Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 82: Habit Tune-Up: The Joys and Sorrows of Binge Working

Episode Date: March 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.- Taming scattered schedules. [3:10]- Phantom part time work in the office. [11:04]- The joys and sorrows of binge working. [18:12]- Organizing reading when you're slow at reading. [25:05]- Combatting administrative overload in academia (including a bonus unsolicited rant). [29:57]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, have it tune up mini episode. The format here is straightforward. I answer audio questions from my listeners that get into the nitty-gritty details of the type of topics we like to talk about here on deep questions. Once again, I have no quick announcements. This is because I just came out of a book launch, which means I am tired of talking about myself and my books and what I'm doing. I would rather just get to the meat of answering your question. So I'm trying to do some shorter intros to some of these upcoming episodes. We've got a good habit tune up episode ahead of us.

I'm looking at my question script now. Among other topics, we will deal with people who read slowly. We'll do some more details on phantom part-time scheduling, which has proven to be a pretty popular topic among my listeners, something I've been scheduling. We'll even talk about unusual schedules that include a lot of obligations at night. If you want to submit your own voice question, go to calnewport.com slash podcast and you will find the instructions there. So I'm excited for the show, but first, of course, we need to pay the bills.

And that means talking about one of my favorite sponsors of the Deep Questions podcast, Magic Spoon. By now you've heard me talk about this company before. it is a great tasting treat-style cereal without all of the junk. So it's zero grams of sugar, 13 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs in each serving, and yet it tastes like those cereals you used to love as a kid. The big news right now is that they have two new limited time flavors. Get this. Cookies and cream and maple waffle.

Now, they are only available for a limited time, so you have to try them out. Of course, you can do custom variety packs of all of their standard flavors as well. We got cocoa, we got fruity, we got frosted, we got peanut butter, and we have cinnamon, but this cookies and cream and maple waffle, limited edition, only available for a short time. If you love MagicSpoon, you want to try those out. If you've never tried MagicSpoon, they will be a great entry point. So go to MagicSpoon.com slash Cal to grab these new limited edition. flavors or to build your own custom bundle of cereal.

Use that promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. This offer is now good anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. So welcome to great tasting cereal that's good for you, my Canadian brothers and sisters, but you need to use that code cow at checkout. So go to magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code cow to save $5 off. All right, and with that, let's get started with our show. Our first question is about taming schedules that are scattered throughout the day and night. Hi, Cal.

So my partner is a theater professor, and I'm about to go back to school to hopefully eventually do the same thing. So my question regards scattered schedules that typically go into the evenings, because theater faculty are typically expected to take part in the theater productions, which thankfully usually comes with a course release. But for example, a day where your teaching in class would look like class from 12 to 130, rehearsal 6 to 10 p.m. That does include any admin work or meetings, but class would meet four times a week,

and rehearsal would typically be five times a week, sometimes six. almost always in the evenings unless you have a weekend rehearsal, in which case that would typically be in the morning to the early afternoon. So my question is, how can I time block a schedule with such unique applications and are so scattered? Well, I enjoy this question because it gives me a chance to talk about a topic that we haven't covered in much detail yet, and that is on again, off again, scheduling. So it's not that you have more total work to do than, let's say, a standard professor. It's just that it's spread out with these weird pauses.

So you can't sit down and say, I'm going to time block nine to five because your day might include things at 10 a.m. And it might also include things at 8 p.m. So how do we actually schedule this? That's a great question. The first thing I'm going to note is that time blocking is going to be your friend here. Time blocking is going to allow you to be very clear about these are the work hours during the day and these are the non-work hours. And this is a distinction that's going to be

particularly important for you because the non-work hours might fall on some days in non-standard positions. So if I don't time block but I run a normal job, I just kind of roughly know, okay, I'm home now, I'm making dinner. I guess I'm done with work. But for you, depending on your schedule, your time off each day might be in the afternoon, where I actually might be first thing the morning. You have different options of where that simulated evening actually happens, and time blocking is going to make it very clear where it falls on a certain day. So you're not guessing and you're not, and this is what I really want you to avoid, just filling in the gap, that time that really should have been your simulated evening, your time to unwind,

to work on yourself, work on other things in your life, you just sort of fill it in with reactive, busy work and bridge the gap between your actual work blocks. So time block scheduling becomes more important when you have an on-again, off-again schedule. Logistically, how does this work? Well, if you're looking at a time block grid, you can't fit enough hours on there, right, to actually have all your work and non-work hours have their own blocks.

Like, you probably don't have room to get from 9 to 10 p.m. All on one sheet of paper. So what you should do is just drawl out time blocks for the time that you are actually going to be working. And you can just take a little narrow row and fill it in all black or something like this to indicate that there's a skip. So for example, let's say on one day you are going to work from 9 to 12, take a break, and then you are going to do your rehearsal from 6 to 9.

You would mark 9 to 12 on your time block grid, then have like kind of a dark line right above 12 to mark a discontinuity, and right above that you start scheduling again at 6. So the next block you mark is 6. So otherwise, there's no reason to actually take up room on your time block schedule for your non-work time. So logistically, that's what you need to do. And we've also covered philosophically, you need to have simulated evenings every day. Here is the time that is my downtime.

There's a couple different strategies of where those should fall. And I think it's just going to depend on you and your work. I mean, the obvious thing to do, obviously, is to start work in the morning because that's natural. Get through that class. have a very concentrated block after that class to do admin work, then late afternoon to early evening is your simulated evening before you go to rehearsal. However, if you're not really a morning person or if the rehearsals go late or, you know, it takes you a while to unwind after your rehearsals because, you know,

you're coming home from work and can't just go right to bed. It's really not that crazy that you might have your simulated evening be in the morning after rehearsal. So your workday, let's say you have the class from 11 to 12, your workday might start at 10.30. The whole morning is off. And then you jump into your class and then bridge the gap from your class to the rehearsal. Now the final question here is what happens to the shutdown complete ritual? Well, the shutdown has to happen somewhere. And I think it can happen probably before your rehearsal.

In other words, you can do. do a shutdown complete before your rehearsal, and that should probably be fine, because what you're really trying to capture with the shutdown complete is open loops. You know, there's emails you've got to get at, you have a faculty meeting, you need to look at your schedule, you need to look at your schedule and figure out what's coming up, make sure you have a plan, look at your weekly plan. You can do that all after your afternoon work block, for example, because your rehearsal, though cognitively demanding is not, it's very focused with here's the people here we're working on this play

so it's not going to generate let's say new obligations and open loops in the same way that just being in a meeting might where people are throwing things at you or during the day when emails arrive from your dean that needs something right away. So I think it's fine if you want to do your shutdown before the rehearsal you can then attack the rehearsal

with full presence, not worried about other work-related obligations and not being too concerned that the rehearsal itself is going to generate its own concerns that then need to be handled. So still do a shutdown ritual to make sure that everything is reviewed. Approaching that rehearsal, having already done a shutdown, again, being able to do that with full clarity

is going to be much more meaningful and much less anxiety producing than if you bridge the gap into that rehearsal and there's a lot of stuff on your mind about other aspects of your academic job. The final thing I'll say here is it is a hard schedule if you have to do evening work. Own that and use it.

You know, say no to more things, be more careful about service. I can't always go to these meetings. If you have a simulated evening in the morning, that's what makes it work. Own that. Yeah, look, I work till nine. So the morning is my time to catch up on other stuff

that's important to me and do my errands. So no, I can't do meetings before 11. Sorry. Or I take the afternoon off on days I have rehearsal. So, yeah, no, I'm sorry, I can't. I got to squeeze things in earlier. I can't jump into that committee meeting during the afternoon. I think it's completely okay to accept that that is an abnormal schedule, and it's not fair for people to demand that you basically have no evening.

Just like if your department chair demanded someone with a normal schedule, look, I want you to come do meetings from six to nine most days. You'd be like, no, I got to get some time off. You're owed some time off too. So once you've identified that and you're clear about it and you schedule around it and you make the most out of the time you're working and it's clear when you're not working and you do shut down rituals so that your mind is clear, own your decision about what time you're you're not working, you are owed that and you should protect it. All right, that's a good question. It's a good topic. All right, let's move on now to do some clarifications of another topic that's been generating

some interest, which is this notion of phantom part-time schedules. Hi, Cal, I have a question about the phantom part-time schedule you talked about recently. Right now, I work from home because of the pandemic so I can do things like take my dog for a walk or read a book with my extra time. But when it's over, I'll have to go back into the office, and my boss will, expect me to look busy for eight hours. I'm just wondering if you have any suggestions for what to do with my extra time when I'm done with my work for the day. Well, let's do some quick review. So a phantom part-time job, this is my term for what happens when you suddenly get much more

productive than your peers at the company where you work. Now, this happens maybe because you listen to a lot of Cal Newport. Now, your time block planning and your weekly planning, you're doing capture, configure, control. You're just on top of things. You're focusing your attention. Maybe you read a world without email, so now you're trying to optimize your personal processes to rely less on the hyperactive hive mind

and more on other processes that reduce unscheduled messaging. So you're doing a lot less context shifting so you can get a lot more done. Your brain doesn't get exhausted as quickly. Basically, you're doing the type of things that means you're going to get things done better and much faster. This frees up time.

You have two options for this time. rededicate it back to the job so that you can get ahead, get promoted, get more autonomy, or you can take this energy and say, okay, I've earned this by being way more productive than everyone else. I'm not that interested right now in getting a promotion. I like this job. I don't need to try to reconfigure it, so I'm going to take this energy and put it into other things. And that other things could just be enjoying the world, putting your feet in the water by the creek and listening to the cicadas, or it could be a part-time side hustle. And so we We call it a phantom part-time job because it's as if your main job has become a part-time job

from an hour's perspective. It's just that you don't treat it as such, and no one thinks of it as such. It just got there because of your productivity. All right, so the question here is asking, what happens when we get back to real offices? So we've been talking about phantom part-time jobs during the pandemic because, of course, when you're working fully remotely, it's very easy to take advantage of a phantom part-time job. If you want to go out to your woodshed and build a bookcase, you can just go do that. If you want to go have coffee meetings for your side hustle or conference calls, you can do that too.

No one is there seeing you. No one is checking on you. Now, if you're in a hyperactive hive mind style shop, well, first of all, give them a copy of my book to stop that behavior. But if you are for now, you might have to check in on some email and some slack. But, you know, you've got a lot of flexibility. Once you're back in the office, something that we have to start thinking about now, right? I mean, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but it's no longer one of these distant future type things. Vaccines are rolling.

This is coming. You now have a boss who can see you, right? So if you bring your woodworking equipment to your office and you're there building the bookcase, it's hard to hide it. The sawdust is going to get everywhere. People are going to notice. So what do we do when we're no longer remote working, but we still are interested in a phantom part-time job? A few things to keep in mind. one, don't consolidate all of the phantom part-time job activities into one block, let's say,

like at the end of the day, because that is, you know, obviously going to be more noticeable and sort of more in the face of your manager. If you disappear at three every day, hard to ignore. You're kind of daring your boss to confront you about where are you going. You're never here at the end of the day. So what if you took those same two hours and you did an hour mid-morning and an hour mid-afternoon, and maybe you did leave the office then. And if you're doing a invest-in-yourself-type thing to go for a long walk or to exercise at the gym or to read by a stream or whatever, a lot less noticeable. You're not really confronting your boss with it. There's all sorts of legitimate reasons why people are in and out of the office during the day, but you're mainly around. You're there

in the beginning. You're at the end of the day. You're there for meeting, so much less noticeable. Two, okay, if you're going to consolidate it, just be up front about it. You know, just say, which is very honest and your boss probably feels the same, there are some aspects from working from home that were really hard. Like I couldn't see people as hard to do meetings, it's hard to meet with clients. But there's other aspects that were good about being at home. It's an environment in which you have more control, you can focus. The commutes are better if you're not commuting during standard time.

So I'll tell you what I want to do. I want to be at the office most of the day, but at 2.30, I head home and finish the day there. Best of both worlds. We've all just experienced remote work. We all understand it. You've got a pretty good chance that they say yes. And now you can do your phantom part-time job

to the degree that is possible most days at home without having to worry about it. You can go to the woodshed, et cetera. The final thing I'll mention here is if neither of those are going to fly, you can't leave the office. They'll be, where are you going? It's going to be like that office episode where Dwight goes, this is a season three. Dwight goes to try to take Mike's job, Michael Scott's job by going a meeting with Jan secretly

to make the pitch that he should have the job. And he told Michael Scott, I'm going to the dentist. And then Jan called Michael. So he knew about it. So when Dwight came back, Michael's very suspicious. It's like, hmm, went to the dentist. dentist, A. What was the dentist's name? And Dwight said, Crentice. And Steve Corral's character goes,

Crentice, sounds a lot like dentist. Here's what I'm trying to say, guys, you don't want to be in that situation. If you're going to be in that situation, okay, that's not going to work. And certainly your boss is probably not going to let you go home early. So what do you do here? Well, the time old strategy of finding phantom part-time job work that can be done on a computer. we're always on computers all the time. Just be on your computer. There's a lot you can do on your computer that is either interesting,

like you're learning about something or reading about something or picking up a new skill or learning how to program or something, or it's related to some, you're learning a skill for a new business idea, you know, whatever. There's a lot you can do on your computer at the office, and nothing looks more productive in the age of the hyperactive hive mind than seeing someone typing away furiously at your computer. So that's your last resort there,

is master the art of just I'm on my computer and I do some other things too. Now again, you want to be really careful. There's ethical lines here you don't want to cross. You probably don't want to be working on another business at a different place of business using their equipment. Like let's be reasonable, guys. But I am in general in favor of if you're going to be really productive and get your work done in less time and really put a lot of effort into that,

reclaiming that time for yourself is a absolutely reasonable option and I am all for it so hopefully hopefully this advice will prove useful as we move back from remote work into real offices hopefully we don't end up trying to convince our bosses that we were off seeing our dentist named

Krintist. All right, let's do a question here about binge working. Hi Kel, my name is Peter. I have a question about binge working. I mean, crazy bouts for work from early morning until midnight with almost no breaks in between. I work as a software developer

for a biotech company. In such a fast-based environment of exciting projects, a bit working is kind of a superpower. Few people can do what I do on a tight schedule, but it always comes with a steep price. After every binge, I have periods of rebound, similar to many burnouts. With this approach to work,

I feel a threat of serious full-flash burnout looming like a sort of Damocles. In my case, a binge working is an unhealthy pattern, probably from primary skills, but it's also a weirdly satisfying one. After a binge, I have a strong sense of accomplishment comparable to completing a race.

Well, first of all, I appreciate the Damocles reference, but if you'll indulge a jump, a millennium further forward in time, binge working as a regular strategy is Faustian. Now, here's the thing. You do feel productive in the moment. You say, look, I ended up producing a lot of work. relatively quickly, but here are the two costs. One is the burnout, right? You have to recover from binge work, so you lose days on the other end.

So it's unclear net net that the total amount of work produced is better. And two, the work's not as good as you think it is because after hour four or five, your skills go down. And so what you produced in a 12-hour binge might have been produced otherwise in eight hours in four-hour blocks spread over two days. and it might have been even higher quality because you're much more concentrated in those days. So what's the alternative? Well, the alternative is the sprint approach. I talk about sprint methodology in my book, A World Without Email. I get into its history. It's popular in software development,

but I argue that it should be adopted in other corners of knowledge work as well. But when you look at software developers doing sprints, it's different than binging. They don't say, okay, let's start working on this and not. stop until it's done. Like literally not stop. Let's work all night, whatever we need to do until it's done. That's binge working. What sprinting is instead is during our work hours, this is the only thing we're working on until it's done. So it's still, of course, quite different than a normal day where you might be working on some code and answering some emails and going to some HR meetings.

And when you're sprinting, this is all we're doing. We're working on this story. if we're going to use like a scrum type term that's really clearly up there on our taskboard and we're going to get this done before we do anything else and we're all locked in and I talk about in a world without email when they do these sprint workshops for non-software developers

they make them leave their phones outside the room like no when we're working this is all we're doing right so we're sprinting but the number of hours is reasonable at a time so what that looks like for you probably is yeah you have to take two days instead of one but you're going to produce better work and you're not going to need rebounds

and I don't think that's going to be that much worse, right? So you're like, okay, we got to get this done. Full stop on everything else. You know, a nice day. And by the way, if you're sprinting, these days have to be less long. Like, you're ending at three because it's hard. Working until three. Next day, working until three, we're done.

Different than, okay, let's go from eight to midnight tonight. That one extra day is not going to make a big difference in terms of the timing. You might have to be a little bit more organized. You might have to tell the people you're working with. Yeah, it takes two days. I can get this done. I'll make it my top priority. Everyone will adjust. No one will notice, but you're going to be much happier. You're going to be much healthier. You're going to produce better work. So that's my suggestion. Binge working is Faustian. Sprint methodology, on the other hand,

is a really smart way to apply your attention capital to demanding time-sensitive tasks. Our next question is about how to schedule your reading when you're a slow reader. But first, another quick word from our sponsors. I want to talk to you about 4-Sigmatics ground mushroom coffee with Lyons main mushroom. Excellent cup of coffee. The mushroom flavor is subtle and nutty. It tastes like nothing you've ever tasted before in coffee. It's really good.

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injecting, inspiring, and actionable wisdom right into your veins. I've been in this business for a long time, guys. Brian is the real deal. He knows the feel. of improvement literature and wisdom better than anyone I know. If you want to supercharge the depth of your deep life, go to optimize.me slash deep and use a coupon deep to sign up for the optimized network

and get a 14 day free trial. To get that free trial, you've got to go to optimize. Me slash deep and use the coupon code deep. When you do so, let them know that Cal sent you and leave a note saying that we all recognize that Cal's Deep Work HQ library is superior to Brian's outdoor Texas office. Longtime listeners know what I mean here. And if you don't know what I mean, you've got some archive episodes of this podcast you need to start listening to. All right, let's get back to our show and return to this question of how to organize your reading when you are slow at consuming text. Hi, Carl.

My name is Laurent and I am French. Thank you for your podcast. my question is about reading. I am a slow reader, and sometimes when I am reading a book, I absolutely won't start a new book in parallel. But I feel this is not good. I know from your podcast that you read a lot. What is your rhythm, but also what is your advice to increase my rhythm? Thank you.

Well, Laurent, I would focus less on the number of books you have read or the number of books you are reading and focus more on the time. spent per day reading. If you can do somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes reading per day, you can do a lot of damage. I think that's a really good sweet spot for most adults to be in terms of covering a good amount of material, keeping their brain stimulated, and also keeping a good throughput of interesting new ideas or literary experiences that they are encountering. A bonus of concentrating on time and not books read is that now you're more free in your reading experiences. So for example, if you don't like a book, you're much more willing now to say, okay, I'm going to stop reading this because you're not worried about some book count

that is now going to not get incremented by you aborting this book. If all you care about is, look, I want to get a good hour in every day. The fact that you've aborted one book to switch to another doesn't really matter. If you come across a new book, that you're excited about, even though you're reading another one that seems important and you do want to finish, you're fine saying, okay, I'm going to temporarily jump over to this new one. Again, it's not going to affect some incremental count of how many books you've read. You're just trying to hit 30 to 60 minutes a day, so who cares what you're actually focused on. My own life, for example, I typically have about four books at a time that I'm reading.

Obviously, if I'm doing research for a book of my own or an article of my own, I can go through short periods where I'll read very quickly. I'll skim a book a day, maybe do four or five books a week to try to get up the speed real quick on a topic. But outside of that type of intensive research efforts, I typically have four or five books going. And there's no real rhyme or reason to which one I read at a given point. Where I am during the day might make a difference. There's certain types of books I like to read when I'm outside. There's a grove of big old trees at a park I walk to each morning. I like to do some reading there.

And I might read a different book there than I read at bed at night that I might. read over lunch, then I might read in the afternoon if I'm sitting out on my porch and have some free time. You know, it depends on where I am or what my mood is. I'm pretty dogged. If I like a book, I'll keep coming back to it, especially like really long historical books. I read a lot of nonfiction, a lot of historical nonfiction. Some of those books are big. Now, I've mentioned on the podcast before. I'm reading David Reynolds' cultural biography of Abraham Lincoln. It's called Ape. It's excellent, but it's also 900 pages. And they're big pages. So if I waited until that was done before I read anything else. It would be a long period where I would be

relatively fallow in terms of the number of ideas I have. So I'm reading that in the background. I have been for a while and I come back and forth between that to lots of other books. I'm reading a book on Boredom right now, which I'm really enjoying. It's called Out of My Skull. It came out in 2020. It's a Harvard University Press book. That is interesting. I just bought two other books on Bordom. I'm going to read next because now I'm really interested in that topic. I also grabbed a Bill Bryson book that was in a free life. library in my town. I said, this would be a good sort of relaxing summertime book because it's a book called One Summer that's actually about the summer of 1927. Really good example of

historical narrative nonfiction that uses anecdote deathly to capture moments without having to be comprehensive. So it's like the anti-Abe, but still within the world of history. And then there's a novel I'm working on and a couple other books I'm dipping back into that I've looked at before. The point being, I'm just moving between them. I go back to Abe most days, but not others. I'll finish it. I will finish that book at some point, probably before the summer. The Bryson book I'll shoot through.

Out of my school, the, the Bordam book I'll shoot through soon. I'm listening to Walter Isaacson's new book on audibles when I'm walking. You know, sometimes I do podcasts. Sometimes I do Isaacson's book, an audible book. Sometimes I do productive meditation. I mean, all this stuff is just an article. a rotation around. And it's not a formal rotation, and I don't keep track of how many books I've read, but I just try to read a good amount every day, focus on good stuff, allow my inspiration

and interest to guide me. And in the end, a lot of stuff gets read, and that stuff generates a lot of ideas. Those ideas get turned to articles and books. My brain's name sharp. It's all a virtuous cycle. All right, we have time for one more question here. This one is about a really common problem in academia that tends to get my blood boiling. Hi Cal. This is Judy. I'm an academic in the UK. Really enjoyed just listening to episode 65 and the deep dive segment in particular. I've got a query though. I can see that I'm getting more productive in my time, but I'm railing against or I'm in a system where the hours allocated for me to do parts of my role are deeply inadequate. So, you know, 100 hours to administer a program or five hours to mark a doctoral thesis and examine it.

These are just indications. How do I manage my productivity, but highlight that the organisations, allocations are inadequate? That's my real query. How do we kind of match our own productivity systems against wider organizational ones? Many thanks. Well, first, Judy, thanks for the kind words about episode 65. I had to go back and look it up to remind myself of what the deep dive segment was from that episode. And it was actually an interesting one.

It's where I tackled the question of whether or not productivity was good or bad. this is in response to the growing anti-productivity movement that's out there right now. It's a complicated topic and one I've been doing some more thinking about since. I just did an interview with a pretty major magazine on this topic. It's working on a big article that talks to a lot of different people on this topic about the anti-productivity backlash. I won't go down that rabbit hole now other than to say that deep dive in episode 65 is just scratching the surface of a much deeper topic that I look forward to continuing to excavate. Now let's get to your particular question because it's a topic that I care a lot about and

it's one that frustrates me, which is overload, administrative overload on knowledge workers. See, this is one of the issues with the hyperactive hive mind workflow that I talk about in my Boca World without email and that which dominates most knowledge work where we just informally figure things out with back and forth unscheduled ad hoc messages. This allows you to very easily the friction is very low, the social capital cost is very low, to drop things on other people's plate that makes your life easier in the moment. It also obfuscates how much you're working on and whether or not that additional demand is reasonable. The result is we get a lot of people who get way too much stuff on their plate. We basically just keep dumping things on them until they

cry uncle, which is at a point where it's already too late for them to effectively get those things done. It makes no sense, but it is something that is hard to avoid if we just say, look, just hook me up the slack, hook me up the email, welcome to our university, Judy at university. at university.edu is your address. Let's just rock and roll. That's where you're going to end up. When you're not more structured, you're not more clear, you're not more intentional about

who works on what, how much should they be doing and why. I think it's something we need to fight back about. So I get real into this in a world without email in chapter seven in the specialization principle chapter. I get really into this notion of what I call, I think, something like work budgets. I think we need clarity in academia, but also elsewhere. Here is how much time you should be working on service. And then we should keep track of it.

And if you want to give someone way more service than that, someone has to stand up and say, I approve that. I think that's good. Instead, we all pretend like it's not happening. We all look the other way. We say, well, being a professor is kind of a weird job anyways. it's independent and unusual and it has these perks

and we're all kind of just doing a lot of work and we grumble and that's part of it and we just let it happen. But imagine in this thought experiment and this is a thought experiment I really detail in the book. Imagine if we did have a way to really clearly track.

Here is how much service has been put on Judy's plate in terms of hours or hours per week or whatever, right? We had some metric. And once you got past some budget, the dean had to sign a form.

time something new was added to your plate to say, I approve this because you're going above your service budget. How many forms were that dean signed? Because it's not unusual for a professor to have, you know, 40 extra hours a week of service. Now, let's say that what you thought was reasonable was 20 hours a week. It should be about half your time is service. And now we're saying we're going to add 20 extra hours. You should be working 20 extra hours beyond your normal work hours on service. And if a dean had to sign off on every one of those hours, at some point he or she would be like, well, okay, this is kind of ridiculous. We can't be putting this much work on one person's plate. That's not fair. And when it happened, but we don't write it down. We don't keep track of it.

We don't make anyone approve it. We don't make anyone confront the reality of workloads. And so we get overload. And to make matters worse, the overload then becomes unequally distributed. Because when it's all obfuscated and ad hoc and unscheduled, guess what? The people who are nice and competent, get a lot more junk on their plate than the weird grumpy physicist who's a pain no one likes to talk to and no one wants on their committees. So he's doing almost no extra work, right? So it's overload and overload that is arbitrarily distributed. Man, that is a recipe. That is a recipe for resentment and burnout. It's not good. All right. So what do we do about this? When we don't have a big policy in place about these budgets of how much administrative work we

should be doing, create your own. See, if you're already doing, the type of stuff I talk about, in particular time block planning and weekly planning, so you really have a good sense of here's what's on my plate, here's how much time I have available, I'm fitting things into these time slots. You know how much work is on your plate and how much more work it would take to do something else. The impact of each thing you say yes to is way more clear when you're a time block planner that also does weekly planning. You know what that impact is going to be. And so now you can have some sort of internal limit. Look, I want to work, I'm willing to work 50 hour weeks. I'm willing to do 20 hours of service, you know, because of my role,

that's reasonable, up to 20 hours of service a week. When you see the load get there, you start saying no. You start saying no with a CODA. And that CODA is, I am very organized about my time. And I have put aside X number of hours a week to do service, which is a lot. In other words, I'm willing to work extra. I'm working 60 hour weeks. I'm willing to put all this time in you to get service done an addition to my teaching and course requirements. And I'm at that. I keep track of it very carefully. So what you're asking me to do is now to do this,

I would have to be working more than 60 hours. I'd have to be doing more than 20 hours a week of service. I would have to be, here's a tradeoff you're asking me to do. I think that tradeoff is not worth it. If you disagree, let me know. But now you are forcing someone to disagree on a very specific tradeoff, not some vague. Are you going to be helpful or are you lazy?

Are you going to be useful in a team player or not? Instead, you're asking, are you on board with me doing this much work, chair, dean, vice provost, whoever's talking to you? And it's a harder answer to say yes. And if they come back and say yes emphatically, they say, well, how much work do you think I should be doing? How much service should be 70 hours, 80 hours? Let me know. There should be a limit, right? What do you think the limit should be? Now, I'm being way too confrontational in this example. You should not be that confrontational. I just, my blood boils about this issue sometimes. So I don't use this as a script, but I think

philosophically, this is an approach that we should use more often. Once you're in control of your time, you can see. Now, let me tell you where this first came up for me in my work, was actually when I worked with college students. My first three books were aimed at students. So I used to work with a lot of students to help them, especially when I was at MIT. And because I was at MIT as a grad student, the students who would come to me for help about their schedule or overload were often MIT students or students from other elite schools in Boston, which had plenty of them. I wrote about this on my blog years ago. Lena was the name.

So if you want to Google this, this is a pseudonym, but I think I called it College Chronicles. I had this series on my blog way back when the early days of study hacks, 2007, 2008, called College Chronicles, where actually like a reality show,

but written would work with real college students from elite schools in Boston that were overloaded or when they had better grades. And I would apply the skills I had written about in my books, and I'd help try to turn around their lives, and I would document it. And College Chronicles was the name of the series. And one of the subject's name was Lena. That's not a real name, but I think that was the pseudonym I used for the blog series.

And what I remember about this student, don't worry, Judy, I'll connect us back to academic life soon. And I remember if she was very overloaded, stressed out, their grades were suffering. And I was a big advocate of time block planning even back then. If you look at my 2006 book, How to Become a Straight A Student, I basically lay out a time blocking strategy for college students. And that was whatever it was 15 years ago now. And so I was like, let's time block. Let's look at your schedule.

All right. Here's all your classes. Great. Here's all your activities. A side note here, she had a lot of activities. All right, let's put down the times on your calendar. Here's where they happen. Here's the practices.

Here's the meetings. All right. Now let's do the regular lab. You know, okay, you got labs here, labs here, labs there. Okay, now let's look at each year, classes and look at the type of assignments that are normally due. Like, you know you have a problem set due every week in this class. You know you have an essay due every week in this class. She was a triple major.

So she had a lot of classes with a lot of work. These were hard majors. It's like, well, let's pick a time for each of the assignments you know we're going to happen each week. When we're going to work on, when you're going to get them done. I used to call us the student workday method. Anyways, we were working on this. So it was just the stuff that she had to do. And we ran out of time.

We filled that sample calendar from when she woke to pretty close to bedtime. We filled it every minute. And there was still more stuff that had to been done. And I remember saying to her, like, Lena, I mean, it wasn't her name, but I said a real name. You're doing too much. I mean, and I'm not just saying this philosophically. I'm not saying this morally. I'm not saying this like, well, this is more that might make you happy.

I'm saying literally you're doing too much. You don't have, you don't have minutes left. And she still had a really hard time. She still had a really hard time saying no to anything. Stepping away from a club, dropping one of these triple majors, trying to make her load more reasonable. A long story short with her, she ended up having to leave on a sick leave, basically,

for mental health reasons. It burnt her out. We get there. We get there in jobs, especially highly autonomous jobs, especially elite jobs that are very obfuscated and ambiguous about how work happens, we're busyness as prize, where we want to be a team player, it's hard to say no, and we say yes until it doesn't actually fit. And even then we don't know what to do, and then we burn out, like Lena.

So we need a revolution about this, and I think being and control your time, so you can be very clear about here's how much I'm doing, and this is going to be this much more on top of that, and that feels like too much. but correct me if I'm wrong. That specificity, I think, is the first step. And this works particularly well in academia because you have autonomy in academia. You're a tenure track or tenured professor.

You don't have to do any of these things. Your tenure decision is going to have very little to do with which things you said yes or no to service-wise when someone asked you to do it. It doesn't matter what matters is what the letter writers are going to say about your research and its impact on the field. It doesn't matter that this vice dean is upset that you didn't join his committee for the most part.

So we have some more autonomy, but I think this is a general idea that we need. It's scary, but necessary. We need to be clear about how much work we're actually doing and whether it's reasonable. And when people try to put more on your plate, they have to confront what they're doing and say, do you really think I should do this much? You really think that's reasonable. That sort of back pressure is how we get to a better equilibrium where people can still things get done. Things get done well. People don't burn out.

I don't think we're going to lose any effectiveness. I don't think professors are going to become worse. I think universities will survive, even if not all of these committees, can immediately get all the people they want into them. Might even be better for the university. Research will happen. Students will be taught.

The wheels of knowledge will turn. All right, so this is my unsolicited rant, Judy, but I'm glad you gave me a chance to talk about these issues. Now, I feel like I should probably end this discussion by noting I personally have not had this be a major problem in my academic career. My department at Georgetown has been actually, I think, quite reasonable about keeping service loads manageable. And there's a lot of departments at a lot of universities that do. The thing that got my blood boiling is that I know there's some universities and some departments,

like the one Judy is in, where they're not reasonable, where they allow things to get out of hand, where they allow certain members to get completely drowned while other members skate by. And there's enough of those departments at enough universities that this issue is really important. So this is a chance for me to both get upset at those departments as well as have some appreciation for my own. Though, of course, maybe the whole issue going on at Georgetown

is that I have such a fearsome reputation as a deep work-obsessed productivity psycho that people don't just bother. So I should probably look a little closer at that. But this is all I'm trying to say here is that not everyone has this issue, but enough people do, and in enough jobs that go way beyond academia, that we need to get rid of the obfuscation and the ambiguity.

We can't just shoot off messages that adds hundreds of hours of work to people's plates. We should be concrete. Here's how much you do. Here's how much is reasonable. We don't go past those limits. Now, of course, one limit I don't want to go past is the end of this episode. So let's wrap this up. To submit your own question to the Deep Questions podcast,

go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how. I will be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep.