Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 76: Habit Tune-Up: Email On Speed (Taming WhatsApp)

Episode Date: March 4, 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. - Updating strategic plans. [4:13] - Capturing small projects. [8:26] - Archiving tasks. [12:47] - Email on speed (dealing with WhatsApp). [17:15] - Coping with an abundance of depth. [31:28]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 that I take voice questions from listeners about some of the nitty, gritty details of putting into action the type of habits we talk about on this show. Let's get started with some quick announcements. Well, the good news from an announcement perspective is that my new book, A World Without Email, has come out. So I do not need to bother you anymore in the opening of these episodes about pre-order bonuses, etc. My plan is to maybe put together a round-up article on my blog and newsletter, where I link to some of the more interesting articles or interviews that I've done surrounding this book launch. So keep your eyes open for that.

In the meantime, if I'm going to point you to just one thing, you might want to take a look at my latest for The New Yorker, which came out last Friday. It's called Email is Making Us Miserable, and it's an excerpt from the book. So if you're curious on finding out a little bit more about a world without email, that New Yorker excerpt is probably a good place to start. In terms of other announcements, I know I keep saying video is coming. It is coming. I just got distracted by all this book launch stuff.

I already have a bunch of deep dives filmed. I already have a bunch of select questions filmed. I have a production company lined up ready to edit and post these things online. I just have to get a couple free hours here to do it. With the book launch now over, I will do this soon, so I will let you know when video of select clips of this podcast is available. I do think that will be fun. All right, looking ahead, we have a good show. I'm going to do a couple of questions here on strategic or quarterly planning.

Do back-to-back questions on that because people ask a lot. about that part of my practice. And I thought we would spend some time on it. I've also got some questions here about archiving completed tasks, scheduling work when all you have to do is deep work. And that sounds nice. And even something here about WhatsApp. All right.

So this should be a good episode of Habit Tuneup. If you want to submit your own questions, go to Calnewport.com slash podcast. And you can find the instructions there. But first, let me talk about one of the sponsors that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible. I am talking about Blinkist. Ideas are currency in our rapidly evolving world,

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All right, let's kick off our show with a question about strategic plans. Hi, Cal. My name is Sean. I am a movement practitioner and my current craftist sharing that practice locally and I have found your work extremely useful in this area. How does your strategic plan change over the course of three months? I find myself coming across many ideas and potential adjustments over the week, so I save them to a text file called strategic adjustments. And over the weekend, I edit the strategic plan document to reflect them.

To give a quick example, halfway through my three-month season, I wanted to add to my strategic plan a reminder to myself that I wanted to ask Cal Newport how he updates his strategic plan over time. Would you change the actual document or add an addendum section or use an entirely different approach? Well, just to get everyone on the same page here, what Sean is talking about is my suggestion that you have a plan for roughly the next quarter. that's why he talked about three months as a unit of time in which this plan exists. You then use your quarterly strategic plan each week to help inform your weekly plan, and your weekly plan then helps inform your daily time block plan. That's the basic approach I preach for organizing your activities professionally. Strategic plans can and probably should be updated during the quarter that they apply to.

is what actually merits an update. There's not a hard answer here, but roughly speaking, what I like to think about existing on my strategic plan is, A, what I think of as big rock initiatives, these tend to be things that aren't necessarily being assigned to you, but you think are important for where you're trying to go in your career. So you might have, you know, I'm launching a podcast this quarter, I'm trying to pick up this skill this quarter, I'm working on a book this quarter, et cetera, right? These sort of important but perhaps not urgent effort so that you see that every week when you're building

your weekly plan and then you can say which of these sort of I want to service this week and what's the best way to do it. The other thing that can show up on a strategic plan commonly is habits or processes or systems that you are trying out that quarter to help you make progress. this is where you might say, okay, this quarter, I'm not doing any meetings before 11. And the morning's all going to be about deep work. That could live on your strategic plan. So you see that each week and are reminded about it. So if there is an update to one of these big picture, big rock projects, you can update your

strategic plan. You know, maybe the goal changes a little bit or there's some details about what you're trying to accomplish after you get some feedback. And that could go and update your strategic plan. or if a particular system or process you have in place there isn't working, you can take it out or edit it, I think that's fine. The example you, though, give, Sean, of asking me about strategic plans, that's a task. So that's not the type of thing I would normally think about existing on a strategic plan.

That should be in your task system. Right, the idea that you have a particular question you want to ask me about, is you go in your task system, you see your task system as you do your reviews and shutdowns, and so you see that and remember to ask me the question. So tasks don't really belong on the strategic plan. Also, short-term experiments with processes. Those don't really belong on the strategic plan. I feel like, let me try this week, you know, doing email just at noon, or you have some

idea that is really experimental. You're not ready to say this is what I'm doing for the whole quarter. That could really, you know, put a reminder of that in your task system when you build your weekly plan and review your task system. You see that reminder, and you just put it in your weekly system. and let's experiment with this new idea this week and see if we like it. Right. So there should be some relatively high bar to pass for a process or system or habit

before it makes its way into your strategic plan where it's sort of being locked in as to like this is what we're really trying to do this quarter. So again, there's no hard and fast rule here, but I hope that Sean gives you some clarity about what belongs in the plan and therefore what updates you should expect and what probably belongs somewhere else. All right. So let's piggyback this question with one more about. about a similar topic.

Hi, Dr. Newport, this is Dennis from Germany. I have a question regarding quarterly planning. So as a project engineer, confronted with projects that pop up like some time and are due in the next like two to three weeks. So I don't usually put them on my quarterly plan because they're like so, yeah, just popping up. And I wonder what your approach would be, like have a separate project master list where I put those things on and just work through them or also implement them into my quarterly plan. So Dennis is using the phrase quarterly plan. In the previous question, Sean used the term

strategic plan. They're talking about the same thing. This plan that you update roughly once a quarter and used to influence your weekly plan. Now, as I talked about with Sean, I tend to just include what I call big rocks projects on the strategic plan. Things that are important, large scale, it might not otherwise have progress made on them. I should probably give credit, by the way, big rocks in this context is an allusion to Stephen Covey. So Stephen Covey talked about making room for the big rock projects and then all the other things you need to do can fill in the fill in the cracks between the big rocks like sand. Whereas if you put the small things in first, you don't have room for the big rocks.

It was one of his productivity metaphors that's had a long life afterwards. So that's where that phrase comes from. With that in mind, no, I probably would not put most small projects onto my strategic plan. So the question is, where should they exist? I think it depends on the scope of the project. If it's really something that's going to just take a day or two of work, you know, a boss says, hey, can you put together a slide deck for this client? It's something you're going to do in four or five hours. I usually would just put a note on my calendar for the beginning of the week in which I plan to work on it.

And then when I get to that week and I'm doing my weekly plan and I look at my calendar, I'll see that note and say, I got to make time on my calendar for, I got to make time in my weekly plan, rather, for working on this project. If it's slightly bigger, I'll give it its own category in my task system. For example, the book launch I just did had its own column on the writer board in Trello.

So all of the tasks related to this book launch had its own column. And a lot of those popped up. There's a lot of small tasks that arise for this particular project, even though it's relatively short term, it takes place over a few weeks. There's a lot to do and keep track of. And so I kept it in that column. And then when I'm just working on my weekly plan, when I'm working on my daily plan,

I see those tasks right there and I can know what I need to get done and make progress on it. Also, as new things pop up on my radar that's important for the launch, I can drop them in that list and know I will see them and they won't be lost. So for small to mid-sized projects, that's probably where things are going to exist for me, either a calendar reminder to make time for it in that upcoming week or its own. column in my task system on the relevant board. So I will see those tasks very clearly, see them all together and therefore make sure to make progress on them as the time is right. Whereas if you look at my strategic plan and look under the section for writing,

there's going to be bigger picture things on there. There's going to be some bigger picture thoughts about where I'm going with this podcast. There's some bigger picture thoughts on the next book I want to write. There's some bigger picture thoughts of what I'm trying to do with my article writing. That's the type of thing that's on my strategic plan, not pulling together excerpts for my book launch or getting the password protection working properly on my pre-order bonus, etc. That's going to just be on a separate task list. All right. So I hope that Dennis clarifies things for you. And by the way, I appreciate the fact that you were walking when you asked that question, because what's the benefit of having this moment of forced remote work if we can't do more

of it outside or in other types of more aspirational context. So good for you. All right, let's do a question now about task archiving. Hi, Cal. My name is Melanie and I work in a corporate supply chain environment. I've been using a blended method of GTD and your techniques to manage my day job, my personal life admin, and writing a novel outside of work. I've found a lot of your techniques very helpful. My question is about archiving completed tasks and projects. I know you talk about reviewing your time block planner, but this is more about logging all of the discrete tasks that I've finished. Should I archive them? How should I do it? I'd like to have a searchable log of what I've done and when, but I fear that I'm making my archival system so complicated that I'll stop using my whole

system altogether, or that I'm tinkering with archiving as a way to procrastinate doing actual work. Well, this is an interesting question because it's a behavior I don't really do. So I don't have great best practices to recommend here. I don't archive my completed tasks, but I could understand why in some context that might be important. So in some professional context in particular, maybe you need to have some record of, oh, this got done, and this is when it got done. So if that is true for your context,

then I could imagine that archiving would be important. I would probably focus on friction reduction with such a system. What's the absolute quickest way for you to keep track of what you did and when you did it? I don't know if the tools I use or regularly recommend can just do this automatically in a way that might be good for you. I mean, I know, for example, Trello does allow you to archive cards. But I'm not sure, for example, that you would want to archive everything that made its way onto a Trello card, and I'm not quite sure how searchable or easily retrievable

these archive cards actually are. I think what I would probably do is I would use a simple tool, like a Google Doc or Workflowee, and I would have a list maybe per week. So in Workflowie, I would just have like the dates and then an indented list under the dates for the week. And in a Google Doc, I would just, whatever, just write it in bold the dates for the week and have a bullet point list under it. And I would probably manually add the tasks that I think need to be documented. I would do date and quick description. Now, I like the flexibility of using something like workflow or Google Doc, because if there's

a few notes that are relevant, you know, we basically did this except for we're waiting to hear back from the client on approval or something. You can just, you have room to do that. You can add your own annotation as you see appropriate. And then you can just quickly say, oh, what happened to that thing? Like, and whatever, search the document, but just also go to the week when I think that happened. Everything's just listed there, and there's dates. And you have a good record, but the record has cleaned up.

It's in your own words, like your own description of the project. You're not taking, you know, again, what I'm trying to get at when I say in your own words is that what you want to capture might be, okay, we got this thing done for our clients. So you have a record of it. The reality in terms of the cards that showed up in Trello relevant to this might be 10 or 15 cards that are kind of messy and have notes to yourself. And that's not really what you want to store. You just want to store on March 2nd, we completed the client project. So I think there's something to just being able to write it yourself from scratch. I think there's something to

the low friction of just using a workflowy or shared Google Doc. And I love the flexibility of it's plain text, however you want to write it. It's just indented bullet points. You can add extra notes. You're not trying to get some techno system to solve this archiving problem for you. That's probably your best bet. Now, again, I would only do this if you feel like you have to do this if it's important for your job. But if it is, I don't think this will be a source of procrastination because you're talking about a couple extra minutes per important thing you do during the week. And that's not going to be a problem. If you need to, just do it as part of your schedule, shut down complete ritual at the end of the day. And you will get that done without it

becoming a major impediment. Now, I try each week on these many episodes to get at least one question that's not sort of hardcore work related. And so with that in mind, let's try to tackle something now about WhatsApp and its unique ability to distract you from the things you want to get done. Okay, so my question is about WhatsApp. I just wanted to hear your thoughts about WhatsApp because initially I had thought I was being quite clever about using WhatsApp instead of using Twitter and Facebook because so it's not like Facebook and Twitter where you can just keep clicking and scrolling. It's curated. It's from people that you know that you've requested

to be in groups with and it's more kind of focused. And also I am on Twitter and Facebook under a pseudonym. I'm not on there for personal reasons and I don't put for instance pictures of my child on any social media. And WhatsApp seems to me to be a better way of sharing, you know, with like groups of family, here's a photo of my child, this is what we've been doing, blah, blah, blah, because it's private and I don't believe that, you know, it's right to be putting pictures on social media of my child without their consent. However, now what I'm finding is that WhatsApp is a total distraction and it's, I have all the settings turned off so it doesn't ping on my phone or anything. It doesn't alert me or notify me, but it's so distracting. It's like a kind of email on speed or whatever. I like that phrase email on speed.

You know, little known fact, that was the original description tagline of Slack. But then they realized that probably wasn't getting them the market they thought. So the thing about WhatsApp is there's a reason why Facebook bought it. So Facebook originally, when they were coming up, their big pitch was this network effect idea. We have everyone you know on this same network. That's why Facebook is important because when you sign up for this network versus other people's networks, this is where your cousin is. This is where your friend from high school is. So if you want to be able to see what they're up to and communicate with them and update them with what you're doing, our network is the best one to use.

And this network effect was very powerful. There was this argument that other social media networks would have a hard time competing because they don't have everyone on them. Once you have most people on your network, it's a huge competitive advantage. In this period of 2010 to 2012, however, Facebook got spooked by Twitter and said, man, this news feed, this just continually scrolling feed of interesting things that algorithms select to try to press your buttons, people are really enjoying that more probably than they're enjoying navigating over to, let's say, their cousin's Facebook profile to see what the latest post are on their wall.

So Facebook moved away from a wall model to a Twitter-inspired news feed model. They say, well, now what we'll do is we'll pull content from all over our network, some from people you know, but a lot from people you don't know. We'll use all of our observations of you and your behavior to help select which articles you might want to see, like which articles will capture your attention or press some emotional buttons or otherwise create some sort of engagement and we'll give you a continuous scroll news feed. And what will offer you is that it will be entertaining or diverting or emotionally arousing. So that way you'll pull out Facebook like people were using Twitter and just hit the app when you're

bored and just scroll. Now, in the short term, this was a smart move because people used the app more than in the old wall days because there's only so much you really wanted to see what your cousin was up to. The problem, however, is that they broke down their own network effect advantage. If now I'm just using Facebook as a stream of emotionally arousing diversion, then the fact that my cousins on it, the fact that my friends from high school are on it, doesn't really matter anymore. And it has to compete in a marketplace against all other sorts of diverting entertainment and diversions.

And that's a much harder market to compete in. It's why Facebook's main product lost, for example, a lot of American users under a certain age because once it was just a news feed, there was other feeds that were more interesting and there was a migration away from the product. So they bought WhatsApp. Now, a big reason why they bought WhatsApp,

at least this is my contention, is because that social connection element of the social internet had started retreating after this shift towards news feeds onto these tools that just directly connected you with people you knew. There was a real migration, for example, towards group text messages,

which became a big deal around the time that Facebook was downplaying social connection is what you're doing on their network. Like, okay, I don't need Facebook to keep up with my high school friends. We have a group text message. WhatsApp was just a better interface for doing these type of group discussions because you could share files, etc.,

like you were talking about. So they bought WhatsApp so that they would still have their hands in this world of social connections. This is a pretty strong world as well because as you mentioned, And part of what makes a WhatsApp group sticky is that it's all people you know. It's a conversation with people you know and care about and like talking to you.

And it's interesting. Like you have a group with your friends. We're bouncing back and forth funny things or interesting things. And people are sending articles that capture my attention. And it's a way to have quick moments of connection with people I care about throughout the day, which is a different selling proposition than the news feed model of Facebook, but is still a very powerful selling proposition. So it was a very smart move for Facebook to hedge their bets by buying WhatsApp, but that's why WhatsApp can be itself very diverting.

And it's same with group text messages and other types of tools like this. When it's people you know who have this ongoing background chatter, it's very hard to resist. You kind of have two options for how you engage with these type of group messaging tools, we'll call them. The one option is to be in the flow of it. Yeah, people post things, you react, they ask you questions, you answer, you ask other people's questions. It's be a part of the continuous partial conversation. You know, that has its advantages because, again, you will feel more connected to people and it's really entertaining and fun. The other model is to be the occasional participant.

Once or twice a day, you jump onto these groups, you see what's going on, you kind of respond to people, you post some things, you have some back and forth for the people who happen to be online with that. that time and then you're gone. If you're an occasional participant, the people in your groups don't really expect you to be around at any given moment. They're not going to ask a question and be offended if you don't answer. They've categorized you into a different category. Now, of course, the cost of being an occasional participant, as opposed to someone who's involved in the continuous partial conversation, is it's less connection, right? You might be a little bit out of the flow of this. You might feel a little bit less connected. There's a little bit more isolation. You don't have that comfort of I just have this chatter going on all day with people I know

or care about. But here's the thing. For most people, that's what you need to do. It is from a cognitive perspective, very difficult to A, get any work done, but B, to even just enjoy and take in and make the most out of what's around you, the world around you, if you have to be involved in partial, continuous conversation. Every time you have to glance at that WhatsApp group and change your context to that conversation, look at those links that are being sent to see the questions being asked by people you know. As far as your mind is concerned, that's incredibly relevant. It's your tribe members. You have to connect to your tribe members. It's going to put a lot of resources into that conversation. If you try to then wrench your attention back to what you're working on, it's not going to go well.

It's going to take time. It's going to be a messy transition. And you're reducing your ability to think clearly you're sapping your cognitive resources. So I don't want to downplay the difficulty of shifting from the continuous partial conversation model to the occasional participant model, but it's what you probably need to do and it's what most people probably need to do. Just the fundamental wiring of our brain makes it very difficult to have a parallel track conversation going on with people we know at the same time that we're trying to do anything else.

That needs to be more discretized in the set periods of time. In addition, if you shift to the occasional participant model, you need to shore up your sense of social connection. You need to shore up the strength of these relationships by going out of your way to schedule more intense one-on-one analog conversations, phone calls, zooms, and in-person meetings. The other danger of the continuous partial conversation is that people tell themselves, well, no, I talk to these people all the time. I'm connected. But your brain does not treat purely linguistic interaction the same way it treats hearing someone's voice or seeing their face or having a back and forth or looking at their body language.

So you can actually end up feeling more socially connected than before, even if you're moving to a much more extreme partial or I should say occasional participant model for tools like WhatsApp if you complement that shift with I talk to on the phone or in person four or five people a week. And I think that is the sweet spot. The digital tools are great because every day or twice a day, you can kind of touch in lightly with people you know and see what's going on and share a few things,

and then you couple it with a concerted effort for real conversation, analog, be it on the phone, Zoom, or in person. That's probably the right way to leverage the social internet to help your sociality without it becoming a problem. The only other word of warning I'll give is that this transition for some people from the continuous partial conversation model to the occasional participant model can be rocky because at first people are upset. Their expectations are being defied. They're used to you always being involved, always answering their questions, always talking back. And when you stop doing that,

it can catch their attention. People might get upset. People might think it's accusatory. Don't preach. Don't over-explain yourself. Just apologize. yeah, it's a busy day. I haven't been on WhatsApp that much, have a lot going on. Just apologize without explaining. People will adjust our expectations pretty soon, and you'll be in the clear.

So this is a transition I recommend for anyone who finds themselves looking at text or looking at WhatsApp or any other group messaging tool way too much. That's my one-to punch for how you free yourself from those downsides without losing too much of the positives.

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That's L-A-D-D-R-L-E-R-Live.com slash deep. Don't forget that slash deep. That's how they know you came from this podcast. That's ladderlife.com slash deep. All right. I think we have time for one more question. Let's do one about a PhD student who is suddenly facing a near-term future that is full of deep work. Hello, Cal.

Now, great podcast and keep doing a great job. My name is Martin, and I'm a PSC student in computer science. And my problem is maximizing my time when I more or less only have deep work left. For the next 15 months, I'm in a fortunate situation that I have no PSD courses or other administrative tasks or roles to handle. I only have research left. I have various papers in various stages of work in progress, but my goals for the next 15 months are four papers and a dissertation. Well, Martin, you are in an enviable position right now.

It's one I have been in as well back when I was in your shoes. Put simply, you probably are just not going to have to work as much as you're used to just in terms of raw total hours over those next 15 months. I think what I would suggest is get started right away with a deep work session. First thing in the morning, kick it off with a walk if you can. Helps clear your head and get you going. Take a break at some point midday. Check it on your email or do some administrative tasks and do another early afternoon session.

Most days you could be done by two, maybe three, depending on how early you stop. and be like that's a good amount of deep work. There's only so much you can do to a clear shutdown and take advantage of this fact by living to your fullest in the time after that shutdown doing other types of things that make life good. It's a good time to get your deep life figured out, to get interested to read deep books,

to overhaul your deep life buckets, etc. Right? You know, for the rest of us who are in busier stages of our life, you owe it to us to really take advantage of the lack of busyness. Some days, of course, you'll work much more. So, like, if you get on a roll on a paper, you might blow through that afternoon break and go into the evening. If you have a deadline for a paper, you know, it might be a late night, etc.

But just in general, think of it as two good blocks with a break in between and then really living up life outside of those times. That is what you need to do again and again and again to get good deep work accomplished. Now, this is not just about taking advantage of freedom. There's only so much deep work you can actually really do in a day. Now, of course, when we're talking about working on a paper, working on a dissertation, it's not like all of these hours are going to be spent in the deepest of concentration. Okay. So it's not the case that most days you're going to be hitting up against the actual limit of what your brain can do. But still, you've got to pace yourself.

You know, if you're going to be thinking hard on things for a year and a half, you want to pace yourself on that hard thinking. And a schedule like this will get it done. I mean, I'm thinking back to my own experience. When I was working on my dissertation, I was organized. The same thing. I'd work every day on that dissertation and papers. I would only take up so much time. I was blogging three days a week as well because, again, I had a lot of extra time.

I also wrote a book unrelated to my dissertation simultaneously with working on my dissertation. That's because of what I'm telling you here. This sort of nine to two gets the job done when all you were doing is the deep thinking. And so don't be scared of that reality. You're not being lazy. It's the beauty of a period in what you're doing pure depth. And I really do also want to emphasize the make the most out of the other time you have. I had a lot of intellectual self-development pursuits I was doing simultaneously with this period of my life.

When again, there's only so many hours you can be taken up working on things like academic papers in my dissertation. I got really into, for example, reading the Great American Transcendentalist. I would do a lot of reading by the Charles River because I thought that was a romantic place to read these thinkers who sort of were in that same general geographic milieu. So I got really into that. I spent a lot of time outside. I worried about not getting enough sun in the Boston winters when I was at MIT. So I would spend my middays outside. I'd go for runs regardless of the temperature.

I bring my dog Bailey with me. We do calisthenic workouts on some of the barges, the floating docks that they had out into the Charles. We'd clear the snow off to do our push-ups and sit-ups. There's a lot of things I was doing during this period with all this other free time that remained. It's very aggressive about let's make the most out of it. I think that's really important.

I also think it's really important to keep plugging yourself into your academic community outside of your obligations. So just to make sure that your intrinsic motivation stays high for this work. Go to talks, read papers that aren't directly related to your research, spend time with friends and your program that are working on other things. You want to be teaching your mind that you really enjoy the topic of your dissertation and the general field in which you're studying that it's a big part of your identity and not just an obligation, not just a source of obligation. So in other words, Martin, we're all very envious. So you owe it to

us to take advantage of this really cool part of your life. Work deeply, work and work intensely, but only so much, and then outside of that, live deeply. And on that wistful note, let's wrap up this episode. Remember to take a look at my new book, a world without email. If you like this podcast, you'll love that book. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to learn more about asking your own questions for the show. I'll be back on Monday, and until then, as always, stay deep.