempted to switch so much. Now, the second thing I

want to tell you here is that it's often helpful to have what you can think of as free play time in your schedule. So maybe you have time that you dedicate. to mastering things that are important to me to master. Personal life or professional doesn't matter, but things I want to master these things. It's important. I want to stick with things one thing at a time. Then maybe you have some free time.

Maybe it's on the weekends. Maybe it's on some evenings where you say anything goes. I read whatever I want to read. The reading during this time, I feel completely justified. Throwing out a book and started another one if I get bored or something else catches my attention. This is time when I can mess around with a new tool I bought or, want some YouTube videos on a particular skill and just try it out for a night. So this often helps to have this free play time where you can just explore, be entertained,

have an outlet for things to grab your attention in the moment. But when it comes to your core efforts to get better at things, focus on the process, focus on the act of mastery, focus on competence as something that's a lifelong commitment. And you're going to find yourself much more satisfied and more. much less distracted in your efforts. I got to tell you, Kathy, just the very fact that you're thinking about this

is a hugely positive thing. Just the fact that you're looking to master skills is a hugely positive thing. The fact that you recognize that this might require some diligent time and that switching all the time might not be the best approach. I think that is hugely positive.

You have asked the right questions and I think the answers to your questions are really not that difficult to put into action once you know what they are. All right, so I enjoyed this Habit Tune Up mini episode. I think I'll do some more

of these in the weeks ahead. And of course, coming soon is the next full episode of the Deep Questions podcast. So keep your ears open for that. And of course, if you hit subscribe on this podcast, you won't have to worry about missing

any of these shows that I'm putting together. Until next time, everyone, stay deep.