Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 96: LISTENER CALLS: Emotional Distractions

Episode Date: May 13, 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.  - Managing a "waiting on" list. [2:57] - Emotion-driven attention residue. [9:40]  - Drifting from time block schedules. [15:29] - Relationship Counseling: Batching dirty dishes? [20:48] - Organizing research. [25:39] - Emotions, energy, and productivity. [32:20]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. No quick announcements. A quick reminder, however, if you want to submit your own questions for these listener calls mini episodes, you can find out how at calnewport.com slash podcast. It's easy to do. You can record the question straight from your web browser. We got a good collection of questions today. we got some on attention residue, one on keeping track of a lot of research papers,

something about writer's block and emotion, which is pretty interesting. I'm even asked to help resolve a dispute, a dispute that a couple is happening, and I think you will agree. It is something I resolve with aplom and clarity, so you can look forward to all of that. But before we get started, let me first briefly thank one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. I am talking about Magic Spoon. You have heard me say before. One of my favorite childhood memories is eating that treat cereal that was terrible for you, but oh so good in the moment.

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Use the promo code Cal at checkout and you will save $5 off your order. this offer is good anywhere in the U.S. or Canada, but you have to use that code Cal at checkout. That's magic spoon.com slash Cal and use that code Cal to save $5. All right, let's kick off the show with a question about one of my favorite features of the trello boards I use to organize my tasks. Hi, Cal. My name's Anna from Anchorage, Alaska. My question is, how do you keep track of your waiting on list? Do you go back over unanswered emails once a day, once a week?

Do you just wing it? Do you just happen to notice things are missing? Because I usually don't. So any advice you have on this is much appreciated. Thank you. Well, Anna, I appreciate this question because it allows me to talk in a little bit more detail about the waiting on list, which is something I mention briefly often, but I don't know if I've really dived into it too much recently. So as long-time listeners know, to organize my tasks, I have a different Trello board for every role in my professional life.

That Trello board has tasks and notes on cards. Those cards go into columns. Those columns correspond to categories. And one of those categories is waiting on. So the basic idea here is if I'm waiting to hear back from someone about something, I can put a card, remind me of that, the waiting on column. I might have some details in there. You know, I'm waiting to hear back from web designer

with their price for the thing I proposed them, waiting to hear back from, you know, Scott about the meeting we're trying to set up and when he might be available. Now, there's a couple benefits to this tactic. One, it helps you better get to just salt of everything on your plate. I mean, a significant aspect often

of a knowledge worker's current workload includes things that is not technically in their court right now. It's in someone else's court, but it is work that's ongoing. And you want to see that because you really want to be able to look at the Trello Board for one of your roles and come away really quickly with an accurate sense of how much is on your plate, what status that work is in, what type of work is on your plate. And if you have the stuff that you're waiting to hear back from someone else just not show up anywhere, then you can get an inaccurate picture of what's really going on in your work life.

also your mind might not fully let it go. I'd say, yeah, look, I sent the email to the web designer. But it's important that we get this website done. And what if they don't get back? I should probably still think about this. So we don't forget it. And as David Allen teaches us, when you have these, quote, open loops, end quote, going in your head,

it uses up cognitive resources and it creates anxiety. So having it written down in a waiting on column where you will see it every day, really helps you release it from your mind. Second advantage is, if someone doesn't get back to you, you're waiting on something and it's gone on too long, now's your reminder is to follow up.

You know, what I would typically do is maybe at the beginning of my week. That's when I do my organization. I'm really looking at the Trello Board and updating it and building my weekly plan. That's usually the time I'll see, hey, you know, I haven't heard back from so-and-so about this issue.

It's been too long. It's been a couple weeks. I'm glad I have the reminder of seeing that card on the waiting on list. Let me send them a note right now. And a lot of notes will come out for me early in the week when I'm doing my weekly planning because that's when I can really spending time on my trellaboard. And so things don't get forgotten. You're able to follow up on things that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks. So that's very useful. Third, it reduces obligation hot potato. So one of the more common traps that people that are casual, about their productivity fall into is they don't like the cognitive burden

of something being on their plate. They get a sense of relief when that thing is no longer on their plate. So here's an email and an overstuffed inbox that represents some sort of obligation or ongoing project that we have to resolve. If I can shoot this off to someone else and say thoughts or what about next week

or I don't know or some sort of non-sequitur, whatever, it's off my plate and on their plate and in the moment you get a little bit of relief. Of course, long-term obligation and hot potato doesn't help because they'll shoot something else back to you and you'll shoot it back to them and every time it's creating

more unscheduled messages and more contact shifts and very little progress that's actually being made on the task. Being in the habit of putting a, I'm waiting to hear from this person on this thing card into your trailer board add some friction into that process.

Now you can't just say thoughts, boom, and you're on to the next message. You don't just type thoughts. You now have to go to your trellaboard and add a card. It says, I am waiting for thoughts from this person on these notes. And as you're writing it down,

A, that friction is enough that you'll probably say, I should just think through and write a smarter message in the first place or solve this on my own or wait until an upcoming meeting. Having to actually sit there and write down what you're waiting to hear back on

forces you to confront the ineffective shallowness of your obligation hot potato that you were playing there. And it puts a governor on that type of behavior, which in the end is good for your productivity. So for all those reasons, I like having waiting on lists. All right, so Anna, to your question, you're asking about how do you actually build these lists?

You were talking about, for example, doing sweeps of your inbox and try to remind yourself what you're waiting to hear about. Don't do any of that. Things should go onto this list at the moment, at the moment that the obligation for the other person is created. So in other words, as you send an email to someone else that you're expecting to reply from, that's when you put a card on the waiting on list. as you're in a meeting and someone says, great, you know, Anna, I will get you, I will get you those numbers.

Right there, you're writing down, you know, right there in the capture columns and your time block planner or whatever else you use, you're writing down right there so that when you get to your schedule, shut down complete ritual at the end of the day and you see your capture columns right there and you're processing those capture columns,

it goes into your waiting on list. So in other words, you should be generating these cards for the list at the moment that the person in question, and enters that status that you're waiting on them. There is no need beyond that to just do a general purpose sweep and think, what am I forgetting? What is it that I'm waiting on?

You don't have to do that from scratch. It should be a reactive action. I sent an email waiting on card. Someone just told me they're going to send me something. I write it down immediately. And when that get processed, it goes right into a Trello card. I'm on a phone call. Someone says, okay, I will get that to you.

Right there on the phone call, I'm adding that to my Trello list. I'm on a Zoom meeting. As someone brings up, like, we will get you back the report by next week. You are writing right there on Trello on your computer. Boom, adding that card out of your head locked in. You'll see it. You won't forget it. You get all the advantages.

All right, Anna, I hope that was helpful. Good question. We'll move on now to a question from someone who has a fantastic name. Hi, Cal. My name is also Cal. I'm a marketer in the UK at the moment, and I've been a fan of your blog and books for a while now. so thank you for all your work. I'm currently working my way through your new book,

A World Without Email, and my question is about Sophie Leroy and her work on attention residue, and the way it inhibits our ability to perform later tasks. In her study, she's asking participants to perform a task after either completing or not completing a word puzzle and then being measured on that subsequent test.

I actually don't know if this goes far enough, because in my experience, the times when I have the highest attention residue, is when I get an emotionally charged email for my boss that I don't have time to deal with or I get a message from somebody reporting to me that I can't address. If a simple word puzzle can impact our performance this much, I would think that something that activates the emotional reptilian brain would make this even worse. I was just thinking it would be funny if this question was just me asking a question to myself

and the question was just mainly compliments about myself. All right, hold on. I'm writing this down. Good idea. All right, so Cal number two, let's get to your question here. A quick clarification. Actually, in Sophie's researching, the experiment you're talking about, the word puzzle wasn't the distraction. It was the task that was happening when the person was distracted.

I believe the distraction was the experimenter coming in and asking the subject to fill out a form. They said, oh, we forgot to get you to fill out this form. Can you do that real quick? but your greater point is taken here. It was an emotionally neutral distraction that was being used in these experiments. And you're saying, well, what if the distraction has some emotional valency,

would that make the attention residue stronger? Now, I don't know specific research that measures this, but I have to imagine that's true. It's like that Bill Maher sketch. I don't know this for a fact, but it's true. anecdotally speaking, there's two different types of cognitive context switch. So things that you can see that captures your attention that have the strongest ability to capture and ensnare your attention to make it all the more difficult to bring your attention

back fully to the original target. Number one, things that are emotionally charged. Number two, things that involve urgent communication or needs or request from people in your proverbial tribe, so social connections who need something from you. So clearly, when you see something that's emotionally very charged, that activates a lot of circuits unrelated to whatever work task you were doing, and those are very primary circuits. Strong emotional reaction circuits are going to take precedence. Let's say over the subtle pattern of activation that you had to spend a long time pulling together

so that you could make your subtle computer code or the chapter you're writing or the argument that you're trying to make in a memo, that's a real subtle. fragile connection of interconnected semantic networks here, that's going to get swamped out if anger or sadness or outrage enters the scene. And then the other issue I mentioned was urgency from social connections or social animals. I talk about this in a world without email. We really take seriously managing one-on-one connections with people in our tribe. It's key to our survival. So having a request from someone you know, but then not resolving that request, trying to then put your attention back to the primary task is also incredibly distracting because

your mind says, whoa, whoa, whoa, forget that. We need to help this tribe member who needs something because if we don't, they won't share food when there's a famine and we'll starve. Here's the problem for modern knowledge workers. What are the two biggest sources of digital distraction? A, social media, B, communication tools like email. What does social media deliver you? incredibly emotionally valent content. There are algorithms sifting through tons of data about you and other people like you to find you just the right mix of content that's going to press your buttons because that's what fosters engagement.

Terribly distracting. And of course, what do you get from email or Slack? You're going to see a lot of messages from people you know who need things from you and you can't answer most of them right then. Why? Because you're just checking your inbox real quick because it's one of these mini asynchronous back and forth conversations is going on and you need to see if the next. next message came back to you, so you have to check your inbox real quick because they need

a response fast when it does come, but you see all these other messages from people you care about or work forward or in your social network who need things. You can't respond to them right then. Both of these things is a catastrophe to your ability to concentrate. It causes huge mental fatigue, huge distraction, anxiety, and general dissatisfaction. So it's a really good point, Cal number two, that the type of things that distract us is like the worst possible types of distractions if you're doing knowledge work. And it's why when I talk about what I call deep breaks, so if you're working really long on something really commonly demanded, you need to take a break, you want to minimize context shift. And I always say, don't look at the internet, don't look at your

inbox, because of exactly those two reasons. Pick up a novel and read some pages, go for a walk, listen to music. These things are not going to be emotionally valent. They're not going to be showing you request from people in your social network that require responses. It's going to be much less diverting. So we are yet again, this is another example of yet again of how terrible we are at actually working effectively with our brains.

All right. So speaking of working effectively, let's do a question here about drifting away from time box schedules. Hi Carl, my name is Zaid, I'm a first year at Merrick School from Iraq. So I have a trouble sticking or getting back to my deep work schedule when I drift. If I plan in seven, eight hours of deep work, I end up with, most of the days I end up with two or three hours. It is a habit now. If I drift from the plan, I procrastinate on looking for ways to get back to studying, like articles or videos.

all I need in this specific time is starting again and sticking to the process. I'm waiting until I schedule time for adjusting my approach on habits, maybe after my shutdown ritual or once a week. I am doubting if I can get back to a focused intention on life. Well, first of all, this might be our first question from a listener from Iraq, so that's exciting. we're increasing the list of countries from which we have heard queries. Now, onto your particular query, this is a common issue, of course, drifting from your time block schedule. And there's a lot of different reasons for it.

Now, in your case, I have three thoughts. Number one, you might be scheduling too much deep work. I mean, you mentioned you're trying to do eight hours of deep work, but you find yourself drifting off after two to three hours. as well, if you're really doing locked-in deep work, I don't blame your mind for drifting off. If I looked at a schedule that just said, I'm going to study for the next eight hours. I'm probably not going to get through that either.

So you might want to pace yourself more and have more realistic schedules. Two, we need to break up this work. We need to break it up in various ways, so it's more tractable for your mind to think about. The first thing you can do for student work is everything that happens on a regular basis should have a fixed time and a fixed location on the same days every week that it's done.

You always have to do a lab write-up. Here's when and where I go to do that lab write-up. If there is a problem set that's always due, here's the two blocks I work on it. Right after class, I go to this library, and on Friday afternoon, I finalize it for another two hours. So automate the recurring work so that it's not a willpower correction. It's not, oh, I just need to be working all day, let's do more.

it's oh it's Tuesday at three and that's when I always go and do my lab write-up so automate all the work you can automate so now you're reducing the amount of just generic deep work you have to find time for it and for that work you want to break this up 90 minutes maybe two hours high quality leisure activity in between it deep work gym lunch another deep work block shutdown complete let's do something else right so you want to break up the work

that isn't regularly occurring into reasonable size chunks and surrounded by high quality leisure. You want to backfill your day probably to be earlier and end when you can end and be done and really embrace being done. So your mind knows there's a shutdown complete coming. If I can get there, I have a really nice evening ahead of me. And finally, fix your time block schedule when it breaks and do that again and again.

So if you do go off your schedule and watch videos for a while, fix your schedule. All right, I watch videos for a while. So now I need to build a new schedule. and I would actually put in the new schedule the diversion activity. So if at 12 you broke off your schedule and watched videos for an hour, put 12 to 1 on the next column of your time block planner and say, I watched videos and then build a schedule for the rest of your day.

Get in that habit. Just the friction of having to rebuild your schedule again and again often can be enough to prevent the diversion and having to face what those diversions are and how long they were seeing that in black and white on your planner. that also can make a big difference. And finally, you should have some non-negotiable rules. You have your workday. When your workday is over, your workday is over.

During your workday, what are your non-negotiable rules? Well, one of them could be if it's a study block, zero internet, zero phone. If you need to get some stuff from the internet, then you should schedule another block to get that information different from your study blocks. What I do is I actually, for my blocks like that, my deep work blocks,

where I'm not going to look at my phone, I won't look at the internet. I actually shade in the border, make it a thicker border with my pencil or pen, indicates just a quick visual cue that this is a focus block. And then all the focus block rules apply. No context shifting at all. Now you just have one rule. I either follow this rule or I don't.

And the question becomes, do I follow this rule or I don't? That's much easier to stick with than just, I'm working all day. I'm probably going to take some breaks. How about now? Okay, not now. How about now? Okay, how about now? And then you have to constantly be making, having this conversation, constantly convincing yourself not to be distracted. You have a clear set rule. Here's my two hour block. It's shaded dark on the border. I never look at the internet during those blocks. The only question you have to answer is, do I follow that rule or not? Because it's so simple and so clear and so impactful, you're more likely to actually stick with it. All right. So that's four different ideas to keep in mind. I hope you find those helpful. All right, let's shift gears here a little bit. I think the time has come as it does every once in a while for me to do some relationship counseling. Hi, Cal, my partner and I are having a debate.

It's about the dishes. I choose to leave my dishes to the end of the day and rinse them all at once, almost as if I'm time blocking that time, where she thinks I should be doing after each meal. I see that as context switching. Can you decide this for us? Love everything you're doing, Cal. Keep it up. Well, your partner is clearly right here.

Wash your dishes after you are done eating. The dishwashing is part of the meal block. It is within the same cognitive context of preparing and eating the meal, and therefore you are inducing no cognitive load by doing the decent human thing and getting that dirty dish out of the sink. I have ruled. Let's take a quick break to talk about another one of the sponsors that makes the show possible. express VPN.

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deep at checkout. That's optimize.combe slash deep and use that code deep at checkout to get your discount. All right. Moving on here. we have a question about keeping track of research.

Hey, Cal, my name is Chris, and I'm a surgery resident and researcher. And I have a question about how you configure research papers for legal review. I currently use a Trello board and time blocking and all time blocks time on my schedule to do some deep reading, primarily reviewing literature in my field. But when I go to execute this block, what I do is go to a card on Trello that has a giant list of research papers that I want to read. And this is getting, list is getting quite long and feeling overwhelming. And it feels like it's sliding back into a more list reactive method of dealing with this problem instead of something more configured and structured. There are a lot of different schools of thought about how best to approach the challenge of learning a literature surrounding a particular research topic.

There's also a lot of tools out there that all claim to have the best combination of citation management or semantics. or semantic knowledge connections, etc. I would say the system that probably works best, at least in my opinion, is the system that the author David Epstein talked about on my podcast when I interviewed him a few months ago. Epstein is famous for really deeply researching

the topics that he writes about in his books like the sports gene or range. He has an investigative journalism, an investigative science journalism background. So that is sort of his superpower, is getting to the bottom of a literature. And he explained his system, which I think is a great balance of efficiency and effectiveness. Roughly speaking, and I'm modifying this slightly, but roughly speaking, what he does is imagine you just have one big document, like a word file.

And you're going to break this up into sections by the different topics in the research literature that you want to understand. And you don't have to do this in advance. You can just start. You can cede this whole process with one paper. Write down, you'll create a page and a header for like what topic that paper. and then you start reading that paper. Now your goal is, in the end, to, you know, type up the citation for the paper

in a summary of the main points. You don't get too detailed here probably, but like this has an experiment on this, it has good data on this, it has an interesting note about whatever. Like, you're just really rough, don't overformat this, spelling errors are fine, but what you need to know later

when you're coming back and trying to remember what's in this paper and is it useful. The key part of David's method is, as you come across citations in that paper that seem relevant, you have to add them to the document. And where they go is at the top of every section in your documents or every topic, you have a holding pin of citations. And you don't have to be super detailed in these citations, like a couple authors' names, the paper name, the date, just enough that you can find it using Google Scholar when the time comes or PubMed or whatever you're using.

You have a holding pin at the top of every topic. Now, if you come across a paper for which there's not yet a topic corresponding to it in your document, then you add that topic and then put the paper at the top of the holding pin. So at first, every paper you come across might be creating a new whole topic area. So you use a big font, new topic, holding pin, quickly type out the citation. So as you read this one paper, maybe one, two, three, maybe a dozen different citations get shown in different topics. All right, what comes next? You go to one of those topics. You grab something from the top of the holding pin.

You download the paper. You read it. You write up a summary. As it generates new citations, do you think you should follow up on? you add them to the holding pin of the relevant topics. If it needs a new topic, you create new topic. And you repeat. And that's basically what your reading sessions are,

is processing things from the top of the holding pins in these topics. Now, at first, everything's growing. Every paper you read creates 10 more citations, five more topics. This document keeps getting longer and longer. You get worried. You say this seems like an endless process. But as David talks about,

and I've experienced this too, when I've done this. Eventually, there's this graph of relevant papers and there's edges corresponding to citations. You have this big graph. Eventually, you're going to begin exploring all the boundaries of this graph, exploring all the nodes. And you're going to find yourself coming across citations when you're reading new papers that you have already previously added. So you don't need to write them down again. And eventually you're going through these holding pins and fewer and fewer things are getting added. Also, by the way, when you go through the holding pin, you're going to find out that some non-trivial percentage of these papers when you

get there aren't really relevant. So you just kind of delete it. Okay, there's nothing really here relevant. Okay, I won't put any notes down for it. So that'll also help slow you down. And eventually the growth gets slower and slower and slower until you're rarely finding new papers and you've processed most of the papers from the holding pin. Now you've actually reached the boundaries of a large research literature. And you have a summary in your own words of every paper in that literature. Now, again, don't pour over every page of these papers. You're trying to say, what was this about? What were the key experiments?

What do I need to remember? It's all broken up by topic. It's all summarized in your own words. Now you're ready to do some damage, right? So now, if you want to put your research into a context, you know, exactly what papers to pull out of here and more properly write up in your paper, because you know the whole literature. You can say, you know, similar effects have been shown.

Of course, you know, Kipler A. all had a alternative approach in which they worked on their chai squared values and whatever, whatever, you were going to be able to speak with this confidence of I've explored the entire graph. And I know what I'm talking about. I know what the site. I know what tangential case is the site. I can be really confident, really terse about it when I write up my formal paper.

So I think that's a great method. There's tools that'll say we can do this better for you. We'll capture the citation properly in a citation database. You can auto-generate the citation. We will let you do semantic linking. you could get with Notion or Rome research so that you could actually connect the papers on the fly and then see the structure emerge. But for my money, I love the freestyle simplicity of just.

It's a long word file or latex file. And I just add the sections. I just type these things at the head and it's not properly formatted. I can figure that all out later. And now research literature processing has just spend some time with that document. Process some things from the holding pin. Okay, session done. Next time you have a session, process a few things from it.

The list grows. summaries grow. And you just keep doing that whenever you have time, you time block some time for it until that thing is done. And the document's barely growing. Now you know your literature. All right. So, Chris, I hope you find that useful. All right, let's do one more question here. Shift here slightly again and get to a topic here about the emotion related with cognitively demanding tasks. Hi, Cal. My name's Talia and I'm a writer, a speaker, and a podcaster. And you talk a lot about systems and processes for consistently organizing and getting your work done, but I'm wondering how you manage some other important aspects to getting stuff done, your emotions and moods and

energy. I know you don't believe in writer's block, but do you ever run up against a day when you're in a scheduled deep work time block for, let's say, your book or a long form article, and you're just not there creatively or mentally or emotionally? Do you push through that? What do you say to yourself? Or do you somehow kind of ignore the emotions and work anyway? I find that it's the sway of my excitement or energy that affects my productivity even more than my scheduling or distractions. So I'm really curious how you handle that. Thanks.

Well, Talia, this is a good question. There are definitely reasons why I might abandon a block for deep work that I've scheduled. One big category is energy, right? So let's say you are sick or you didn't get a lot of sleep or for whatever reason you literally don't have the energy to do the thinking at the level you want to do it. There's no reason to try to force yourself through that task. That's a good reason to drop a block. Extreme distraction is another reason. We've talked about this before on the show.

If there's some sort of national event happening or something happening in your family or something that's very emotionally valent and distracting, I think that's, completely fine to adjust your schedule. I talked about this on the podcast after January 6th, how January 6th was not a day in which a lot of people got things done. You know, famously, 9-11 was not a date where a lot of book chapters were pinned by authors around the country, etc. So I think that's completely fine too. If your mind is incredibly engaged with something else, you're not going to get a lot done. You might as well abandon those deep work blocks. And in general, this is not philosophically a problem if you're doing something like time block planning because again, the key with time block planning is not you get a medal for sticking

with a plan. It is that you're being intentional about how you want to spend your time. So it's actually a real active intention to say, I originally had this plan for how to spend my time. Now I got to this point of the day and realize, you know, I think I'm coming down with something. I'm flagging here. So if I'm going to be really intentional about what I want to do with my time, let's not write. let's actually take a nap or just do a little bit of shallow work and go for a walk or something like this, right? That's actually within the spirit of time block planning, not counter to the spirit. It's all about being intentional with your time as being superior to being haphazard with your time. So there should be no guilt about that.

The only flag I would raise right here is my attention was captured a little bit to hear the terminology. and I'm paraphrasing you slightly here where you're saying your excitement plays a bigger role than scheduling when it comes to the work you do. Now here we might want to be a little bit careful because the one thing that I do not typically allow to be a major player in me changing my schedule is motivation. If you're waiting for I want to feel motivated to do this hard work and if I don't really feel into it, I'm not going to do it right now. that is more problematic, and it's for the very pragmatic reason

that intense cognitive work is not a natural thing to do. The human brain was not meant to do this intense symbolic abstract reasoning something we're kind of tricking our apparatus into doing. The human brain did not evolve 200,000 years ago to write a book chapter or to do high-level mathematics, just like it wasn't evolved to write or read. We have to actually hijack parts of our brain evolved for other purposes and basically force them, co-op them into doing this highly artificial activity that's otherwise very valuable to us.

So motivation can be incredibly fickle when it comes to highly cognitive work. It's why if you have a fitness habit, you don't usually use, am I in the mood to go to the gym, as your indicator about whether or not you go to the gym? Because, again, it goes against our energy preserving instincts as a species, so you got to just go to the gym. And the same applies for cognitive work. I don't care so much about excitement.

I don't care so much about motivation in the moment. often motivation will follow you actually getting started, getting all those cognitive networks fired up, suppressing the unrelated cognitive networks, starting to make some cognitive process, maybe even falling into a flow state that can take 10, 15, 20 minutes. Now to put a flag on that flag, just so we can get really complicated and convoluted here,

over the long-term motivation can be important. So if you find as you come back to this work again and again, it's doing nothing for you, then you might want to reconsider doing that work in the first place. So if it's a, you're writing a novel because, I don't know, you kind of felt like you should, but it's not doing it for you. And every time it comes to write, you're not into it. It doesn't energize you in the long term.

It's not an important part of your identity. Maybe you were suffering from some sort of intrinsic force of motivation to do this because maybe your friends are doing it or you took creative writing at college and you felt like you had to do it. Well, long term motivation is an important key. And that means you might want to give up on that type of work in general. But in the short term, here's something in general that's important to me. and it is energizing overall an important part of my life, but I don't feel like doing it right now.

I don't care so much about that emotions. All right, so to summarize, time block planning or that general approach to work is all about being intentional about your time instead of being haphazard. To adjust your schedule to account for flagging energy is completely intentional and part of that philosophy. Be wary, however, about using whether or not you feel motivated or excitement,

excited as one of the major factors you use and make a decision about whether or not to rebuild. your schedule. All right, and with that, I should probably wrap up this episode. I left some dishes in the sink earlier, and I have a time block coming up to get some batch cleaning done there. All right, thanks for everyone who submitted questions. Kalnewport.com slash podcast to find out how YouTube can submit questions.

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