Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 86: LISTENER CALLS: Mastering the Art of Thinking While Walking

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.- Transferring tasks from capture to configure tools. [4:07]- Getting better at thinking while walking (plus bonus MIT nostalgia). [6:53] - Deep work breaks. [14:44]- Dedicated task lists for projects (what I do). [25:28]- Incompatible calendars. [30:43]Thanks to 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, listener calls mini-episode. Quick announcements, this is the second mini-episode in a row in which I have tried out the new name, listener calls instead of what we used to call the mini-episodes, which was Habit Tune-up. As I mentioned last week, I liked this new name because it more accurately describes what differentiates these many episodes from the main episodes is the fact that we hear the listener's voice. Not that we're helping people tune up their habits because we do those type of questions on the main episode and not all of the questions on these many episodes are really nitty-gritty habit tune-up questions anymore. So this seem more accurate. No one has complained about it so far,

so I guess I'm going to stick with this unless I hear a strong case to either go back to have a tune-up or do a different name altogether. I will tell you long run, my plan here is, is I'm waiting until the listener download numbers get high enough that I can satisfy the ad commitments we've already sold in the main episode, thereby freeing up if I want to do a second episode, I'm not constrained by ads, so I can do shorter episodes or more experimental episodes or whatever. So this is where I'm trying to get is one epic episode that has voice questions,

has written questions, has guests stopped by the HQ and jump on the mic, where my ads are, and where I'm satisfied my ad commitments. and then be more experimental with what I want to do instead. So that's what I'm looking at down the line, but I need some higher download numbers before that becomes possible. All right, that's a little look behind a curtain here at the podcast. We've got a good listener call many episode ahead of us. We have two different questions, which I will combine about doing thinking and work while walking.

We've got some in the weeds questions about configure and trello boards, as well as some questions about calendars. So this would be a good one. And before we dive into those questions, of course, as always, let's first take a brief moment to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. And I am talking about longtime friend of the show, Blinkist. The idea here is simple. You subscribe to Blinkist, and what you get access to is 15-minute summaries of thousands of best-selling non-fiction books.

You can get written summaries or audio summaries that gives you the key points of those books. Why is this important? Well, ideas are currency in today's current culture. Books are a great source of ideas, but books take a long time to read, and it's hit or miss. Some books look promising. They turn out to be a pamphlet that has been expanded to 60,000 words, and other books maybe seem esoteric, and they change your life. So how can you tell which books you should spend the time on? Well, Blinkist allows you to get these 15-minute summaries of the key points. For some books, that is enough. And for others, that 15 minutes will tell you, ooh, I absolutely need to buy this one. It's a fantastic service for anyone like me,

or the 12 million other people who have a Blinkist subscription, who recognize ideas are important and books are where to get them, but that books are expensive to read. With Blinkas, you will get unlimited access to reader, listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books, all the books you want for one low price. Now, for a limited time, Blinkis has a special offer, for our audience, go to blinkus.com slash deep to try it free for seven days and save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and you'll also save 20% off, but only when you sign up at blinkis.com slash deep. All right, and with that, let's get into the questions. And our first question is about

configuring the tasks on your plate. Cal, thank you so much. I love you. You are the man. Your podcast is awesome. I used to be very anxious with all the overwhelming life administration stuff that I couldn't really get a grasp on. Now I really feel like I have my arms around it.

I've learned a lot from you. I've really got the capture part down. A great note taker. I transferred my daily notes into a master log at the, the end of the day. It's been working really good for me. I just need some advice about the configure step to use Trello for the configuring. Do you start a board, move it from the notebook to Trello, and then remove it from the notebook, or do you move it from the notebook to Trello, let it live in both places, make work happen, and then delete it off of both once it's complete?

Thank you. Well, when it comes to capture configuration, control productivity systems, the tools you use for capture are temporary. In other words, the information is captured those capture tools only until they can be moved into your permanent systems. Then once in those permanent systems, configuring can happen. So if you use a notebook to capture tasks or obligations or ideas and notes and you process this, you process these notes at the end of the day, let's say, to get them into a permanent system, your notebook is no longer a record here. The permanent system is where they live. The permanent system is where you encounter them. The permanent system is where you work with them. The permanent system

is their new home. Now, I do use Trello. I have a different board for each of my main roles, and so that's where things go. And that's where tasks I may have captured in my capture column in my time block planner from my inbox. I'm going to went through and cleared out some emails and all that's going to go into a Trello board onto a card under the proper category, under the proper board for the role in which is related. And then that's where it lives. And that's its home. Eventually, it will get moved onto a time block plan and get executed, at which point you'll

get taken off of the Trello board. All right. So that's the way to think about it. Whatever you use to capture new obligations or ideas on the fly, think of that as a temporary home. You should only really have one home for information at a time. so it moves from your capture to your permanent home. That's where you configure.

That's where you simplify. That's where you reassess. And that's where you come up with what I want to work on this week, what I want to work on this day. And once it's accomplished, that's the system. It eventually leaves. All right. So next we have two different questions about more or less the same topic.

So we'll play both the questions. And then we'll get to my answer. Hi, Cal. My name is Chris and I'm a PhD student, also working in the area of theoretical computer science. I am interested in hearing more about your process for working out proofs while taking a walk. I have been trying this for the past few weeks, and it has been a generally productive and pleasant experience. However, I find that effectiveness of these walks vary with the stage of the proof that I am currently at.

For example, once I have a fixed proof strategy, I can manipulate equations and inequalities and find out how certain parameters will trade off while I'm on the walk. On the other hand, I've made very little progress to trying to generate new proof strategies while taking a walk. For me, new strategies come after many calculations and experiments, but I would like to train my mind to be able to think about them on walks while away from my computer. What is your strategy for developing proofs while on a walk, and what have you found to be most effective?

Hi, Cal. I am a time series method. So I'm guided by the goddess Demetra as I do seasonal adjustment. I've been a long time follower of yours and after several years of practice, I'm really comfortable doing deep work. Now I'm looking for a way to ramp up the intensity through predictive meditation and working on foot. I get to go a lot to the woods with my dog. So I would like to know, do you have any training plan for people?

productive meditation? Well, I'm going to answer the second part of these two questions first, because the second question included a Greek mythological reference. So preference must be given. So when it comes to training productive meditation, and a quick aside, for those who don't know the term, productive meditation is where you work on a professional problem just in your head while you're walking. Every time you notice your attention wander from the problem, you just note that and pull it back to the problem at hand. It's a training technique. I talked about in my book Deep Work for getting better at concentrating. So how do you actually get better at productive meditation?

In other words, what should your training routine be if you want to do more and more productive meditation with the goal of becoming better and better at concentrating? Three things to say. Number one, have a clear problem that you are working on. Make it reasonably tractable. In other words, a small thing, you kind of see what, or at least you can imagine what progress would look like. Don't give yourself some impossibly large and ambitious prompt to handle during your productive meditation session. Don't say, figure out how to solve this major unsolved

proof. Let's go for a walk. Instead, you say, what would happen if we applied the Simplex technique to, you know, with these limited parameters? Could we make progress there? So something very specific that you could feasibly make progress on, but it's not trivial what the answer is. Two, when you're done, you've got to record your thoughts. You need an artifact of your deep work session. So there's got to get written down somewhere. That pressure of I'm going to have to articulate what I thought about clearly is very useful because it prevents your session from just having dissipated energy.

Like, well, I just thought about this type of thing in general. And you know, maybe I know more about it's like, nope, you are going to record what you came up with, including dead ends. That's fine. but you're going to record it black and white. That pressure actually keeps your concentration higher during the session. All right. And then three,

what is the variable that you want to tune? So if you want to become better at productive meditation, what's the variable that you're trying to increase? It's time. You start with short productive meditation sessions. I'm going on a long walk with my dog, but just 10 minutes at first. I'm trying to actually make progress on this proof

or this idea or this business insight, whatever it is that you're doing your deep thing. thinking about, and then you increase it until you can do 20 minute walks, 30 minute walks, 40 minute walks, an hour walk, and keep these thoughts going in your head and keep making progress on the thought. So that's the variable that you want to push. Well, think about as your leading indicator. You push that variable. You get better and better at productive meditating. You get better and better at productive meditating. Your just capacity for concentration in general will increase. Now let's go to the first part of the question

where we have specifically, like me, a theoretical computer scientist. My advice for that first part of the question is you need to go back and forth. So it sounds like the type of theoretical computer science you're in involves actual interaction with a computer, running a model, getting results, thinking about what that means. Just go back and forth. I run this, I get the things, I'm trying to think about the results I see. I go for a walk to make sense of it, come back. maybe I capture those sense

in another experiment or trial I run on my computer and then I go for a walk to make sense of that so you deploy the walks whenever you have anything any type of new input, new observation, new inspiration that needs to be processed and acted upon

go for a walk to do that and then when you need to actually then put that insight into play with your computer you come back and do that. So for you your productive meditation sessions might be back and forth to your computer. 20-minute walk back, 10-minute walk back.

When I was at MIT, I'll tell you the walk I used to do. Sometimes I'd be working on a proof. I'd be writing a paper, and I was like, okay, this doesn't work like I thought. I need to figure out this issue into proof. And so I would walk the infinite corridor. Now, here's the real key. This was because it was a challenge I was interested in.

I was in the status center, so that's on East Campus, if you're a MIT type, so near the Charles MGH. It's not the Charles MGHH station. It's the Kindle Square Station. So near the Kindle Square Station. So on that far side of the campus,

my goal was to get to the far end of the infinite corridor all the way over at Mass Ave, without, and here is the key, without going outside. So I figured if you're in the status center and we're in the Gates Tower, six floors is where the theory group is,

six and fifth floor, you would have to go down to, I think it was the fourth floor. The fourth floor connected to the other side to where the other tower was. Once you're on that other side, you could connect over into where the RLE laboratory is, right? You could get over to the electrical engineering department people

in another building. There was a tunnel that connected them. From that building, if you went through the right hallways and down the right sequence of stairs, you could get into the main building at the very end of it where the infinite corridor begins. Now, of course, here is the key with the infinite quarter. If you're going to think in the infinite corridor,

you cannot do it on the ground floor. it's a traffic jam. All your energy is going to go into not running into people. You need to do the second floor, maybe the third floor. And then you can walk the whole infinite corridor to the end. And at the big atrium at the mass av end, if you're up on the second or third floor, you're up there on the railings, you can look down

and it's very dramatic, and then you can walk all the way back. That is a perfect length. Status center to mass aft and back via the second or third floor of the infinite corridor is a perfect length route for unsticking something. In fact, your computer work, work, work, and can repeat it. So I walk that track quite a bit during my MIT times. Let's generalize that. If you're working on a deep thought that requires interaction with some other system,

but also thinking about what you come up with, interact, walk, interact, walk, interact, walk, you should be racking up, in other words, a lot of steps if you want to get the most out of productive meditation in that type of a work environment. All right. Speaking of deep work, let's do a question now about taking breaks from such efforts. Hey, Cal, thank you so much for your podcasts and books and blog. They've had a huge positive influence on me since I first discovered your blog more than 10 years ago. And I'm looking forward to reading a world without email coming up here soon. My question is about the Pomodoro technique and how you take breaks during deep work sessions. When I'm planning two hours of deep work, let's say, it makes the most sense to me to do two.

two 50-minute sessions with two 10-minute breaks or four 25-minute sessions with four five-minute breaks. I have found that having dedicated and planned breaks helps me focus more during the work sessions. If I have a two-hour session without that kind of time structure, I'm prone to get up to stretch my legs or get a glass of water to give myself little breaks along the way, and it doesn't feel as effective. I'm curious how a two-hour deep work session looks for you in terms of how you take breaks. I think it's helpful to think about three categories of breaks and we can order them from minimal impact on your cognitive capacity, the maximum impact, and then we can talk about how to deploy them to support long, deep work sessions. Minimal impact is where you're literally just taking

your foot off the cognitive gas pedal, right? I'm trying to solve this proof. I'm giving it full thought, I'm at a dead end. All right, let's relieve that tension, right? Let that tension out. But you don't switch to anything else. You just stop thinking so hard about the problem at hand. And maybe you go back and write down a few notes about why it didn't work or you clean up some of the earlier text you recorded about the proof or the definitions. Like you give yourself a really easy task to do that is still 100% about what you're thinking about. This is minimally invasive because you basically induce no cognitive context shifts. There's no networks in your brain that have to be inhibited.

No new networks that have to be amplified. So you don't cause any of that context switching costs. You're just trying to give your brain a break. It was trying to think as hard as I can. And now you're letting off a little bit of steam. Okay, now let me go back at it again. If you want to do something physical during those type of minimal breaks, that's fine. we talked about last week about shooting baskets at the basketball hoops you can put

on the back of the door. Actually, what I used to do in my old house, I don't have to set up at my new house, but in my old house in Silver Spring, when I was working outside, I had a Fisher Price basketball hoop. My kid, you know, was one of my kids' Fisher Price basketball hoops, and I would shoot, do shots at that hoop. It's physical. It's really just a different part of the brain. It's going to be very minimally invasive or making a cup of coffee.

Like something physical is fine, but keep your mind what you're not. what you're actively thinking about in the same context as the problem. The next level up in terms of invasiveness is in some of my writing I call deep breaks. Now you're going to take more of a substantial break from the work, maybe five or ten minutes. You're going to maybe think about some other things,

but you want to reduce the negative impact of this context shift. The best thing to do here is not to think about things that are too similar. So don't start thinking about in our proof example, another proof or something else about your professional job. Certainly do not look at anything

that's going to give you an unresolvable social obligation. So do not look at your email inbox or Slack. Because seeing, oh, here's messages I can't get to right now. That's going to take up a lot of cognitive energy going forward because your mind takes seriously social obligations being ignored.

And certainly don't look at anything that is going to peak your emotions, positive or negative, so probably social media. or news is off the table. Don't look at social media. Don't look at news. Don't look at highly edited YouTube videos that are made to get a response. All these things are going to generate large responses that are going to take more energy and more time to return from.

But if you turn your attention to something that is not super engaging, not that similar to work, and does not introduce unresolved social obligations, it's going to be better. So you pick up the sports page, right? You're working on a academic paper or a proof and you pick up the sports page when you're trying to take a 10-minute break. You maybe grab a little snack or something like that to get your blood sugar back up. And that's a deep break. It will take some effort to get back into it, but you're not setting yourself up in a really

difficult situation. The third category is the maximally invasive type of break, and that's where you open up your inbox. That's where you look at social media. That's where you think about another work issue. You take a call. You talk to a colleague about an unrelated issue, but still an issue where you related to your work.

You go on YouTube for a while. Those are really hard to return from. We all have that feeling. We're like, oh, I'm bored or I'm tired cognitively. Let me just like jump on Twitter or someone comes in and interrupts you. Your boss comes in and it interrupts you with like a really urgent thing unrelated to your work. You know how hard it is. You know this, right?

It's really hard to get back to what you were doing before. That's because this is maximally invasive cognitive context switching. Right. So we have these three levels of invasiveness when it comes to break. I think the right way to think about it is during a deep work session, a contiguous deep work session. So there's on your time block plan, there's not an intervening block dedicated to something else. You do not want the third type of break. There's no email.

There's no social media. There's no YouTube. You're hoping your boss doesn't come in to interrupt you, right? You don't want any of those type of breaks. They're going to be way too invasive. Right. If you need to do that type of work throughout your day, you need a block dedicated to Like I'll deep work for two hours and then spend 30 minutes and I'll do email and talk to my boss and check social media over my lunch hour.

And then I'll get back to another two hours of deep work. Don't let that happen during your deep work blocks. The minimally invasive, that category number one, this is what you can be doing every 20 minutes. You know, it's just you're pushing, pushing, pushing, you hit the wall, foot off the gas. All right, catch our breath. I'm going to mix a couple metaphors here. All right, let's go for it. Pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing.

All right, foot off the gas. And you know what? If you're doing something really hard, it might be every five. minutes. I have this often with math proofs because you're either making progress or you're not. And if you're not making progress, you can only push against that wall so long, right, before it's a waste of time. So you're like, foot off the gas, push, foot off the gas, push, every time trying to find a different angle. Because that first category or break is so minimally invasive in your cognitive context, it's great. It makes no real issue, no real issue.

And then I would deploy in a longer deep work session, that second category where you are going to change your attention, but the things designed to minimize the context switching costs, you know, do that every 50 minutes to an hour. I think that's fine. I'm trying to write for 50 minutes or an hour. I'm not in a flow state. I'm not in a groove. All right, sports page, snack. Let's get back into it for another hour. That's completely fine. And of course, if you get in a groove or you fall into a flow state or pieces are falling into place, and you can blow right past that. All right. So I've talked about deep breaks before. I haven't talked about this first category, so I'm glad I have a chance to. that's the way I would think about it.

Foot off the gas pedal brakes whenever you need them. Minimally invasive contact switches, once an hour or so I think is fine. And the hard stuff, the email, the social media, the YouTube, the online news, God forbid, jump into your text messages. Don't do that during your deep work blocks. If you need to do that, put aside a non-deep work block

in which that can happen. I want to take a moment here to talk about one of our sponsors, my body tutor. It's a company founded by my friend Adam Gilbert, who I've known for a long time. He used to do the fitness column on my study hacks blog. It's a brilliant idea. If you are looking to get in shape,

my body tutor is what you need. Here is how it works. You get a coach. It's an online coach. The coach helps you figure out a meal plan, helps you figure out an exercise plan. And then, and this is the key, you check in with that coach.

every day. As Adam says, in fitness knowledge isn't the problem. Everyone I talk to already knows what to do where they struggle is turning that information into action. My Body Tudor fixes that with daily accountability and expert support. It turns out when you have to check in with your coach every day, you're much more likely to follow the plans. And when you have plans that have been custom built for you with a coach who can adjust the plans as you realize, okay, this is not quite right for you or your circumstance, you're even more likely to stick with it. So if you're looking to come out of this and better shape than you were before it started. My Body Tudor is the way to do it. If you mention deep questions when you sign up, Adam will give you $50 off your first month.

So go to MyBodytutor.com and mention deep questions when you sign up. Let's take a second here to talk about four-sigmatic ground mushroom coffee. You have heard we talk about this coffee often on this podcast and for good reason. it is an important part of my deep work ritual. So it's a good cup of coffee. It has ground lion mains mushroom in the coffee. It doesn't taste like mushrooms. It actually is like a nutty taste.

A little bit less caffeine, so it doesn't make you too jittery. The thing I like is that that ground mushroom gives it a distinct physiological effect, which makes that cup of coffee a great hook for deep work. You drink your four-sigmatic every time before you go into a deep work session because it's such a unique experience. Your brain learns to associate

this type of coffee with the work and helps you transition into that mode with less willpower and less energy needing to be expanded. At least that's how I use 4-Sigmatic coffee. But I am far from the only one who does. There's over 20,000 five-star reviews on this product and they back everything with a 100% money-back guarantee. Here's the good news. We've worked out an exclusive offer with 4-Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee, but it is just for my listeners. So to get up to 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for deep questions, listeners, and is not available under regular website.

So you'll save up the 40% and get free shipping. If you go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep. All right, let's get back to our question. questions and do one that gets into some of the nitty-gritty details of setting up your productivity system. Hi, Cal. This is Shivani. I am an applied research scientist working at a large tech firm in the Bay Area. And my field of work is AI and machine learning. I use Trello 2, but I find that I'm having too many projects at work. All of them, some of them slow moving, because there are new ideas that I'm exploring.

Some of them are fast moving because they are projects that I have to deliver sooner. Some of them I'm leading and so on and so forth. So my question was, do you have a separate Trello board for each of those projects? Or if you put them all within one Trello board. Well, thank you again for answering my questions. Well, Shavani, this is a good question. I'll tell you how I do it. So let's look at my two main jobs as a researcher and as a writer.

Both of these jobs has a primary type of project. The thing I do again and again that's at the core of my job, so as a researcher that's producing academic papers, as a writer, it is producing articles, is producing books. I tend to think about it more like producing book chapters, which then add up to a book, but more or less the same idea. Those primary projects, at least in my professional life,

do not get separate trello boards. I have one trello board for research. I have one Trello board for writing. Now, what I tend to do is the primary projects I'm working on at the moment, their status, and what I'm trying to get done is in my weekly plan. It comes out of my strategic slash semester plan. So my strategic slash semester plan, I see, like, I'm working on this article and I'm working on these two papers.

Then when I make my weekly plan, like, okay, so what progress am I making on these, if any, this week? well, for example, I want to work, I'm stuck on this proof for this particular section of the paper, and I really want to see if I can make progress on this this week. That's something, a decision I'm making my weekly plan. I'm working on this article. I think this week I need to read a couple of these two books to get up to speed on this topic I need for the article, right? So my weekly plan, I look towards my strategic slash semester plan to see what primary projects I'm working on

and then translate what efforts that means this week. many of these efforts do never require a task, right? And this is where I have a big difference with David Allen. I don't believe that these type of primary project efforts all can be decomposed down into next actions. I don't think that is productive if you'll excuse the double use of the term. If I'm working on a section of a math paper, trying to make progress on a proof I want to do or get an algorithm bound down better, I don't need tasks. I need hours. You know, this week I'm working on this algorithm, trying to crack this bound. I need hours. I want to get 10 hours in on this week. I see I have a big group on Wednesday. I'll go do it in the woods. I can do an hour

every morning on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, whatever. What I'm looking for is hours. I don't need tasks. There's no task there. It's just thinking. It's just thinking from a bunch of different angles, taking notes, priming the problem, taking notes. I don't need to translate that to task. It's the thing I do. A professional baseball player doesn't have to break down their training into individual tasks, they check off a list. What they need to do is make sure they have time to do their training, which it's what they do. They know how to do it. Occasionally, right, occasionally tasks will be generated and then it will go on to the general board for that role. So if I'm working on an article, like often what I need is reading time or writing time. What I need is hours. There's not

particular task I need. It's like I need to read these books this week. I don't need a task. I need to work on a draft this week. I don't need task. But sometimes specific tasks do fall out of it, such as I need to set up an interview with this person. That will go into my writing task board. Or I'm working on research and I'm stuck and like, here's what I need to do. I need to talk to so-and-so and get some recommendations on paper so I can learn more about this technique. Okay, now that's a task that needs to get done. That's specific. That will go on my researcher task board. So I hope this generalizes Chavani. I hope it's not too specific to my particular type of work,

but I tend to think about primary projects in your field are things that exist on your quarterly plan, assuming you're a non-academic, and when you do your weekly plan, you look at those plans and figure out what progress I want to make and, roughly speaking, how do I want to do it? For the most part, what you're trying to do is get hours for that work, because you know what it is, you know what it takes,

you've done it 100 times by now, you just need the time, and you need to fight for that time. Occasionally it does generate specific tasks. Usually when you have to contact someone or get some specific type of information or go to the library to get a manuscript, like something that's not in the normal flow of the work you do,

then that can go on your task list, but you don't need a separate board for the project for that. You can just have your general task list where that goes on. Oh, yeah, I got a, you know, I got to call Chris and set up a meeting to talk about this project. And then it becomes a task, okay? So hopefully this will significantly reduce the number of tasks you deal with and really increase this deep to shallow ratio for you in your work. You can spend more time actually just thinking hard and trying to make progress on your project and less time checking things off a list.

All right, we got time for one more question here. Let's do one about calendars. Hi, Cal. My name is Margaret, and I work for a large university as an instructional designer. I have two questions about calendars. I love your time block planner and I really enjoy analog calendars in general, but I work in a large public institution that use digital calendars, specifically the Microsoft ecosystem. In this time of remote work, I've noticed that I've been having a lot more work meeting. But in addition to work meetings, I of course have family meetings and events that I need to keep track of on a calendar.

My university has settings in place so that I cannot sync my Microsoft calendar to my Google calendar or any other calendar. And also, the only way that I can view my Outlook calendar is to download the Microsoft app. When I open that app, it automatically opens to email. Again, this is a feature that I cannot change, but I also refuse to have this app on my phone. Well, Margaret, I empathize. I think it's annoying that your work calendar has to be in a Microsoft product, which is going to be largely incompatible with whatever you're probably using for your personal calendar. I back up your decision not to put that app on your phone.

I don't have an email app on my phone. It causes headaches, I would say, maybe once or twice a week, but I think those headaches are worth it for the tradeoff of, oh, I can't get to my email, even if I wanted to on my phone. I get in trouble because of that sometimes I get into some rough situations occasionally where it would be really useful to check my email, but it also saves hundreds of temptations to check. Like just today, I was out at the National Arboretum with a friend. I brought my youngest with me, and we were out there for a couple hours.

It was a great Sunday day. I had my phone, but I couldn't check email on it. So all I could do is, like, if I needed to call my wife and ask her a question or tell her late coming home, I could, but that was about it. I got to say that's a better experience. and if I could also break that moment and see, oh, I have a message coming from this person. Oh, here's work intruding.

And so, yeah, it's a bit of a headache. Like, for example, I had to tell someone who I was talking to before that trip. I'm going to be off the grid till four, so, like, I can't answer any questions you have until then. We were trying to set up a meeting, et cetera, but a small price to pay. All right, so I back up that decision, too. So what should you do? Well, you're not able to do what I do. I use Google Calendar.

Georgetown uses Google Calendar. it's great. So I have a work calendar I keep that I share with my wife so she can see all of my work appointments. I have what I call a logistics calendar shows up on the same calendar, different color. These are things only I see. I use it for like scheduling and notes to myself. And then there's Georgetown events also get imported into this calendar so I can see automatically faculty meetings, for example, tenure review meetings. And they show, it's all in the same calendar and it's great.

I love that technology. I mean, I'm saying this just to make you jealous because you don't have that option. What you probably need to do is either keep those two worlds completely separate or put your personal stuff onto the Microsoft calendar. I think within the Microsoft ecosystem, you can have different types of events on your calendar. So, you know, if you have to share some of your calendar with other people so they know when you're busy or not, and you don't want them to see your personal events, you could probably make those a different calendar you track or a different type of event.

I mean, there's some logistical details here that aren't that interesting, but you might just have to put that stuff on your Microsoft calendar. So when you look at your Microsoft calendar, you see everything. Now, what happens if something comes up and you don't want to go load up your computer

to enter this to the calendar? Well, you should have a good capture system. If you're using a time block planner, put it right there in the next day. Like if it's the nighttime and something comes up and you need to schedule it, just put it on the notes for the next day's capture columns in the next day when you're doing your schedule,

and you're working at your office, you'll transfer that onto your calendar. Similarly, how do you know what's happening that day or the day's coming up if you don't have your phone with you? Well, you know, when you build your time block plan for the day, you see everything on both your personal calendar and your professional calendar, and you can mark it all down in your planner

and see what's going on. When you do your weekly plan, you can look out ahead and see what's coming up. I mean, what you're really losing here is, yeah, it's a bit of a pain that in the moment you can't check what's on your calendar on the phone, but that's probably okay. Now, your other option is just to keep your personal calendar separate, and have that be accessible on your phone because it's not a very stressful calendar.

The idea that you have access to your personal calendar anywhere, it's not a very stressful thing. And so if you just need to remind yourself, let's say you're working on your Microsoft calendar, you can look at your phone at your personal calendar to make sure that you don't overstep things or over-schedule things, and that would work too. So it's a bit of a pain, but it's not an insurmountable pain. And more importantly, I want to back up your decision to make your baseline standard is, no, I don't want this on my phone. I don't want my work calendar on my phone.

All right, with that standard, either of those two options, moving your personal into your work, or keeping your personal very accessible but your work not accessible and just using capture, et cetera, your weekly reviews, your shutdown routines to make sure

that you're not missing things. I think that is the way to go. You will be okay. And with that, I think we will be okay, wrapping up this episode. Do you want to find out how to submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast for details.

We'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast and until then, as always, stay deep.