Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 78: Habit Tune-Up: Time Blocking vs. Bullet Journaling

Episode Date: March 11, 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.- Active recall in the office. [4:58]- Processes for problem solving. [9:58]- Time blocking versus the pomodoro method. [14:20]- Time blocking versus bullet journaling. [23:51]- The necessity of a second brain. [28:46]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. Now, if you're one of the many new listeners to this podcast, you discovered it through my publicity tour for a world without email, let me explain briefly how this works. I do two episodes a week, a main episode on Mondays, and a Habit Tunup mini episode on Thursdays. This is a habit tune up mini episode during the Monday episodes. I answer written questions from my listeners on a wide variety of topics. We get into work stuff. We also get into the big ideas about technology.

And we get into more philosophical discussions about the deep life and making the most out of life. It's a wide ranging array of topics. And then in these habit tune up many episodes, they're shorter. And we do voice questions. Right. So listeners call in and leave their questions. and they tend to be more on nitty-gritty details, sort of tactics and habits of the type of things

we talk about on this show. All right, so that's the format. I'm evolving the format, by the way. I mean, one thing I've been thinking about is as we get nearer to the pandemic winding down to something much more manageable, I want to set up another mic or two in my studio,

start to have some more people in studio. I did a in-studio recording recently with Lex Fridman, and I hadn't done an in-stub, in a little while, and I miss it. It's really nice. It's really nice to be there with the other person. And what I was thinking, not so much having guests come in to be interviewed, but having a regular stable, a small number of people I know and like around here are very smart who can come in and we can go back and forth, we can debate, we can get into relevant topics of the

day that overlap what I write about. They can explain to me really basic internet culture stuff that I don't understand, like what a TikTok is. Anyways, I thought that would be fun. And also just a place to have people come in and hang out. We could podcast. I could have writers come through. We could, you know, shoot debris, come up with ideas, have computer scientists come through. We can work in the library, in the Deepark HQ.

So anyways, that's one of my visions. If you have other ideas about evolving the format as we move out of the pandemic, always happy to hear them. You can send them to interesting at calnewport.com. We've got a good mini-episode plan for today. I'm looking at my question list. We're going to get into active recall in the office. A naval officer is wondering about creative solution problem-solving processes.

We're going to get into Pomodoro versus time blocking, time-blocking versus bullet journaling, notion and the need for second brains should be a good episode. If you want to learn how you can submit your own questions for the podcast, go to Cal New dot com slash podcast for instructions. Now before we get started, let me thank one of the sponsors that makes the deep questions podcast possible when I am talking about grammarly. As I often say, clear expressive writing is critical. It means you're going to be understood better.

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All right, let's get started with the show. Our first question is about adapting a piece of advice from one of my early books to the world of work. Hi, Carl. I'd like to ask you about learning new and complicated things at work, especially if one's job is rather technical. Do you believe similar advice to give to students transfers to the workplace? As an example, you recommend active recall as the main learning strategy. Although I honestly love it, it would feel weird to do it in an open space

of the office. Now with remote work this may not be an issue but in normal circumstances I'd always look for some alternatives. Or leave it for later, for doing the walk or my commute back from work. I'm curious about your thoughts, and thanks for the podcast. So for those of you who are not familiar with the full Cal Newport canon, which at this point goes back seven books, if you can believe it, in my early books, which were student advice guides, and in particular my second book, which was called How to Become a Straight A Student,

which I published in 2006, wrote primarily during my first year at MIT, I talk about how the best students study. And the thing that they shared in common more than anything else was they used what I termed active recall. That is, the way they reviewed information was to deliver the ideas out loud without looking at their notes. There's some neuroscience here that's interesting. We don't have to get into the details.

But basically, if you can explain something, so actually properly vocalize it, to another human so they understand what you're talking about, without looking at notes, you understand it. And when you do this for the first time with a complex topic that you kind of have the pieces for, this locks them in the place. It cements those neurons.

It gives you such a strong understanding of the topic once you've taught it out loud that you don't really have to go back. Now contrast this to how most students study, they use what's called passive recall, which is I will read my notes, I will read the textbook. I will read the sample solutions quietly to myself

again and again and hope that it sticks. Vastly less effective. You can read over an argument a dozen times and remember some pieces of it, but if you have to stand up and say, let me make that argument to you right now, and you do that once, and it's hard and your brain strains

because you're really having to think hard about what the pieces are and try to pull them up. But if you do this, the information sticks. To the point where Once you've successfully actively recalled an idea, you're set for the test. You don't need to go back.

So active recallers would often spend a lot less time studying than their passive recalling peers, and they would get better grades. Because it takes less time to learn something with active recall than passive. It's harder. The energy you are expending when you active recall is harder. That's why people prefer to just put their hooded sweatshirt up in the library at 3 in the morning and just read their highlighted notes. but that's nonsense activity.

All right. The question here then, now that we have this background, is should I do that in the workplace when I need to learn something new? And I'll say yes and no. I mean, you were right to point out that if you are active recalling

in the middle of an open office, it's not going to go well. People are going to think you're a little bit weird. I do not suggest that. Do the active recall away from the office. I used to do it while I was walking a lot when I was an undergrad. I would walk on trails around campus or kind of away from people to do active recall. Obviously, you can do this at home before you go into the office in the morning or when you get back, come back from the office

early to work at your house more where you're not going to bother anyone. Or if possible, dragoon some of your colleagues into one of the breakout rooms and say, I'm going to explain this to you or try to explain this to you. Tell me if it makes sense. That's great. That social pressure means you're going to actually expend more energy and learn the new information even faster. All these things are fine. None of them will label you as crazy, and they're all going to help you learn things quickly. An alternative is to write out from scratch without looking at your notes an explanation of whatever topic or idea that you're trying to learn. And that works pretty well too, because again, you're trying to create this information from scratch.

So you're forcing connections to be made in your brain that'll be more long-lasting, but for whatever reason, explaining something out loud, the verbal articulation. seems to involve more of the brain, seems to better solidify the concepts than almost any other type of recall. So yes, active recall is something that should be in the toolkit of anybody who wants to very effectively and efficiently learn new information.

But I think you are wise to be a little bit wary about where you do this. Talking to yourself through most of the day in the middle of an open office doesn't always go over so well. All right, our next question here comes from a lieutenant in the Navy. Hi, Cal. My name is David. I'm a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy submarine officer.

My question for you is we often have procedures in the Navy that we use for pretty much everything. Do you have a procedure that you normally use for coming up with creative solutions or problem solving, whether it be focusing questions or a certain brainstorming practice that you do to help you come out with solutions on a regular basis? Thank you. Well, David, this seems like a timely. question. If you're a lieutenant, you're on subs, I'm imagining you're right around your department head tour, which is probably the first tour where you have a non-trivial amount of autonomy over the department that you supervise and solving problems could be useful. So I understand why this is

timely for where you are in your career. It's timely for a lot of people. As you move up, the ability to creatively solve problems can be a real differentiator. So here's the way I think about that from a process perspective. Problem solving is about building a actionable and accurate structure of the problem in your head that then makes clear what effective solutions are available. There's three different things you can do that are relevant to building up the structure and gaining insight from it. The first, of course, is just inputting information that's going to help you build that

structure more accurately. So it's reading things, learning about things, trying to bring into your brain as much relevant information as possible about the problem so that the structure you start to build, you have the right materials for it. The second thing is relevant here is actually doing the cognitive cycles required to take these materials and start manipulating them in your head and building out a structure that seems to make sense. Trying to probe and understand the structure as you build it to see what solutions might

look like. I recommend doing this walking. Now, maybe this is a mean suggestion to someone who might be doing this brainstorming in a 5 by 10 birth on a Los Angeles class or something like this, but walking tends to be what I prefer. You walk, you work on the problem just in your head. When you notice your attention wandering, just say, okay, I note it. My attention's wandering.

Bring it back to the problem. When it wanders again, note it, bring it back to the problem. Readers on my books. know I call this productive meditation. It's a fantastic way to actually try to work with information just in your head. You need a certain amount of cycles just doing that. The third thing you need to do is converse with other people who are relevant or have relevant information about this problem. So when you actually go back and forth, here's how I'm understanding this problem. What I know about it, the structure I'm building, what I think

solutions might look like. You're gaining access to whatever structures they've built based on the information they've seen and the cognitive cycles they've put into it. And they can very quickly help you evolve and update your own structure. So talking to someone can be a real shortcut, to have a collaboration to really greatly improve or harden or make more sophisticated, the internal structure you have for these ideas. Those are the three things you need to do. You need to do all three of those things. You can cycle between them from a process perspective. Just make sure all three are getting prioritized.

Bring in more information, put in some cognitive cycles while walking, talk to someone else about the problem, repeat. and that's it, right? The more you do these three things, the closer you're going to get to getting a good solution. And so when I'm having trouble with a problem, like let's say a math proof, as I do in my role as a professor, usually what happens is I'll realize,

okay, I'm missing one of these three things. I need to talk to other people. I got to get collaborators on the phone. Maybe they'll unstick something. Or I need more time just thinking about this. I have the materials. I just have to build them better. I have to put them together better.

Or, you know, I don't know enough about this problem. I don't know enough tools. I need to go read other papers. I need to learn other techniques. And that's a pain, but I got to do it. Without tools, I can't solve it. And it really helps me when I'm trying to solve problems because it gives me clarity.

Which of these things have I not been doing recently? Find some time for it. And then just repeat until you get closer to some solutions. All right, that's a good question. Let's see what we have. Another one here. This one is talking about time blocking, but it's time blocking versus the Pomodoro method.

Hi, Cal. Is it possible to use both time blocking and the tomato timer technique for managing my time? All right. For those who aren't sure what's being referenced here, the tomato timer technique is also known as the Pomodoro technique. It's named for this particular type of timer that's shaped like a tomato. And the idea is you break up your work into these 25-minute chunks. and you set the timer and you let the timer tick down. And you just work on what you're working on until the timer rings and you put a checkmark on a piece of paper, take a short break and repeat.

After you've done it's four times, you take a longer break. That's the basic idea. Now, the nice thing about the Pomodoro method is that it is about minimizing context shifting in the sense that you're working on something until the timer goes off, then you get a break. So you get used to this idea of I work on something for a while without constantly checking inboxes,

constantly checking my phone. When I'm doing something, I'm doing one thing at a time. It's one of the big ideas in my new book, A World Without Email, is that context shifting is productivity poison. So this is good. You say, I have a break coming up when this timer finishes. So I'm not going to interrupt what I'm doing now. I'll wait until I get to that break.

And so I like that about the Pomodore technique. I also like its connection to stimuli response. So you just get used to this timer turning on means you work. When it goes off, you stop. It's a, what we would call. in my book Deep Work is like a deep work ritual. It's something your mind learns. When that timer goes on,

I'm just focusing on one thing. So I'm very much aligned with the motivation behind the Pomodora technique. But I tend to think of time blocking as a more general alternative. So with time blocking, you're accomplishing something similar. When you give every minute of your day a job, you know what you're supposed to be doing

in a given time block. You know things like email checking or break. are scheduled in their own blocks, so all you have to commit to is this notion of I follow the time block plan. So I'm in this block for writing something. Well, I'm going to write until that blocks over. I'm not going to check email now

because that happens at this other time. I'm not going to go on a break and look at social media now because that happens at this time. And you get that similar effect to focus on one thing at a time. But you get a little bit more benefits from the generality here

because 25 minutes is not that long and you might need a lot longer amount of time you want to work on something, especially as you get more comfortable with focus, you get more comfortable with resisting distraction. You don't want to take a break every 25 minutes. Part of the problem with context shifting is that the attention residue left from switching your attention to something else like your email inbox. And then coming back to your primary task, that could take a while to clear. That could take 10 minutes to clear. If you're taking a break every 25 minutes, you're only really getting 15 minutes of work at a time, anywhere near your

peak cognitive capacity. I mean, I typically recommend going at least 60 minutes. in between major contact shifts if you're trying to do something hard, trying to do something cognitively demanding. Now, where you might get some benefit from using timers, I mean, I write about this in deep work, is there a great training tool. So if you want to improve your ability to focus, timers can allow you to do cognitive interval training.

If you get uncomfortable focusing and the urge to look at distraction becomes overwhelming after 15 minutes, and a timer can be great because you can say, okay, I tend to get distracted after about 15 minutes. It's overwhelming. So what I'm going to do is use a Pomodoro style timer and I'm going to try to work for 15 minutes. And when that timer goes off, then I can take a break.

And actually, this technique works really good in this type of scenario because you see that timer ticking down. You're like, man, I can make it six more minutes. This is crazy. It's almost there. Then I'll take a break. Once you're comfortable with that period. So if you start with 15 minutes,

you're comfortable with 15 minutes. you see, let me start doing this with 20 minute timers. 20 minutes until the timer goes off, and then I'll take a break. Then when you're comfortable with that, go to 25. I recommend that people keep going up this ladder of cognitive interval training until you get to 90 minutes.

If you can do 90 minutes pretty comfortably, without feeling an overwhelming urge for distraction or finding your mental capabilities just plummet before you get there, now you're all set. You have enough focus capability to really do some damage into modern knowledge work environment.

But that type of training is somewhat orthogonal to actual planning. I mean, you can do this training within time. You've put aside for training. And obviously, you're actually getting work done. So it's not just pure training. You're actually getting work done. But ideally what's going to happen here is you've done this training. You're comfortable focusing for up to 90 minutes.

You have a time block plan. You're following your time block plan. You're comfortable jumping into these blocks and doing what the blocks say. And you don't need timers at that point. similar to internet blockers. What I find is people use internet blocking tools for things like social media or YouTube. They use them at first to help break this knee-jerk response of look at social media in between everything. Look at social media when you're bored.

But after a while, that Pavlovian connection between boredom and Twitter or boredom and YouTube gets broken. And then you don't have to put the blocker on anymore. You've trained your brain not to associate. boredom with those particular distractions, and now you don't need artificial obstacle. So that's the main way I suggest using timers. You can use them to help interval train your ability to focus, but time blocking, when done correctly, is a more general alternative to what you get through the more restrictive Pomodoro method.

And for new listeners who don't know what we're talking about with time blocking, go to timeblock planner.com. This is the website for a time block planner that I sell, but whether or not you use a time block planner that I sell, but whether or not you use my particular planner, the video there does a good job of explaining exactly what the time blocking technique actually is. I want to take a quick break to talk about another sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast, and that is Magic Spoon. One of my most nostalgic memories from childhood is eating that sweet cereal that they used

to sell. As an adult, you feel like I can't eat that job. anymore. This is where Magic Spoon comes in because they offer a great tasting treat-style cereal that is actually not so bad for you. We're talking zero sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs in each serving, only 140 calories per serving, keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carbon, GMO-free, but it still tastes great. It still tastes like those great treat cereals you ate as a kid. It gives you that little moment of escape that we all need these days.

Now, as I mentioned on Monday's episode, they have a new flavor peanut butter. Not as good as frosted. We all agree with that, but it's pretty popular. They kept selling out last year when it was in limited addition. So now it is part of their rotation. You can add peanut butter to your custom-built MagicSpoon variety packs. So go to magic spoon.com slash cow to grab a variety pack and try it today.

And be sure to use that promo code Cal at checkout to say five. off your order. Of course, if you don't like anything about the product, 100% happiness guarantee, they will give you back your money, no questions asked. So get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cowl and use that code cowl to save $5. Now, if you're going to have cereal, well, you've got to have some coffee too. And if you're going to have coffee, make it a cup of four-sigmatic's ground mushroom coffee with lion's main mushroom. as a good cup of coffee has less caffeine than a normal cup so you won't get so jittery that lion's main mushroom adds a really nice sort of nutty flavor to the coffee but it also

has a psychoactive effect when you drink four-sigmatic ground mushroom coffee you feel it does something different in your brain what i recommend is taking advantage of that effect to make your cup of four-sigmatic coffee a hook before your deep work sessions if you always drink a cup of this coffee before you do deep work, your brain will soon associate that unique physiological signature that you get from drinking this coffee with time to go to work. And you will be able to slip into those deep work sessions quicker and more effectively. So give this a try. Look, they've got 20,000 five-star reviews. They've got the 100% money-back guarantee. There's no real risk here. But that's how I like to use for Sigma-Covic coffee. The good news is we've worked out an

exclusive offer on this coffee. It's just for my listeners. You can get up to 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, but to claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for deep questions listeners and is not available on the regular website. So you'll save up the 40% off and get free shipping. So go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-I-C. dot com slash deep. Now, our last question was about time blocking versus the Pomodoro method. As long as we're doing these productivity battles, let's try one now about time blocking versus bullet journaling.

Hello, Carl. I have a facetious question instead of a serious one, but good news is you can't talk about the time block planner. So here we go. Can you envision the bullet journal community taking your time block planner hostage and creating like a piece of art with maybe colored time blocks and stickers and drawings for the shutdown complete? By. Well, if we're thinking about bullet journaling, you could certainly implement a time block plan in a bullet journal no problem. Right? Because in bullet journaling, it's very free form.

Each page can essentially be assigned what you want to use it for. So there's no reason why you can't just use a page for every day. Build a time block plan. Adjust the time block plan as your day proceeds. I think that would be a perfectly appropriate thing to do in a bullet journal. If you're a serious bullet journaler, you're, of course, going to use fine pointed markers to draw some sort of lattice of living vines around the edges of the time block plan. and when your time block plan breaks,

there'll be some expertly drawn cartoon smoke and a fissure across the schedule, and the whole thing will be beautiful. The whole thing will look good on Instagram. And I'm kind of joking, but not really. I mean, actually, I think this is part of what makes bullet journaling work. If you have a visual aesthetic, you have that instinct, you're basically just leveraging that

to take your planning, scheduling, tracking more seriously. So actually, that's a feature, not a bug of bullet journaling. So I think that's fine. If you're a bullet journaler, you should do time block plans. You already have everything you need. Just make that one of the pages that you use. And if you make it look good, send me a picture.

Love to see that. Interesting at calnewport.com. My main issue with bullet journal, it's not really an issue. It's just a matter of where it's appropriate and where it's not. The one thing that I've heard from a lot of people is that if you're in a standard knowledge work job in terms of your task volume, your task volume is going to be too large to keep track in the paper notebook. So for a lot of people in a lot of office environments, they may have one to 700 tasks, a lot of details associated with these tasks, changing statuses for these tasks. And that's just too much

volume, too much changes to keep that all in a small size paper notebook. And you probably need electronic tools if you're in a high volume task type of job. Right. It's why, you know, I have a trello board for every different role in my life. That trello board has seven to eight. Each trellaboard has seven to eight columns, each of those cards has a lot of information on them. Links and notes and files associated with that particular task, so I have everything there when I need to execute. I'm not going to be able to implement that just free handwriting in a 4x notebook. So when I think about bullet journaling, I often think about either you're in a more of a

low volume task situation, which is, you know, one of the primary audiences for audiences for bullet journaling is solopreneurs and freelancers, where actually, you're actually it can be a relatively low volume task environment. Bullet journaling works beautiful. If you're in a high volume task environment, you probably have to modify that method if you want to use it. But if you like the other aspects of the bullet journaling system, I think it's worth doing those modifications.

Look, I mean, I'm happy for people to buy my time block planner, but I'm more happy for people to be doing time blocking, whether it's in my planner or in a bullet journal or just on a sheet of paper or on a black and red like I used to use, or is it red and black? I always mix that up. The notebook, the spiral bound notebook I used to use. The key thing, as far as I'm concerned,

is that switch from List Reactive to time blocking is such a night and day shift in terms of the control you get over your time that I just want to see as many people as possible make that change. A quick aside here, while I was recording that particular question, I got a call from my publisher that the World Without Email has made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

So a quick moment to thank everyone who bought the book or supported the book, especially the pre-orders. That really helps with the list. And then once you get the New York Times designation, then you can call the book a New York Times bestselling book. And then that helps the sales going further whether or not you stay on the list or not. So the whole thing is like a really virtuous loop. but I just want to take a quick aside, I guess. I didn't have this information before I started recording. So I'll just say it now.

For those who supported the book, thank you. All right, let's get back to the show. Our final question here involves an idea that I hear about a lot from the tech influence productivity world. And that is the necessity of a second brain. Hi, Cal. Thanks for a cool podcast. My name is Dawn. I work as a communicator.

I live in Sweden, and I have a question about the tool or app Notion. I'm sure you're familiar with it. I've tried it myself, but I found that the overhead cost of getting started with it was just way too high when I already have a system in place that I think works pretty well for productivity and keeping on top of my tasks. But I see Notion mentioned a lot by people around about the internet, and they all say something like notion is my brain. Notion is my second brain. I keep my brain in notion. So I'm wondering if I have two few brains. Do I need a second brain? Should I try to have one place

where I keep everything? I don't even know what that would look like. Well, we really have two questions here. One about notion and one about second brains more generally. And when it comes to notion, I don't know a ton about it yet. I've been hearing good things about it. It's one of these tools that has a lot of functionality, which is a little bit intimidating. So I do know people who have been using it in a second brain capacity. So like individual entrepreneurs who use it as a place to keep track of a lot of information in their life.

Actually, my friend Shreeny Rao, who runs the unmistakable creative podcast. He just recently sent me a video, I think, about Notion. So I should watch this video. So I can't speak. from an expert perspective on that particular tool. I will say, though, more generally, the fact that there's a high learning curve doesn't necessarily turn me off from it as a solution.

I mean, I have a high level of friction before I switch systems, but if a system is going to solve a big problem for me, I am willing to put a lot of overhead into learning that system. This is one of the big ideas in a world without email, is that overhead is okay if what you get in exchange

is a system that going forward is going to be much more efficient. I actually talk about Claude Shannon, I should say, an information theory as an analogy in that book. And I talk about how Shannon discovered with communications, putting in a lot of time up front

to design a clever code for a particular probabilistic information source, simple source, details don't matter, means that going forward, on average, the number of bits you need to communicate symbols from the symbol source is going to be reduced, and in the long run, you're going to end up way ahead. It was worth doing the pain up front.

I think this is true for workplace processes. If a new process, let's say something that is possible because of a tool-like notion, if a new process going forward is going to be a big win, then it's worth taking even days' worth of time to get it going in the first place. And what do we mean by big win? Well, in a world without email, the biggest win is trying to minimize unscheduled messaging. So if there's things you do in your company or on your team or in your business, where a process built on top of notion reduces a lot of unscheduled messaging that you have to just

check your inbox a lot to find or check your Slack channel a lot to find to respond to, it's probably worth it. So I just want to make that general point. I'm not saying anything about this particular tool because I don't know it, but I don't care about overhead if you're going to get a really big result. If you don't know what the result is, don't waste time experimenting. If there's a minor thing that's going to improve, it's probably not worth the overhead. just keep working with what works.

But if you hear from someone or see a video, have a colleague or a client show you what Notion does quickly, and you say, wow, I could really get a big win that it might be worth the overhead. Second brains in general, so let's move to that second topic here. Yeah, you need something like that. For each of the major areas in your professional life, there should be an electronic home

for all of the relevant information and thoughts and notes and ideas and products you've produced for that part of your professional life can be stored so that you're not trying to keep track of it in your brain, and you're not going to lose it. Now, I use relatively straightforward systems for this. I've talked about it before on the show. When it comes to my writing, I use Evernote. And there's a notebook in Evernote for all the different writing projects I've ever worked on. There's a notebook for book ideas.

There's a notebook for blog post ideas. There's a notebook for every major article I've written. there's a notebook for every book I've written. There's notebooks for a lot of books. I didn't end up writing, but I started thinking about, I need that place. When I have an idea, I'm reading something and I say, ooh, that would be an interesting blog post.

Or I could use this in my new book. I can throw it into Evernote, and it's there. And I must have thousands of notes in Evernote, broken up by notebooks, notebooks sometimes in stacks by topic. Really makes a difference because all that information is still accessible. It's not in my head. For my academic work,

for the last few years, I've been using Overleaf. Now, this is really insider baseball for doing the type of academic work I do. But Overleaf is basically a web-based tool for using the typesetting program, Latek, which is what mathematical types use to typeset mathematical equations. So if you're going to write a paper like a physics paper or a theoretical computer science paper or an applied math or abstract math paper, and you're going to have a lot of math, you're going to write it in a markup language called Latek,

which then renders it into a PDF with the proper formatting. So Overleaf, you can have these different projects in a web-based interface and all your collaborators can access each of the projects. And so I just create for every major idea I have, every paper I'm working on, I just create a project in Overleaf. I created one this morning. Had a call with my collaborators. We're working on some new ideas. Boom, let's get them out of our head into a second brain. I created a project in Overleaf for that new idea.

Created a document in there, threw in notes on everything we talked about. will now grow and expand until either it peters off and we move on, but we'll still have a record of what we worked on, or it'll eventually be transformed into a paper in all the different results the decreed in there, all the proofs that accrete, all the messaging that accretes will all be used in that paper. So different second brains for different broad categories of my professional life, but they're very important. I don't want to store this stuff in my head. They can be analog. I mean, some people use notebooks. I used to use notebooks. I just have so many. ideas I have to work with, so many projects I have to work with, that the electronic homes

I find easier to work with. All right, so to summarize, we have two notions here. There's notion, and my main point about notion is it's a high overhead tool, but if you're convinced that it's going to give you a big win on something that matters, like reducing back and forth messaging, go through the pain. Then there was second brains. Since you should have electronic second brains, I tend to use very simple low friction things. But again, if there's some big win notion would give me in terms of being a second

brain that had really major functionalities I needed, I would learn it. I haven't seen that yet. I've seen Notion more successfully referred to in terms of workplace processes, like teams working together on particular projects, not so much just notes. But I'd be open to it. All right, so that's my thought. Notion, take a look at it. Second brains. Yes, you need them. And what I need is a break from this podcast studio. This is the fifth thing I've recorded today. Ah, the wonders of book line. So let's leave it here for now. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. Find out more about asking questions. Go to calnewcourt.com slash podcast. Until next time, as always, stay deep.