Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 74: Habit Tune-Up: Taming Trello

Episode Date: February 25, 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.- Spending too much time on Trello. [8:47]- Reducing instant messenger use. [18:33]- The inflexibility of time blocking. [27:30]- Finishing a thesis on time. [34:32]- Working deeply during a coup. [37:33]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 should be well known to you by now. We take voice questions from my listeners, where we get into the nitty, gritty details of tuning up the type of habits we like to talk about on this show. As for quick announcements, well, you might imagine they involve my book, but the good news is that book comes out on. Tuesday. So pretty soon you will not have to keep hearing so much about it. The main quick announcement about the book is that we have scheduled a live event for Thursday, March 4th. It is being sponsored by the Politics and Prose bookstore here in D.C. When I launched a digital minimalism, I did so with a big event at their physical bookstore. We had a standing room only

crowd. It was a lot of fun. We, of course, can't do that this year, so they're hosting a virtual event, which means you can attend no matter where you are in the world. The event will be a conversation between me and Jason Freed. I talk about Jason and deep work. I talk about Jason in a world without email. We is well known as the co-founder of Base Camp, which used to be called 37 Signals. She's a co-author of many bestselling books on radical thinking about how to change and improve work including rework and remote. He has a book out called It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. He also has been a longtime contributor to the single signal versus noise blog. Anyways, really exciting to be in conversation with him. We'll get into it. We'll talk about the problem with email, the future of work.

There's a lot of really interesting things. He has tried at his company. There's places also that we disagree. We'll get into that. So it should be a fun conversation. If you want to attend, you have to register, even though it's virtual, you register and you get tickets. And to do that, go to calnewport.com slash blog. I wrote a blog post about this recently, and the links are in that blog post. We can go to the registration page. Also, I think politics and pros is going to give away, or not giveaway, but they're going to sell some signed copies of my books.

I'm going over there to sign some copies. So if you order a book through politics and prose, you might be able to get a signed copy. You can find out more details on that. registration page as well. So that's exciting. And of course, the pre-order campaign is still going on. If you pre-order the book, digital or hardcover, by March 2nd, you get access to this email academy video series I put together. It's me on camera walking you through some of the big ideas from the book and giving you some advice for how to put those ideas into action. So it's a great way to dive into the big ideas of the book and the actionable steps from the book,

even before you've had a chance to read the whole thing. If you pre-order, you will also immediately be sent an excerpt. So even while you're waiting for your copy to arrive, you can start digging into some of the ideas of that book. Here's the thing about these pre-orders. I mean, really, really the main incentive here is probably my thanks. The publishing industry is weird, but for a lot of reasons, book. bought in advance really help because they, A, they count those sales as happening during the first

week, which is important for a lot of things. But also seeing pre-order numbers go up, signals to the people that need to be signaled, like Amazon and others, that the book has fans, that's important. It just gets all of the balls rolling that give your book the best chance of actually catching people's attention. So, you know, that's the main reason why I've been pushing that. So, you know, I put together this email academy. I have the excerpt, but really what probably the main pre-order bonus here is my appreciation. So the details of how you register your pre-order is at calnewport.com slash pre-order. As you can probably tell, book marketing or book publicity is not exactly my strong suit.

I like the part where I write the book. I really like the part where I think about the book, but haven't yet started writing it yet. I'm not so great at the part where I try to convince people that, oh yeah, I guess you should buy this. So in typical me fashion, I've been responding to the launch that's just starting to occur now by turning my attention to new ideas. This is my patent pending sort of anxiety reducer because I can't control. I mean, I guess I could control if this book does well or not if I was a master marketer or not a master marketer, but it's kind of out of my hand. So just yesterday I bought three new books to read. There's a topic I'm really interested in that I'm starting to go deep on. Might be relevant for the book I write next.

So I like focusing on the next thing. Once I'm done with the current, I don't want to dwell. So I bought three books. There's also I've been really ramping up the time. I've been spending on a couple math proofs I'm working on in my computer science. So this is my patent pending response to these type of somewhat anxious moments is go deep. Find the next thing, go deep. And y'all tell you what, it's been pretty stress relieving. The weather's got nicer here too. Getting some sunshine, I can do more work outside. That helps.

But that's where I am talking about pre-orders and retreating as soon as I can to trying to think deep, calming thoughts. So let's talk about today's episode. We've got some good questions here. we have someone who's going overboard on Trello, someone worried about time blocking, making them less flexible, a thesis-related question, someone asking about deep work during a coup. So, you know, if we want to talk about a deep cut on a narrow topic, here we go. So this should be good.

I look forward to getting to these questions. If you want to find out how you can submit your own questions to this podcast, go to cownduport.com slash podcast, and I have the instructions there. All right, so before we get started, I want to take a moment to thank one of the new sponsors of the Deep Questions podcast. And I'm talking about stamps.com. The idea here, it's a no-brainer. Like, here's how it works. You pay a small monthly fee, and then for that fee, what you're able to do is from your home, print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class.

of mail anywhere you want to send, you just put the postage you printed on what you want to send, and you can schedule a pickup. No going to the post office involved. They, in addition, give you large discounts on the shipping rates itself. So they work with the post office. They also work with the UPS. And you can get up to 40% off post office rates and 62% off UPS shipping rate. So if you do the math, you send like two things or three things or something like this. And just that discount alone, you paid for the monthly fee. But honestly, I think that's burying the lead here, which is you don't have to go to the post office. I need to ship this box.

Great. Print it. I need to ship this letter. Print the postage. Schedule a pickup. You're done. I was thinking about this because as I mentioned on Monday, the DeepWork HQ is right down the street from our town's post office. And because of pandemic restrictions, they're only allowing a very important.

very small number of people in there at once. So every day there's this long line out on the sidewalk, even when it's raining or snowing or frigid outside of people waiting to go in the post office. And all I can help thinking is, okay, a picture of this is a beautiful Stamps.com advertisement. So stop wasting time going to the post office and go to Stamps.com instead. There's no risk. And if you use my promo code deep, you will get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale, no long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com.

Click on the microphone. It's at the top of the homepage, and then you type in Deep, that's where you put it. That Stamps.com promo code deep, never go to the post office again. Where we can go, however, is the start of our show. We will kick things off now with a question about Trello. Hi, Cal and all the listeners.

My name is Michaela and I'm from Sweden. I'm currently in the process of switching careers. Earlier, I was a project manager within tech. And now I'm excited about my future as an user experience designer. My question to you, Cal, is related to Trello, which I've been using for several years myself. I often find myself paying way too much attention to the organization and structure in Trello.

to the extent that steals my valuable time for focus. My thoughts can go to things like what tags would be most appropriate? Should I move tasks from different columns representing their state? When do things go into the archive? How do I prioritize in an efficient way? Is it by dragging tasks to the top of a list? As you can hear, I'm overwhelmed by all the options Trello gives me

and I would like to hear your setup and recommendation on what a beginner-friendly Trello board is looking like when aiming going deep. So, Michaela, let's start by summarizing what Trello or similar types of virtual task board tools, what they can do well, where they're useful. So one thing is they help you get obligations, professional obligations out of your brain

and into what David Allen would call a trusted system. So you have them recorded somewhere where you don't have to remember them just in your head and you can free up those mental resources that would otherwise be dedicated to making sure that you don't forget the obligations held only in your head. Another advantage you can get out of a virtual task board is context.

So you can have different boards for different contexts. So you maybe have a board for this project, a board for this type of client, a board for maybe an administrative role that you also play in your company. This allows you when you're working on one particular context or role in your professional life to just be surrounded by obligations and information related to that role. This saves you the context switching cost if you're seeing information related to many different roles concurrently.

So people, for example, that just let their email inbox act as their general purpose collection area for stuff that's going on, they don't get this benefit because while you're looking through this inbox to find an email about a given client, you're also seeing emails about other clients and about other projects and about your administrative role. Now your mind is trying to switch back and forth between these contexts and you can't think particularly clearly about any of them. So Trello is really good about that, different boards for different roles or context. The columns in Trello can be useful because it allows you to have some mild structuring to these tasks, right? So you can kind of quickly assess. Are these things that aren't urgent,

but I don't want to forget? Are these things I'm working on right now? Is there a particular project in this role or something that has to get done soon? And here's all the things related to that all gathered in one place. Am I waiting to hear back from someone? All right, let me have a column just for that. It's useful, right? So it's not just a whole mess of obligations. Well, you have some sort of loose structure to it. It really helps your mind to have that structure when it sees all those tasks, it seems a lot less intimidating. It can think clearly about what you should do at AIDS planning. So Trello has that advantage. And finally, Trello has the advantage that you can attach information. And again, I'm saying Trello, but this is true of many different

virtual task board tools. You can attach files. You can have long text descriptions. You can have checklist. Get on back and forth discussion. If it's a shared Trello board, each of the virtual cards in these systems is itself an anchor onto which you can connect lots of relevant information, and that's just convenient. So I'm not doing Slack searches or digging through my inbox to try to find where is the notes from the last client call, where is the contract we signed with this client, where is the draft of the marketing white paper we're putting together. All this can be attached to cards. They're all on a board for this project, context, or role. All that's very convenient. This makes task boards.

useful those different properties, but what they cannot do for you is make it easy to work. And this may be part of the problem that's going on here. If you go back and read, for example, early Merlin Man, or if you read my New Yorker article, the rise and fall of getting things done where I tell the story of early Merlin Man, it's a broader story of this moment in productivity history that happened in the first decade of the 2000s, where productivity enthusiasts had this optimism that with the right tool, so if we could use technology in the right way,

we could make work almost effortless. It would be this mind-like water widget cranking where our systems just kind of told us do this concrete action next, do that concrete action next. One of the names given to this movement was productivity pran, spelled PR 0N.

If that sounds weird, that means you're not a geek. Congratulations. It's an example of what's known as LeetSpeak, which is sort of a tech nerd vernacular. So I got this name, Productivity Prawn. Merlin Mann was involved with it. And the idea was if you optimize technical tools properly, you're going to somehow offload a lot of the difficulty of work

into the tool itself and to make work into something for you as a human to be much easier. TLDR, to use some more lead speak, this did not actually work out. Merlin Man gave up on productivity prong and just completely changed the nature of his work and focused more on things like creativity

and doing things that matters and not getting too distracted and not having too much on your plate to organize in the first place. So there's sort of this amazing arc in his career that I built that article around. But as possible, Michaela, that you're feeling a little bit

of this productivity prong mindset. You're thinking, if I can just get my Trello board just right, the right columns, the right connections, the right cards, the right information on the cards, it's going to make work pretty effortless. And it won't. Work is hard. You still have to make the hard decisions about what to work on next and you actually have to do the work and that's not always easy and you have to stare at your time block schedule and you have to force yourself to do it and sometimes you fail and that's just how it goes. So when you think about Trello, think about

those advantages which are great. It gets rid of friction that you don't want to have to deal with. It makes work easier to deal with you get more out of your brain, but it doesn't make work easy. And once you recognize that, you'll probably find it easier to spend less time on Trello because there's not this promise being held out of a miracle configuration. You kind of do something that more or less works, tweak it occasionally, but eventually you have to get after it. So I've loaded up here on my laptop, my Trello,

and I've gone to the board, for example, that I use for my role as a writer. The board is literally called roll, comma, writer. Let me go through my columns here, so you can see what my Tolo board looks like. I have a column called Two Process. This is like I'm dumping stuff that I don't even really know what this means or how to deal with it, but I don't want to forget it. It goes to two process. I have a column called Backburner, right?

So this is stuff that I need to do writing related, but it's not particularly time sensitive, but it should get done at some point. I don't want to forget it. Now I actually have two backburner columns, essentially one that's related to my writing itself, so my books and articles, and one that's related to more of the business stuff that surrounds my writing. I have a column called Waiting to Hear Back. So if I've sent a message into the void, and I'm waiting to hear back from someone on that, and that's going to spark a next step, like, okay, when I hear back from my web designer about, approval or whatever, go ahead and sender XYZ. I can put it in that column so I don't forget it. I have a temporary project-specific column here called book launch. So sometimes when I have a short-term but complicated or task-heavy project, I'll give it its own column on my board.

So here's all the stuff just for this. I can keep it in one place. And then I have this week. So it's the stuff I'm doing this week. And then I have a column called reminders. I like to throw reminders on here about stuff because I see it when I look at my Trello board. So it's a good place to have a reminder like, hey, remember when doing your blog post to change this property setting, that type of thing. All right? So it's not that complicated. I throw stuff on here. It's not a miracle board. It doesn't make it easier to be a writer. But it means I don't have to keep track of things in my head. And I can much more easily make plans for the day. I can much more easily look at this writing board and say what needs to get done this week. What am I working on this week? Okay, what am I going to

schedule them today. Good, let's go. Time block. I'm executing. All right. So I hope that makes sense. Good enough is good enough. Like the difference between a Trello board, I have more or less one for each role and some reasonable set of columns. The difference between that and a highly optimized Trello board is small. The difference between having no structured capture, so not doing any configure and having some sort of structure captured, that's the big gap. That's the gap you want to close. But once you've closed it, you can turn your attention back to actually. executing. All right, let's do a question here about instant messaging. Hi, Cal, I'm Tim from Hong Kong. I've been a long-time reader, starting from how to become a

student to your study hacks blog posts and, of course, digital minimalism. My technology question is, do you have any tips for people who are just starting out to reduce their instant messaging use? I've already set up office hours on calendar and other means of content in my current chat apps, but I still find myself going back to frantic messaging. Thanks. Well, Tim, I really like this question because it's an excuse to talk about strategies from my book, A World Without Email. You know, the two things you've already done are good. The office hours and the use of calendly.

Let's just quickly elaborate for people who might not be familiar with what this means. When it comes to office hours, that means that Tim has set times, during the week in which he is always available to talk either in person or virtually depending on how things are set up so that when interactions show up it clearly needs some back and forth. Instead of just trying to do this back and forth on email or instant messenger, you can say, yeah, just grab me at my office hours. And so you can collapse a lot of asynchronous back and forth conversations throughout the

week into these concentrated times where you can go back and forth real rapidly and solve a lot of problems, you solve a lot of messaging, you reduce a lot of messaging, you reduce a lot of context shifting, it makes life much better. Actually, in the event I'm doing next week, I announced with Jason Freed, we're going to talk about office hours because they use those at his technology company. Call and Lee, that's just using a one message scheduling tool. It's another thing that's a good idea, that if I have a meeting to schedule, I can just send you a link.

It's say, all my available times are here, just click on that link, choose anyone that works for you. We really underestimate how much it affects our cognitive capacity to have to tend to back and forth conversations about meeting scheduling. It's not just the four emails back and forth it takes for us to schedule a meeting. It's the fact that I have to check my inbox 40 times throughout those four back and forth emails because I'm trying to wait for that message ping pong ball to come across the net so I can hit it back to you without too much of a delay because we really want to get this meeting set up. And so we really underestimate the damage of trying to schedule meetings with back and forth messaging. So if you have calendarly or acuity or schedule once or any tool

where you can just say, here's a link to any time that works with no back and forth messaging required. It's a huge win, the bigger wind than you would think. So Tim, good for doing both of these. But let's step back and ask, what is the general strategy you are deploying here? Because once we understand the general strategy, we can figure out how to keep going. Sounds like these helped, but have not gotten you off instant messenger enough that you're happy yet. So let's step up and say, what's the general strategy here? Well, the general strategy. is basically the big idea for my book, which is if you want to reduce the time you spend on instant messenger or in your email, you can't solve that problem in the inbox itself. You can't solve that problem with better habits, with batching, with turning off notifications, with setting better norms about response times. You have to look at the underlying processes that make up your role and say, is there better ways to implement these processes that does not require as much? unscheduled back and forth messaging.

Every knowledge work role, every knowledge work team, every knowledge work company is really comprised of a bunch of processes. These are things you come back to again and again in which people work together and produce a valuable outcome. How you implement these processes matters. If you haven't thought about it, if you haven't named these processes, if you haven't talked about it, you're probably implementing them with what I call the hyperactive hive mind workflow,

which means let's just rock and roll, back and forth messages, an instant messenger email, we'll just figure it out on the fly. If you have one process and only a few people you work with, that's fine. Otherwise, it's going to kill you.

Now you get into them in the book, I won't go into too many details now about the context switching, the cognitive cost, how it exhaust our brain, how it makes us miserable. It's not good. All right.

So the strategy here is to identify these processes and say, okay, right now I'm implementing these with the hyperactive hive mind, is there a strategy to implement these that has less unscheduled back and forth messaging? That's what you've been doing, Tim. You identified two particular processes, and you came up with better implementations that decrease back and forth messaging.

So setting up meetings is a process that happens a lot. You realize if I use Call and Lee, I can still execute that process, but with less back and forth messages, answering questions about, I guess it's some expertise you have. That's a process that comes up a lot, and you realize if I use office hours to implement that process instead of the hive mine, which would just be, hey, hit me up on Slack whenever you have a question. You're still executing that process, but with less back and forth messaging.

So the whole game here, Tim, is to identify more processes that make up what you do during your day and keep asking the same question about each. How can I change how this process is implemented to reduce back and forth messaging? and how can I change how this process is implemented to reduce back and forth messaging. Now, you're new to your job, so you'll probably be doing this somewhat asymmetrically. In other words, just making changes on things that you can control.

You probably can't change the behavior of your colleagues, your groups. That's fine. Even asymmetrical optimization of these processes goes a long way. I mean, half of my book gets into the principles of what it looks like to different principles for different ways to optimize these processes. So it's not like a one-size-fits-all solution here,

but just to very briefly summarize a very small number of highlights from the book, you might find yourself, for example, with some processes that are very automatable. Oh, we have to produce this podcast episode every week. We can actually break that down into five steps, and we can have a spreadsheet, one row for each podcast episode,

and there's a cell for the current step it's in. And when you're done with your step, you change that cell, and then the next people involved see that and they can go grab the information from some shared file and do what they're going to do and then they change the cell and it goes to the next thing

you know so it's like I upload the raw file to this drop box and change to sell I put the title of the show in the spreadsheet change the cell to like ready for edits or something the editor takes it you know whatever put some notes

uploads them to drop box when they're ready for you to approve them they change that cell to edits ready you go back in and update it and, you know, et cetera, right? Like, you can automate processes so you use shared files and shares folders and set rules so that very little back and forth messaging is required to actually execute that process. Or you might have some sort of shared taskboard approach.

Maybe there's some project you're involved in with a couple other people. And it's not automatable. It's, you know, it's a one-time thing. You're trying to put together an event for a client or something like this. Well, again, you could just do this with the hive mind. Hey, it was just rock and roll and slack. and we'll figure this out. Or you might say, let's have a shared taskboard.

We'll use Trello or Flow. All the things we need to do are on there. Their status is on there. All the files and contracts and information and sites is all attached to these cards. So all the information is in the same place. Three times a week. We have a 10-minute, highly structured,

real-time status meeting. Who's working on what? What do you need to make progress? What happened to the thing you said you were going to work on last time? Great, go work. I'll see you at the next status meeting. again, it's an example of you're taking a process,

we have to plan a client event and figuring out how can we minimize back and forth messages. All right, so just keep going, Tim, process after process after process. Each one will reduce the pressure. We'll reduce the pressure on your chat channels or inboxes a little bit more, a little bit more, until that pressure gets low enough that your attention does not have to constantly check them.

And not having to constantly check them is where you want to get. Now that's a big idea from this book. I think a lot of people tackle communication overload by just trying to spend less time communicating. But if the way your underlying processes are implemented is back and forth unscheduled communication, this won't work. The more time you spend away from Slack, the more time you spend away from email, the worst you're going to make other people's lives.

That's not sustainable. So you've got to find the processes that are implemented with the hive mind and say, what's better, what's better, what's better. And remember this, the definition of better. and the knowledge or context is less back and forth messages. All right, I hope that helps Tim. Honestly, I don't mean to make this sound like an advertisement

by a world without email. I mean, I'm giving you the flavor here, but that's the entire recipe. All right, moving on, it would not be a habit tune-up mini episode if we didn't do at least one question about time blocking. Hi, Carl.

I am Salah from Saudi Arabia. I used to have an OCDD, which is obsessive, compulsive personality disorder. So does your time block planning make people rigid and inflexible? So I'm afraid that time block planning will ruin my OCD treatment, which taught me flexibility and living the moment. Well, Sala, I don't want to talk about your treatment plan in particular. So I'm not an expert on therapeutic responses to OCPD. But I will talk more generally about the general concern of inflexibility of time blocking because I hear that a lot from a lot of people. There's this notion of I need some flexibility in my work. I need to roll with things as they arrive.

If I try to place a structure around my efforts, it's going to tamp down creativity. is going to tamp down my flexibility, and that's going to cause problems. All right. If done properly, this is not going to be the case for most people. You have to imagine you have a certain amount of energy you can expend during your workday towards actual productive activities. It's like steam coming off of a boiling kettle. Now, if you put this steam into a pipe, you can kind of concentrate it,

and you can move it to places you want to move, you can get a lot of actual. and get a lot of work out of that steam. If that pipe is leaky or you have a bunch of pipes, you don't have any pipes on it at all, a lot of that steam is just going to dissipate into the air where it doesn't actually move anything in this metaphor. And that's what it's like if you approach your work without a plan. If you say, okay, what's next?

I'll use the list-based reactive method. Let's look at my inbox, let's do some of that. Look at my to-do list and grab something that seems convenient. Let's do some social media for a while. Let's look back over here at my inbox. Wait, what's Clubhouse? Let me go do a clubhouse for a little while. All right, let me look at my to do list. Oh, the things do. Let me do that real quick because my boss just sent me an email to bother me for it. Let me get that done real quick. Oh, man, it's five. You know, hey, good day.

Not a very effective way to work. If you instead actually look at your available hours and say, what do I want to do with these hours today? You can put that steam into a pipe. You can make the most of your time and get the most out of each of those blocks because you know what you're supposed to be working on so you can concentrate it. Now, a common mistake, is if you make those blocks too fine grain, that can be inflexible. And it's like every 10 minutes, like do this and send this email,

then walk over and talk to this person. Yeah, that's little too inflexible. You need broader blocks in that. If you have creative work, it's free form, have big blocks for it. Use time blocking to get the small stuff out of the way so that you can put aside three hours in the afternoon

of just work on this thought, whatever that means. Go for a walk and read or think wherever it takes you. You can block out very flexible time. very creative people often do their creative efforts under very strict schedules. You need some boundaries around creative thought. So I think that will help you as well.

And then also just be fine with, look, if there's things that interrupt me and I have to change my plan, I change my plan. Next time I get a chance. It's okay. Time blocking assumes you might change your plan a few times. It's not a problem. The goal with time blocking is simply that for the most part, you have a plan for the time that remains in your day. if you have to change that plan, it's not a big deal. It's just better to have some sort of intention about giving this many hours and what's on my calendar

and what I need to do. What's the best use of this time? You just want to have an answer to that question for the time that remains, even if it has to update. So more generally, I think time blocking is very compatible with a kind of creative, flexible work lifestyle, but it's also going to get you a lot more done than if you approach things with a completely free-form mentality. I want to take a brief moment here to talk about four-sigmatic ground mushroom coffee with lion's main mushroom.

I've been talking about this coffee for a while on this podcast. First of all, it tastes great. It doesn't taste like mushrooms. It tastes nutty. It has a little less caffeine than normal coffee, so it goes down smoother. And that lion's main mushroom gets right into your brain and does something cool. my preferred use of this coffee is as part of my deep work ritual because the physiological signature is so unique

when you're drinking this ground mushroom coffee, your brain quickly learns. This unique feeling means it's time to concentrate. It learns that lesson and puts you into that concentration mode much faster. Now, I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee. This is just for my listeners. You can get up to 40% off plus free.

shipping on the mushroom coffee bundles. But to claim to deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This is only for Deep Questions listeners. It's not available on their regular website. So you will save up the 40% and the free shipping if you go to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C. Dot com slash deep. I also want to talk about Magic Spoon. You've heard me say it.

Few experiences are more nostalgic for me than eating that bowl of treat cereal as a kid. It used to be one of my favorite things. Now as an adult, I can do it again, but without all the junk because of magic spoon. This is great new cereal that has zero sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, and only four net carbs, grams of carbs and each serving. each serving is also only 140 calories. It's keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carb GMO-free, and it tastes great. Of course, the new excitement I told you about on Monday is that they have a brand-new variety pack featuring their brand-new flavor peanut butter.

This was a limited edition release last year. I kept selling out, so now it's part of their main offerings. You can build a variety pack today that includes the new peanut butter flavor. You can also put in the other flavors like, fruity or cocoa and the number one flavor, of course, we all agree, which is frosted. So go to magic spoon.com slash cowl to grab a variety pack and try it today. And be sure to use that promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. You got 100% happiness guarantee here if you don't like it for any reason.

They'll refund your money, no questions asked. So get that delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code Cal to save $5. All right, we're running a little long here, so let's go into rapid-fired mode and try to knock off two more questions with quick answers. Starting with one here about finishing a doctoral thesis. Dear Cal, my name is Sanya, and I am a low PhD student at Oxford. I'm in my final few months trying to finish up while we are all still in its rows of the global pandemic. Your writing on deep work has transformed my writing practice, and I was hoping for a piece of advice to power me through these final months. Now, I should admit, I had to cut this question

short for time concerns, but it did include an excellent and extended Greek mythology metaphor, so my hat is still tipped, even if I couldn't include it. I have two quick things to say here when it comes to finishing, especially a complex humanity dissertation at an elite school like Oxford, a couple things to keep in mind. One, it sounds like from your extended question that you have just, you finished the primary thinking and reading and now it's time to actually pull your thoughts together. Talk to people. Fellow students, professors, bounce ideas off of people.

If there's places you can write articles quickly, so not through a long peer review process, but in, you know, review publications where you can just get a thing out quickly and get some feedback, do that, argue with your professors, argue with fellow students, argue with, what you want to do is get your ideas out there, make sure that you're running them up against other ideas, you're knocking off the rough edges, you're adding that extra coat of polish. That's really going to help things lock together real tightly as you start writing. And then two, doctoral thesis has to be taken one little bit at a time. Every day, set time, two hours, execute, execute, execute.

It seems completely overwhelming at first, but you do a little bit of a little bit of a chapter this day and a little bit more this day, then you have to go back and rewrite the first part this day, and you just repeat and you look up a couple months later, and that chapter looks pretty good, and now you're on the next one, and now you're on the next one. The only sub-piece of advice I would give is, as you were writing in a little bit each day, spend a little bit of extra time in the moment to avoid having to do large periods of sort of wrote formatting style work later. So, for example, get those citations, get the right information in there when you're done with your session, format the citations properly, that type of thing, so that as you're making

progress, you don't have this looming large sort of administrative formatting task hanging over your shoulder. Like, I'm going to have to go back and take all these rough notes and turn them into formal citations, and I really dread it. You know, sort of semi-polish as you go along. All right, so talk as much as possible the smartest people you can about these ideas, is your final code of polish. And two, the formula here is simple. Every day, set amount of time. Again and again and again, that will add up. You will get there. I'm excited for you. All right, let's do one more quick question here. This one's a little specific. Hey, Cal, this is Kat. Do you have any advice for doing deep work and staying productive during a coup or similar distracting events?

I had a really hard time concentrating during the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, and eventually I just gave up for the day. I feel irresponsible for paying attention to something I can't control and yet irresponsible if I don't pay attention. What do you do? How did you spend January 6th? Thank you. Well, Kat, that's a specific question, how to do deep work during a coup. Good news, though. That is actually the topic of my new book.

I call it overthrowing procrastination. I guess I'd be a little bit narrow. Now, are you, are you, is there an accusation maybe in that final question? Where was I, January 6th? Is there a little bit of prodding there? You know, were you wearing greater than or equal to one Viking helmets or furs on January 6? Is that what you're trying to figure out here? I was not at the Capitol on January 6th.

I was working when it happened. I was in a meeting, a Georgetown meeting, and then I didn't do much work after. And I think that's fine. I got similar questions actually about the Texas snowstorm recently, you know, because it knocked out power and water and people had a hard time obviously working. And again, my answer there was it's fine. I think it's fine. If there's like a natural disaster, if there's a personal disaster, like something really bad happens in your personal life, if there's major national news, I think it's completely fine to do maintenance mode on that day. Like, okay, what just has to get done to the light stay on?

Let me just get back to this person, cancel this meeting, you know, so that it's completely fine. it's not completely open loop, but like a 20-minute emergency shutdown and then go do something else. You know, I think that's completely fine. One day is not going to make the difference. One week that you're six not going to make the difference. One storm that knocks out your power for a couple days. It's not going to make a difference in the long term.

So don't be hard on yourself. When you need to shut it down, shut it down. And then when it's time to get back at it, you can get back at it. In the meantime, it sounds like I probably have a new book proposal to write because at I know I would have one potential reader for my government subversion-based productivity guide. And while I go and write that, I should probably bring this episode to a close. Thank you for your questions. Find out how to submit your own questions.

Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast. We'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast, the episode the day before Pub Day for World Without Email. So that will be fun. Until then, as always, stay deep.