Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 90: LISTENER CALLS: My Current Scheduling Setup

Episode Date: April 22, 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.Behind the Curtain: My Current Scheduling Setup [0:22]Book Recommendation: The Unspoken Rules [9:34]Listener Calls: - Perfectionism and time-block schedules. [12:58] - Constructing effective student schedules. [18:56] - Organizing the tasks that make up a project. [26:58] - Optimal task structure. [35:47] - RANT ALERT: social media and danger of algorithmic attention. [40:32]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 question's listener calls mini episode. No quick announcements today. I thought before we got started, I would do a brief look behind a curtain segment. So I just got back from vacation. Last week's episodes were pre-recorded, and I'm now recording this mini episode on Monday morning. So I just got back from vacation, and I spent three hours this morning wrangling my inbox. Now, of course, whenever I spend that much time dealing with an overload of obligations and requests and commitments, it puts me into a process-focused mindset.

Right? I mean, this is the mindset I talk about in my new book, A World Without Email, the mindset that says what you need to do in professional knowledge work is identify the different processes. That is, the things you do again and again in your professional life. And for each, actually answer the question, how do I implement this process? How do I collaborate with people? How does information flow, et cetera, with a goal of minimizing unscheduled messaging, unscheduled messaging being the thing that causes the context shifts,

the context shifts being to productivity poison that makes it very difficult to get good work done with your brain. So having to spend that many hours post vacation in my inbox put me into a process-focused mindset, really got me thinking and tuning up and checking in on and reviewing my own processes for the current moment in my professional life. I thought it might be useful for me to talk about some of these. Now, the key background, I would say, to my setup is that it changes a lot, depending on what season we're in and what's going on in my professional career. I mean, my professional career can differ a lot because I'm a professor and a writer. Professorships are very seasonal.

A summer is very different than a semester in which you're teaching two classes and have a big service commitment. A semester in which you're teaching one class without major service commitments is very different in a semester with two classes and major service commitments and so on. And as a writer, I mean, obviously, if you're finishing a book or doing a publicity tour, that's a very different period than if you're in between books or maybe you're in month four of of writing a book and it's just a background activity. So all my stuff is very seasonal.

So I have to keep revisiting my various processes and updating my implementations based on the current moment. And also some processes go away as not being relevant and new processes come in. So where am I right now? Well, in the spring semester at Georgetown, I am on a research fellowship. This is more or less like a sabbatical, but without the travel to another location. No teaching, no major service obligations. I'm focusing on some research problems that I outlined. in my proposal.

Of course, it's been a little bit busy in the first half of this semester because of book publicity stuff, but now that's starting to wind down. And so I use this vacation and this moment after the vacation is a time to really tune up, okay, post book publicity,

still in the middle of a research fellowship, what are my processes? The big thing I've been focusing on recently is my scheduling processes. Now, in a perfect world, when I'm on a research fellowship and not publicizing a book, my calendar would be more or less empty. I love the idea of an empty day, a day that you wake up and there's nothing on your calendar, and it's entirely up to you. I thrive if you give me self-direction. It's up to you

to figure out what to do. I'll structure that day great. Do a great mix of deep and shallow and quality leisure, and it'll be a great day for me. I get more stress when I have a lot of things on my calendar. However, even though my load is less than normal, because I'm not teaching, so I don't have all the things surrounding teaching and all the things surrounding major service commitments. There's still a bunch of stuff that has to happen. I mean, I still need to meet my students or my professional CS collaborators because I can't do research without talking to other people. So those meetings still exist on the books. There's still some service I'm doing, right? And we have to meet and talk about that. And of course, in my business, there's stuff you have to do. You got to talk to web

designers. You have to talk to your ad agency, right? There's stuff that has to happen. And I'm still doing publicity. So we've wound it down, but you can only wind it down so much, at least in my experience, there's always things to be done. And though I'm being more picky now, is still quite a bit of interviews and, well, we've got like podcast interviews and radio and newspaper and magazine interviews, a fair amount of that still going on. So I still have things to schedule. What is my scheduling philosophy. Well, for this particular moment when I'm on this research fellowship, what I am doing is focusing every morning, every morning is deep work. It's mainly CS research, but also writing. There are some other times I do reading and writing as well outside of the morning,

but the morning is when I really do my best CS work. Every morning, Monday through Friday, CS work. I don't schedule things before noon if I can get away with it. There's a few accept some international stuff has to happen early. And research meetings, I will schedule early in the morning because that's part of deep work on research, is meeting with my collaborators and talking with them about research. To the extent that's possible, I try to schedule phone calls and interviews and related professional appointments in the afternoon on Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. This is basically how I handle or I used to handle these type of appointments when college

campuses were open. So at Georgetown, I would always, like a lot of professors do this, would make the days I'm there teaching, the days I try to schedule all of my meetings and office hours, etc, because you knew for sure you were going to be on campus those days because you have to teach. So you might as well take advantage of that. It's okay, as long as I'm here, let's do all the stuff that has to happen in person. Well, we're not in person right now, and most of my work is virtual because it's, you know, people around the world in the country that I'm working with, but I'm keeping that same philosophy. So let's just pack it in the certain days. Those days are rough. I think it's better to pack it in than have it sprinkled everywhere.

So that's mainly when I meet. And then there's some exceptions, right? So faculty meetings, when they happen, tend to happen on Fridays at Georgetown. So I have some Friday faculty meetings. There's some other things. I have a program committee, a two-day program committee meeting coming up for a CS conference that's on a Monday and a Tuesday. And as I mentioned, there's some things, some meetings with people or some international things that have to happen on the other days. But that's basically when I try to schedule things. And I use Call and Lee. I'm using Cal and Lee right now for that. I've just told Callan Lee. these afternoons are my time.

I've hooked it up to my Google calendar. So if I book something in that time, it automatically, that availability gets noted by Calumly, and we'll try to book things in that time. And I'm in a mode now where I am sending people that CaliLink, if we're going to meet. So we'll crowd in those times, but leave the other times, leave myself with some breathing room.

The other thing I like about Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, is that it gives you a nice gradient into and out of the weekend. You know? So you get the Sunday. Like, yeah, it's Sunday. Kids are going back to school tomorrow.

It feels different, right? We're not out going on adventures or going out to eat or something like that. But the next day is going to be light on appointments because it's a Monday. And so I can really sort of get back and think about my week and make a good plan and get some execution and really get a good head of steam going. And same thing, Friday, pace yourself gradually into the weekend and have a Friday that has more, let's say, deep work

and contemplation and walking before you get to that sort of Shabbat that starts on Friday night. So I like that plan. So that's what I've been doing. A little technical detail. What I do with Calanley is then I have another appointment type called after hours. And I make it a different color. It's a red appointment. And I say, you know, don't use this unless I tell you to. And that's what I use if I need to schedule something with someone who can't fit during my preferred times. And maybe we talk a little bit. Like, look, I can only really do this on Monday afternoons or something. I'll just tell them like, okay, that's fine. Just let's do it two Mondays from now and the afternoon. But then I can point them towards that secret after hours appointment type and say,

use this to book it so that like it'll go on my calendar. It'll be in your calendar. We can have all the details. And you can, we can save that last step of having to talk about our calendars. You can automatically book it. So that's my secret for booking the things that don't fit into the more restricted times. So that's a little look behind a curtain about what I have been doing recently with my own productivity systems. We got a good show today. I'm looking at my listener calls here.

We have a couple about social media. We have an executive with some technical questions about tasks and project planning, someone talking about perfectionism and how it blows up time block scheduling and a college student asking if they should be working on weekends, of course, to find out how you can submit your own listener calls, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how. While there, sign up for my weekly newsletter where you get my famed weekly essay, which I have been sending out since 2007. I also wanted to give an unsolicited endorsement for a book that just came out this week.

It's a book called The Unspoken Rules, Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right. It is written by a young man named G-O-R-I-C-K-N-G. It's published by Harvard Business Review Press. Gork is a first-generation college student who went to Harvard and then went to Harvard Business School and does a lot of advising of other college students, especially first-generation college students, but also career advising. He did some advising at the Boston Consulting Group as well. Anyways, he wrote this book of...

Early career advice. So advice for people who are new in their career. I read it. I blurbed it. And I really thought it was sharp. Here's my blurb from the back cover. Incredibly smart, nuanced, and evidence-based career advice.

If you're just getting started your professional journey, you absolutely must read this book. I stand by that. Anyways, Goric reminds me a lot of me back when I was writing advice for students or writing career advice. And the thing that differentiated me from a lot of other people giving advice is that I was very, I guess, logical and hyperrational and really work through the systems that seem to matter and push away the conventional wisdom. Well, Gork does that as well.

Probably does it better than I did. I thought it was really smart advice. And I am a big believer in this book. So if you are somewhat early in your career or knows someone who is early in their career, check out the unspoken rules. It just came out this week. I think it is destined to be a classic. All right, so that is a enough preamble. I want to get started with the show. But first, as always, let's talk about one of the sponsors that makes the Deep Questions podcast possible. Blinkist. Blinkist, of course, is a subscription service where you get access to 15-minute summaries, both written and audio, for thousands of nonfiction best-selling books.

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And with that, let's get to our calls. Our first caller wants to know about perfectionism and its impact on time block scheduling. Hi, Kyle. I have an internal dragon that I have to fight, which I sometimes called perfectionism and impatience. And together, they can get me distracted easily and get me off my time block planning, which I made very deliberately to achieve my goals, like publishing a computer science paper. What usually happens is that something bothers me about something that I'm doing. So like, let's say, for example, I'm programming something and there is something that isn't perfect or isn't, there isn't like a tool for it.

And then I go down this rabbit hole and make it perfect. and then I thought it would take an hour and then it takes three hours to get it to the level that I want. And I think having this issue happen occasionally is okay, but when it happens to me daily, it gets in the way of me getting things done and delivering on my most important projects. So what advice do you have?

Well, let's start with some useful terminology. We can call what you're talking about here a runaway block. so you have blocked off some time for a given activity and the efforts on that activity spiral well beyond the boundary of the block you put aside for it in such a way that it could really disrupt the rest of your time block schedule. These are common. What makes runaway blocks a little bit difficult to deal with

is that there's two categories and the response is different depending on the category. So the first category is when you are, you're working on something that's core to your craft. You're working deeply on something that is core to your craft. It's one of the core things you do professionally. So, you know, you're a writer and you're working on an article and it just doesn't get away from you. You just really get into it.

And you're rolling and you're on a roll and it's starting to come together and you want to just keep going. Or you're a computer scientist and you're working on a proof and you put aside an hour and a half. But at minute 70, something clicks. and the ratchets and that lock start to click in the place like I got to keep going right I want to keep rolling with this I got to capture my thoughts

and you blow past that 90 minutes right those type of runaway blocks I think are okay right I mean the point of a time block schedule is just to make sure that you're being intentional

about your time that you're not just acting in a reactive manner you're trying to make the most of the time you have and for most people if it's a core deep work professional activity

if it's rolling past your block it's very pretty and useful what you're doing, so you should let that go. And then when you're done, step back and fix your schedule for what remains. I mean, of course, there's obvious exceptions. If you have unmovable things, like I need to go pick my daughter up from school, well, I can't blow past that block. I need to go do that. When I wouldn't worry about blowing up your schedule, if the reason why you're blowing it up is because you're in the flow of something that's really valuable and really useful. Because again, you can fix the schedule later, and the goal is

not to stick to your schedule no matter what. Your goal is to be intentional about your time. I think that's quite intentional. This proof is going well, this article is going well, this code is coming together. I want to keep rolling. The other type of runaway block, however, is more of the perfectionist fueled less core activity.

So as you're talking about, maybe you're writing some code, and it's fine, but you get obsessed about, you know, isn't there some sort of a numerator object I can use instead of this array that I'm roughly hacking together here? Now I really got to understand these enumeration objects, and now I'm on stack overflow,

and an hour later, I've gone down a rabbit hole, and it doesn't really change too much what my code does, but I've sort of satisfied some internal itch. That type of thing can drive you crazy, or some sort of formatting issue. I'm working on a paper. I'm typesetting a paper, and I want to get this table to look a certain way. I want multi-column rows with some shading.

I can't quite get it to work right, and I'm getting obsessed that I'm on Google and trying to find these examples, and you blow past your block. It's not that important. that you get that table format in that way right now, but you blew past the time. These type of runaway blocks are less useful.

It's a pain to keep destroying your schedule if you're destroying it not for the sake of something really valuable, but just because you get perfectionously caught on something. The way you deal with those second category runaway blocks, at least the way I recommend, is that as you see yourself getting near your block boundary, get up and walk away. Get up from your computer, get up from your notebook,

get up and walk away, go refill your coffee, get some water, come back, look at your schedule, walk away again and say, okay, okay, okay. What do I really want to do next? Do I want to change my schedule so I can spend more time working on this? Or do I want to just shut this down and move on to the next thing? And force yourself to actually explicitly in the situation, say, I want to keep working on this and force yourself to change the schedule before you keep working.

And you're like, all right, I want to get this enumeration object right. I think it's important that I learn it. You give yourself a pause to actually convince yourself that's important, and you have to go through the pain of changing your schedule and seeing the impact, and then you can go back to it. Now, in theory, look, you still get that thing done, but you've given yourself a pause, you've given yourself some time to think about,

do I really want to do this, to break that addictive perfectionist momentum in your brain, you break that for a second and get to see things fresh. So that's what I'd recommend. So if you're in the middle of something you know for sure is core, you're writing, whatever, and you roll through a block, roll through a block. If you're not sure if it's core

or if you're sure it's not core, you have to insist on the rule that, look, I can keep working on this, but not until I get up, leave the room, get some water, come back, and update my schedule and say, here's how much more I want to work on it. Because for the non-core activities, probably seven times out of ten, you'll look at that and say, I actually, I don't want to spend 30 more minutes on this. It screws up the rest of my schedule. It's not that important.

All right, so a little hack there, but I think that will help you separate those two types of runaway block categories. All right, our next question here is student-focused. Hi, Cal. It's Dexter here again. I previously asked you in the past some advice for my girlfriend, who's an elementary school teacher here in Montreal, and your advice worked perfectly. Now I have a different question. My question is, as a university student, should I be working on weekends? I already time block everything and segment my days, so I'm doing nothing but deep work along with my usual lectures on Zoom.

I wanted to know, is this a best idea, is to just be able to shut down my weekends and enjoy some really high-quality leisure activities and start fresh on Monday? I wanted your thoughts. Thanks. Well, Dexter, I will give you my current thoughts on the way that college students have scheduled their time. This takes ideas that were first presented in my books, how to win at college and how to become a straight-day student, and I've updated them some since then. So here's the latest, greatest version of my thinking on college student scheduling. First, your calendar is going to play a really big role in structuring your life as a college student. And what I recommend you do at the beginning of each semester is first put all your classes and all your labs, all your recitation session. So basically all of your obligated classroom time, put it all in your calendar.

Put anything you know is going to happen on a regular basis like club meetings for extracurricular, sports practices, your work. Get that all in your calendar as well. I mean, this is kind of obvious. Next, and here's where it gets a little bit more interesting. for each of your classes, and for each of the regularly occurring type of work produced by that class. So, for example, in a math class, you might have a problem set due every other week. For a chemistry class, you might have a lab you have to do once a week. For a literature class, there might be an essay-based homework you have to hand in monthly.

For a literature-based class, there might be books you have to read, right? That there's a certain amount of reading you have to do every week, right? So you figure out for each class, what is the work that I know occurs regularly and put aside time for all of this work on your calendar? Like any other meeting or appointment. Make it the same times on the same days every week. Monday afternoon, I do my first draft of my CS problem set and on Thursday morning I finish my CS problem set. Friday all day is when whatever I do my list. literature reading. It's a reading day. I go to the library. I get all my reading done.

Everything you know is going to happen regularly. You get it on your calendar. This gives you an honest appraisal not only of how much time your classes are going to take, but it allows you to be somewhat intentional about when you do that work. The rhythm is also useful. I always do problem sets now. I always do reading now. I do it in this location. It's always this time, always this day. No willpower needed, no special scheduling needed. You just execute. I call this the student work day. I talk about it in some of my earlier book. Everyone should do this. You see the regular work you have to do, make it clear.

All right, one other thing you should do on your calendar is look through your syllabi for each of your classes. And look at the big non-recurring assignment. So maybe you have a test. Maybe you have a term paper due. Right, you want to mark those due dates on your calendar for sure. But for each, you also want to figure out, when do I want to start my work on this thing that is due? for a test, probably two weeks before is where you should begin to regularly start doing your active recall studying for a large paper. It might be a month before.

And you mark that on your calendar. Okay, start working on term paper, this or that. And I would even recommend every week leading up to each of these things that's due, you should have a note at the beginning of each week working on the term paper, studying for this test. All right, so that's all on your calendar as well. Now let's fast forward to being in the semester itself. You come up to a particular week at Sunday. You're working on your schedule for the week ahead. You go to your calendar.

Your calendar is the keeper of the keys here, right? I mean, you see everything you need to do, all the regular work, your classes, your job, everything's on there. And you're like, okay, I'm just going to follow this calendar. But you also see those notices right there for Monday about I should be working on preparing for this test this week. I should be continuing to work on this term paper that's due in three weeks this week. And you should build out a weekly plan where you put aside time for those things, those non-recurring things that need to happen that week. And you figure out what days you're going to do it.

And I would say just put it on your calendar. And college students can be very calendar focused. Unlike other knowledge work jobs, it's not very reactive. You're not dealing with emails all day. You don't have sudden Zoom invites and 64 requests and quick questions you have to answer. There's a very structured, more predictable workflow. So you can really just let your calendar spell out your work. Now we can get to the question of whether or not you need to work on the weekends.

Now, there's two places where this will be relevant. First, it'll be relevant when you're doing your scheduling in advance of the regularly occurring work that happens in your courses. You could put some of this work on the weekend or not. And this is going to be taste. I used to like to try to keep regularly occurring work within the work week, but it could be taste. Maybe you like to do Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon because it's quiet on campus. You like to go to a certain library and get a lot of work done midday on Sunday or something.

And so maybe that's when you work on something just due on Monday. That's fine, but it's taste. That's one place you decide. And then two, when you're doing your weekly plan and trying to fit in, okay, when do I work on this term paper? When do I work on this exam that I'm studying for? And you try to find the time for it. And if you can't find the time during the week, you might use some weekend time as well. So you might use the weekend, but it's up to you.

Now, your schedule might force it. If you have a ton of stuff, maybe you have to use the weekend, but at least you're being really clear about what you're going to do when. Now, a couple of heuristics, I think, are useful. If you're a college student, evenings are not a bad time to work. I think a lot of college students work in the evenings. In fact, it can be kind of lonely if you're not working in the evenings because students are off studying, but don't work too late. So if possible, have a heuristic where you don't work past. I used to do like seven.

And if you are going to work on the weekend, I used to like to have one block I did on one of the weekend days and then keep the other weekend open for other types of stuff. Now, you might find keeping your weekend completely open makes you feel better. And if your schedule's not too crowded, you should be able to easily do that. Other people like to work on the weekend a little bit so they can keep their week less crowded. But what's important here is intention. You are clear about all the work that needs to be done when it's going to be done.

you have enough distance and moment for reflection when you make those decisions that you can be very intentional about it. What you want to avoid is just saying what's due tomorrow, what do I have to do today? That is scheduling death for a student. That's going to put you in a situation where you're working late on a Sunday because something is due Monday and you haven't started. That is where you're going to do it all nighter on Tuesday because you have a lab report and a paper due and you didn't think about it until you got to Tuesday. So doing this type of calendar based in advance scheduling. It's going to give you so much more control over your student life. And if you're not overloading yourself, you're not doing this triple major nonsense or 30 extracurricular nonsense,

you're doing less, doing better, knowing why you're doing it. The whole Zen valedictorian strategy I talk about in the old entries on my study hawks blog at Calnewport.com, you can Google Zen valedictorian to find out more about that. You will find that you probably have a lot more time than you you think once you're careful about it is a great place to be as an undergraduate. You work when you work, you're done when you're done, you have your evenings, you have a lot of your weekends. weeks are really easy, some weeks are harder, but you're in control. So, Derek, that is what you should be aiming for. All right, let's leave the student world and go back to the world of executives and high-powered knowledge work and get into some technical questions here about

task scheduling and projects. Hi, Cal. My name is Sarah, and I'm an executive in London, one of your many London listeners. I have two questions for you. I actually have a ton, but I'm just going to give you two right now. Firstly, I'm wondering how you record your tasks and whether you record your tasks and blocks according to their process or their product. I've come across a bunch of different scores of thoughts on this, but that seem to fall into two groups. One, advocating, recording goals in which you spell out the desired outcome or goal or end state, and the second, advocating, chunking things into almost component processes and actions. And I'm in a indecision as to which is optimal.

Well, let's pause here and answer this first question, and then we'll hear your second query. Roughly speaking, in my productivity systems, there's two different types of projects. There are projects where it is obvious what the component actions are, and there's projects where they're more specific and one-off, right? Like, you really do need to enumerate them. So for an example of the first type might be I'm working on an article. I mean, I kind of know what that means, right? I know the process of writing an article.

There's an early process where I'm reading and doing interviews and then a process where I'm writing drafts. And I don't really need to write down tasks. What I need to do is make sure I just have time put aside to make progress. On the other hand, there might be a project like preparing a pre-order campaign for a book launch. I think that's very one-off. There's 10 different tasks that probably need to be done. And they're very specific and it's not obvious what they are.

It's like, okay, I got to do this with my web designer. I've got to gather this information. And I really need to list out what those tasks are. So there's processes or projects rather where I know what to do. I just need time. And there's projects where I need to actually list out what that project is made up of. All right. I deal with both of them differently.

The thing that is common to both of those type of projects, at least in my systems, is that they will be captured in my strategic plans. This is also what we sometimes call semester plans or quarterly plans. It's all the same terminology. That's where I keep track of what I'm working on. And when I go to my weekly plan, I see, oh, of these ongoing projects, what am I trying to make progress on this week? And in my weekly plan, which again is freestyle, not highly structured text base, it's why the weekly plan pages of my time block planner are just blank line pages. I'll work out what that means.

Like, oh, I'm working on an article this week. Oh, I'm working on. I've got to make progress on my pre-order campaign this week. And I sort of write out what I'm going to do this week, which projects I'm working on from my strategic slash semester slash quarterly plans and roughly speaking, how I want to make progress. Now, if the project is one of these of the first category where it's obvious what the work means, then all I'm really doing in my weekly plan is figuring out when I'm going to do that work. Every day for the first hour, I'm working on this article. Friday afternoon is really when I'm going to work on this article.

So there's never a task that is involved here. It's a project that's on a strategic plan. It gets noted in a weekly plan that I'm going to work on it during certain times, and then I actually just work on it. And I know what that means. If it is a project that has specific tasks I need to list out, I will do that on the Trello board. On the Trello board for the appropriate role that that project is related to. So if it was this case study of a pre-order campaign for a book launch,

it would be on my writer-related Trello board, and I'll give it its own column. And then I'll have a card for each of the task. That allows me to attach information and files, etc. On each of the cards related to those tasks, as I've learned things relevant to this process or get new information. And so that's where those tasks will exist. When I'm doing my weekly plan, though, I will still put aside time. Okay, I need to make progress on my pre-order campaign. I need to get a few things done.

So I put aside some time on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning to work on it. And then when I get to those days, and I'm time-block planning, I can then go back and look at the appropriate list in Trello to figure out, okay, what do I actually want to do? Which task am I going to do today? Right, so I hope that clarifies. So just to summarize, the thing that's in common of all projects is they exist on a plan. whether you use a quarterly plan or call a strategic plan.

And that gets translated closer to action each week in your weekly plan. Okay, here's the projects I'm going to work on and when and how I'm going to work on them. And where they differ is some projects, I never have to enumerate what that means. I just know what it means. I just need to know when to do it. And other projects, I need to do when to do it and have a list somewhere of the task. I want to think too much more than that, though. You can really go down a productivity prawn rabbit hole here.

and get up to your neck and omnifocus type views or this or that. And I don't think that's going to get you too far. There's only so much you can do with your setup. Like if you need to keep track of what a project means, keep track of it somewhere. The most important thing for all project work, and this is not technically demanding from a productivity system perspective, is know what you're working on and when you're going to work on it during a given week.

Before we get to the second half of this question, I want to talk briefly about grammarly, and in particular their grammarly premium product. Now you've heard me talk about grammarly premium before. You know I'm impressed by it. This is software that runs on all of your devices and works with all of your favorite sites and apps, be it Outlook or Gmail or Twitter or LinkedIn.

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suggestions. How to write that sentence more clearly. How to make that more concise. How to get rid of unnecessary or redundant words. It can also give you vocab suggestions. Oh, that word is overused. This phrase will keep the readers more engaged.

It is really eerie and spectacular to watch this thing in action. I don't know what artificial intelligence mojo makes this work, but I've been very impressed by it as I've been working with it. Clear expression is critical. Grammally premium is going to help you express yourself much clear, which means people will take you more seriously.

Your thoughts will have more impact, and you'll get more of what you're trying to get in your professional life. So I cannot endorse Grammarly Premium more. It is a cool product, and I'm very impressed by how well they get it to work. Now, here's the thing. You can get 20% off Grammally Premium if you sign up at Grammarly.com slash

deep. That slash deep being the magic piece that gets you that 20% off. So that's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. I also want to talk about four-sigmatic's ground mushroom coffee with lion's main mushroom. You know I really enjoy this coffee for a couple reasons. One, it tastes good. It's a little bit lower caffeine and that ground mushroom gives it a nutty, smoother flavor. So it's not as harsh as black coffee, but you don't have to put cream into it.

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So to summarize, you'll save up to 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, and let's move on now with the second of the two questions that our productivity-minded executive was asking. And secondly, a tech question about how you configure tasks in your week's and strategic planning. I'm really looking for a tech tool that lets you choose between viewing only one particular project at a time or looking at the whole shebang for when you're doing weekly planning sessions or whatever. I really like the focus that comes from viewing just one

project when I'm working on that work block, on that time block. But when I'm planning, I find it helpful to be able to scan through and also find the spatial configuration really helpful when it's all in one view. Well, I agree that the spatial configuration of how you display what you need to do can make a difference in terms of getting a really good gestalt understanding of, here's what's on my plate, here's how it's organized, here's what needs attention. Just having everything, for example, in one large, long list of tasks can be not nearly as useful as if this information is more structured.

Here's how I structure my task. As I've talked about before, I use tasks. boards. My tool of choice is Trello, but there's other task board tools that can work. You can also do this in notebooks. You can do this simply with like shared documents and just build your own tables. Like the tool doesn't really matter here. But I like the task board analogy. I have a separate task board for every professional role. So here, whatever your main roles are in work, you know, project supervisor for this project, head of the hiring committee, whatever, has its own board. And then each board is divided

up into columns. As I talked about it, the answer to your first question. Some of those columns might be connected to specific projects in which it's not obvious what the related constituent tasks are, and I want to see them. So putting out the CFP for the new position where hiring might have its own column. And then there's other types of general columns, just general type of tasks that need to be done, things you're waiting to hear back from people on, things that need to be clarified but aren't quite urgent, things you're working on this week, et cetera, right? I find that type of structure to be about optimal. I, when doing my weekly plans, I flip through these different boards and you very

quickly get the understanding of your task. And it does help to have them in these columns because then everything related to a particular project, you just see it boom in the context of that project. And that's somehow less overwhelming and daunting than if they were just items 10 to 15 of a list of 600 things. You look through these things, you do some configure, okay, this was done, let me update this board. Okay, I heard from this person, I'm moving away from there and you have a really good all in one sense of what you need to do, and then you can build your plan. Now, the second bit of your issue here is you're talking about when you're actually executing, let's say you're in a block related to a particular project. You don't necessarily

you're saying want to go back to that Trello board and see everything. I mean, first of all, I don't think that's a huge problem because if the things you're looking to do during this block are all in one column, you can kind of filter out the other stuff pretty easily. But I get you, some people want to be just focused on the things you're supposed to be doing. In that case, I would transcribe the particular task that make up a given time block into your time block planner. Put a number in the block, circle it in the upper right of the daily planning pages. Put the number up there and list next to it. The task that you're actually doing during that block. So you have an hour and a half to work on the hiring committee. There's five things you're trying to get done. You put like a one with a circle

in that block, and then up in the upper right, you put a one with a circle and list those five things. So that one is the key. So you can associate that particular list with that particular block. We put it in the upper right because as you correct your time block plan throughout the day, as you move one column to another to another, you're moving down the rows. So you're very unlikely, unless you have a terrible plan, you're very unlikely to hit the upper right quadrant of your time block grid. So that's where we list out our tasks.

And of course, if you have no idea what we're talking about, go to time block. Planner.com and this isn't for the question asker here but for the listener who doesn't know we're talking about Go to timeblockplanner.com and watch the video and you'll see you'll see what we're talking about here. All right. So I hope that makes sense. I think one board per one board per roll with multiple columns is a great way to structure spatially information that's useful when you have particular tasks that you're executing during a block and put them on your time block plan itself and then you don't have to break your concentration and context switch back to that task list after you finish each individual thing. All right, this episode is running a little long. That's okay, though.

Let's just do one more question. Let's transition a little bit away from, well, this is work related, but it's also social media related. So an interesting combination of a couple of different topics we'd like to talk about here. Hi, Cal. First, thanks for sharing the fruits of your deep work with the world through your books, blog, and podcast.

Your advice is high quality information. in a sea of shallow content. My question stems from the recent experience of getting tenure. Until then, I had implemented your tips only half successfully. I had found, in particular, that my social media use was endogenous to my insecurities. I felt the need to trumpet my achievements online and to collect likes on Facebook because I was not genuinely confident. That changed quite dramatically with tenure. I not only quit social media, but I stopped craving it, which had not happened during my prior social media detoxes. I feel utterly liberated from outside expectations, yet still extremely ambitious, focused, and productive in the best ways. What advice would you offer my past

self, who was still an insecure assistant professor? Well, I really appreciate you sharing this experience, because it underscores an important point about social media that I think is often, it's often overlooked. It's also something I sometimes get in trouble for talking about. So now I can blame you if I get in trouble for talking about what I'm about to talk about. But here's something I want to emphasize and then we'll extract the general lesson here. Go back and reflect on the period when we transition from blogs to social media. when this transition really began to happen right around whenever this was, 2008 to 2012. Why did social media become so much more popular, right?

So we had this Web 2.0 revolution that happened. Web 2.0 was all about individuals being able to much more easily publish information and connect to and comment on other people's information, right? So we went from this world of static websites run by big companies to a world where I could have a blog and you can have a blog and I can subscribe to your blog on RSS and leave comments on your blog underneath it and there could be the users themselves could be generating and discussing content.

A major revolution in the history of information, very critical. The early software like blogs got taken over by social media. Now most people, when they look back at this, say yes, it's because social media was easier. And this was one of the big selling points of social media during that 2008 to 2012 period is that it's a pain to set up a blog and Facebook's very important.

easy. The interface is unified and nice and everyone knows what it looks like and all your other friends are on there and you can connect to them much easier and they can see what you're doing much easier. They don't have to figure out about RSS and subscribing. They can just click a button that says follow and then see your things. Simplicity was one of the selling points. But there is another selling point, a psychologically tuned selling point that I think was very important and often overlooked, which is social media collectivized. attention. So if you had a blog, you could publish whatever you wanted, anyone could interact with you

and comment on it, but it was hard to get attention. I know this from personal experience. Go back and look at early 2007 study hacks. You'll see a lot of empty comments, a lot of posts that very few people read. It was very difficult to actually get someone to give you their attention, to come to your URL, to subscribe to your feed. And attention was somewhat hard one. Now, when you got it, as I eventually did with study hacks, as I published books and honed my ideas and built a reputation, it could be very fulfilling and very satisfying.

But not everyone could get it, and it was hard to get. What social media offered was attention for everybody. Now, at first, the social dynamics of this, the social dynamics was built heavily on your friendship network. I talk about this in deep work. There's this original model of social media where when it was still focused mainly on connecting to people you know, there was a sort of informal social contract. I will give likes or comment on your post if you give likes or comment on my post, right? There's one that happened to the world of blogging.

If in 2006 or 2007 I published some photos of my trip to the pumpkin patch, there would be crickets. Who cares? In 2010 or 2012, if you published that on Instagram, well, your friends who follow you just to be nice, well, like, hey, cool, looks good, beautiful, right? So now suddenly we are collectivizing attention. I will pay attention to you if you will pay attention to me. I will give some feedback to your thoughts or pictures or observations

or documentation of your life if you do the same for me. Now, everyone could get a taste of something that psychologically is very alluring and very powerful. People paying attention. As social media technology evolved, especially as we evolved away from connecting the people we know being the major use of social media, they got much more sophisticated about how they could package up, commoditize, and use as an inducement attention.

So now what you actually get with social media services, especially services like TikTok, is they'll actually algorithmically manipulate this feeling of attention. If you're on TikTok, it's not like the old Instagram days. We're like, yeah, I'm being followed by seven people I know. who we have an informal social contract we look at each other's feeds and comment

by the time you get to TikTok you just have an algorithm that will strategically dole out views of your videos in an intermittently reinforced way so pretty early on if you sign up for TikTok pretty early on it'll take one of your early videos and it will show it to a lot of people and your view count will jump up

and it's attention and it feels great and then it'll cut it back again you're like oh I'm so close I must almost have come across some format that's going to get me more attention So they've really exploited this drive of the power of attention from other people. Let's get rid of the pretense of, yeah, it's friends, keeping up with friends and just algorithmically dole out views in a way that's going to touch that button and make you feel good. It's one of the things that make social media very powerful, right, is that it is algorithmized, digitized attention.

There's a few things that we care about more. which brings us back to your original story. You see, once you had in your career built up a more stable and resilient and verifiable source of respect and attention, your papers were getting cited, you were respected in your field, you were granted tenure, once you had that from another source, the shall-word digitized, sort of algorithmically doled out attention that social media provides, suddenly became a lot less alluring. That fundamental human need was being satisfied in another way. I think this plays a big role in why when we enter the real major social media era, that sort of wave two in 2008 to 2012, why I wasn't that tempted by services at that point

in a way that other people were. I mean, part of that was by then, you know, I had a website already that through years of work and publishing books and such had built up an audience. I already had an audience. I was already getting that attention online. I had books that were doing well. My academic career was rolling well. I had a lot of sources of sort of strongly verified

attention and respect from other people that made me feel really good. And so I didn't have that same craving. And this brings us to the danger of social media. I mean, there's nothing wrong. Let's be clear. There's nothing necessarily terribly wrong about getting attention through these digitized platforms.

But you've got to be really aware of how powerful that is and how that can really trap you in an island of the lotus eaters type scenario when it comes to professional accomplishments because you're saying, well, I just like this. I have views. I have likes. Why am I going to spend all month trying to get a peer-reviewed paper published? Or why am I going to really put in the effort to get this community group in my town up and running when there's all sorts of people that I follow on Twitter that we do a lot of back and forth. But the digital, the digital attention, the digital connections, though sometimes quite real, can also tend to be quite ephemeral. There's this hard to avoid law of nature that in all

aspects of your life, if you want something really great and rewarding, typically hard work or difficult work is required. If you want the benefits of really strong relationships, you actually have to sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on behalf of those relationships. You can't get the same thing just by doing emojis and quick comments on social media posts. At some point, you have to spend time with real people. Sacrifice for that person. Be there for them when they need you. Help them, give them time, see them face to face, right?

You're never going to necessarily get the same strength just in this digital simulacrum. Same thing when it comes to work. You can get all these views and you can get all of these likes. But what did you actually do to get those views in the way? likes. You're making pithy comments. You're retweeting links. Like, that's fine. But how can that possibly give you the same professional advancement or fulfillment or stability of applying and honing a hard-won craft? That peer-reviewed paper that you had the right that helped you get tenure was way harder than getting a claim on Twitter. But it's also giving you something that's way more

stable and way more deeply satisfying and way more probably useful to the world than just getting that acclaim on Twitter, right? So in the end, things that are valuable require you to have something valuable to offer in return. That's usually non-trivial sacrifice, non-trivial time honing of craft, right? So my advice, I guess, to go back to where we started, the right advice for someone in your same situation back when you were an assistant professor and a little bit more insecure and and thought you need to be on social media

and that a claim on social media mattered is don't be too attracted by the allure of digital attention. It is often a cheap substitute for hard one attention. Hard one attention is hard work. But once you have it, you're almost certainly in a much better situation than if all of your self-respect and connection and accomplishment is based on this teetering pile of likes, views, and retweets.

So my advice is turn off that phone, get back to thinking, get back to writing. All right, we went a little long today, so let's wrap up this episode. Thank you, everyone who submitted their questions. To find out how to submit your own listener calls, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. And while you're there, sign up for my email newsletter. We'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Beard. questions podcast and until then as always stay deep