Deep Questions with Cal Newport - How Do I Reclaim My Schedule? (w/ Laura Vanderkam) | Monday Advice

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

It’s common to feel like you don’t have enough time in your schedule to build a life that’s both professionally successful and personally deep. But is this true? In today’s episode, Cal interviews time management expert Laura Vanderkam about her new book, BIG TIME, which argues that with the right tweaks and mindset you might be able to start getting more out of your life right away.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Send an email to [e-mail].   Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia   (0:00) How do I reclaim my schedule? (w/ Laura Vanderkam) (2:00) Eliminating distraction and prioritizing deep work (1:08:18) Batching email responses (1:13:25) Cal’s upcoming books (1:18:51) What Cal is reading (1:24:06) HQ update   Books:   Grow Healthier as You Grow Older (Kenneth Cooper) The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) MurderBot (Martha Wells)   Links: Sign up for Cal’s newsletter at www.calnewport.com/ideas Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?   Thanks to our Sponsors:   https://www.calderalab.com/deep https://www.vanta.com/deepquestions https://www.shipstation.com/deep https://www.drinklmnt.com/deep   Thanks to Jesse Miller for mastering and production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you ask most people how they feel about their schedule, they'll say their biggest problem is that they don't have enough time. Business is often cast as the scourge of our current moment, the villain that is keeping us from cultivating deep lives. But is this time scarcity narrative correct? Well, today is Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at this question. Now, to help me in this exploration, I'll be joined by my friend Laura Vandercam, who has a new book out titled Big Time, A Simple Path to Time Abundance.

Now, Laura has been making waves recently by arguing that the story we tell ourselves about not having enough free time is more about mindset than reality, that we actually have more time to work with than we realize if we can adjust how we approach our schedules and our expectation. for our schedules. Now, I think there are some incredibly important ideas in here for those who are interested in seeking depth in an increasingly distracted world. The very best deterrent to losing yourself in endless digital distractions has to be to build a life that is more interesting and more intentional than what's happening on all of those screens. And Laura argues that you can start cultivating this depth right away without having to

make drastic changes to your circumstances like a major career shift or moving to the countryside. So if you feel like your life has been slipping out of your control and you crave something deeper, then you need to listen to this conversation. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. So Laura, I want to start by talking about our perceptions of our free time versus the reality. So the most common story that you point out that people seem to be telling about their time is they don't have enough. They're busy in a way they haven't been before. There is no free time in their life. What have you found to be the reality about that narrative?

I have found through looking at thousands of people's schedules that even the busiest among us has some free time. Now, it probably is not as much as we want, but there's a big difference between not as much as I want and none. And so when people track their time, they tend to see that there's at least a little bit here and there. And that's just, you know, a good thing to know. It's a much better story to tell ourselves than none, which is completely defeatist. If we see that we have some, even if it's not as much as we want, then we can start asking, well, what do we want to do with it? You know, what would be most enjoyable in these few minutes I have? What would feel most rejuvenating? Whereas if you're telling yourself a story that I have

no free time whatsoever, what do you do when free time appears? Well, these days it tends to be whatever is easiest right in front of us are electronic hobbies of scrolling around online, looking at social media, that sort of thing. So if you want to spend the free time that everybody has well, then we need to first acknowledge that it exists. So how much are we talking about, right? So when you look at these time tracking logs, people actually writing down how they spent their time over a real week, what did you discover? Is it, hey, I got 23 minutes a week and I thought I had none, or is it more substantial? What do you actually find you when you look at this data? For most people, it's way more substantial than 20 minutes a week. And, you know, if anybody wants to

check that, you can look at your electronic tallies. You know, even those of us who try to stay off, a lot of websites and headlines and things like that wind up consuming more than we mean to. I mean, that's the nature of sort of addictive technology. But, you know, it tends to be some amount of time, maybe an hour or two at night. Sometimes it comes in bits and pieces, but it's generally at least an hour or two in the evening. Many people have time on the weekends that could at least be repurposed. It may not be spent completely well in a way we would actively choose, but it is there. Like when we write in the things that we have to do between work, sleep, personal care, child care, housework, transportation places, there's often spaces around that, but we tend not to notice that time because we aren't.

necessarily doing anything memorable with it. But when people adopt practices to put in more memorable leisure, then they can start noticing its existence and it starts to feel bigger. I mean, this feels like an important distinction you make that when it comes to our perception of our lives, there's a difference between I want there to be large swaths of free time, I don't want to feel busy, thinking that's the goal versus I'm making time for things that are important to me. And it seems like one of the big ideas from your book is that it's more the positive things you do. If you're actually able to make regular time for things that are important, your sense of your life will be more expansive. And that's different than saying I need massive amounts

of free time, otherwise I'm going to feel busy and can't do anything. So yeah, the problem with massive amounts of open time, as in time that we don't think about how we want to spend it, is that we do something, but whatever it is is not necessarily going to be all that memorable. And then that time feels like it can't compete with the have-to-dos because the have-to-dos are structured. The have-to-dos involve schedules and other people and intentions. Nobody's like, wow, you know, that work day went so fast. I feel like I didn't have any time at work at all. I mean, that tends to not be something people say.

But that's because you're filling your work hours with schedule. things with meetings with other people, with intentions, with goals, and we don't have that for time outside of that. Now, obviously, you don't want to go full overboard with scheduling every minute outside of work. But what makes your personal life feel like it can compete with the have-to-dos is when you put meaningful, intentional things into it. So if somebody decides to go play tennis with friends one night a week. That night, you notice it, right? You don't have a story of like, oh, I have nothing else going on in my life. That's the tennis night, right? And so it's a day that passes with something that you remember from it. And then it feels more vast in our recollection

than if you don't have anything meaningful that's done with it. I think it's so interesting. So you're saying when your time is getting eaten up by like low quality sort of default type distractions, you don't really register it in your memory. So then when you look back, like, oh, I had no free time because you don't remember, oh, I spent 30 minutes going down a Twitter rabbit hole or watching random YouTube. You just were like, oh, I just worked all day and I was busy and took the kids around and then it was evening. So what you do with your time matters or how you think about what actually happened at it. So I want to get into this a little bit more. You have this idea of being a ringmaster of your own life as a psychological.

shift you make and how you think about your time. So just at the high level first, what do you mean by this concept of seeing yourself as being a ringmaster of your life? When a lot of people talk about their crazy, busy lives, they use the metaphor of a circus and say, like, my life is a circus. And what they mean by that is that their lives are chaotic. But I've always felt that's a bit of a slander against circuses because circuses are incredibly well organized. You know, nobody gets shot out of a canon at the wrong time. Like, if the clowns are supposed to be in one ring, it's not that the tigers are going to be in that ring, too. I mean, everything is organized as it is supposed to happen. Tricks are executed within a fraction of a second. Everybody knows where they are supposed to go.

We should aspire for our lives to be like a circus. And so to extend this metaphor, I think it's helpful to think of ourselves as the ringmasters of our lives. Like the ringmaster is not like, oh gosh, this is all chaos, there's nothing I can do with it. No, the ringmaster knows that it is complex, but it is incredibly orderly. And so there's lots of ways you can do this, but one of the best is to have a time every week where you sit back and look at what is coming up, right? What is going on in your life? And you think about what is most important to happen and what you need to see happen in three rings of our lives for our careers, our relationships, and ourselves. Make sure that something is happening in all three rings, know what's going on, know the order of things, make sure you've got a plan

if something goes wrong. You know, the ringmaster sees all the tricks performed over a net, so nobody falls and has a disaster. You know, and also make a circus worth watching. Like, I think it's important to manage our circuses for delight so that, you know, it's not all drudgery. There's also some fun that's going on too. Well, I want to get into these pieces. The first I want to say, I don't know, I think putting the lions in the ring with the clowns. Would be interesting? It could be interesting. I just want to say. I don't want to tell the Ringling brothers how to run their circuses, but they probably would get even more attendance. I want to get into those points you talked about. But just to hit on the conceptual point about this ringmaster approach, make that differentiation for me between chaos and complexity, because the words sound similar, but their effects are very different. They are very different. Complexity and chaos are not the same thing at all. I think chaos is the enemy. Complexity is not. And that is important.

because there's a lot of literature out there and a lot of sort of mindset that we need to simplify everything, right? Like minimalism, simplicity. And there's some great upsides with all of those things. But many of us have lives that are just structurally complex. You know, people have multiple different spheres or jobs they're doing. I mean, they could be a professor and, you know, a podcaster. They can have multiple children. They can have spouses who are doing things that, you know, require a lot of coordination as well. People can be deeply involved in their communities. And so we don't need to simplify all that just to simplify. And in many cases, you can't.

You know, like I have five kids. That's more complicated than if I had one, but I have five. So here we are. There's really nothing to be done about that now. So the question is, how can we manage this complexity in a way that feels calm and orderly? Not how can we simplify because simplification is the only way to avoid chaos. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Hey men, you need to start taking better care of your skin.

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I like that distinction a lot. So let's get into the details. So you talked about, planning, you're sitting back thinking about the three rings and making sure that each is represented. What are the timescales you're talking about here? Like for the week ahead, for the month ahead, for the day ahead, what makes most sense? I do the bulk of my planning as a weekly process. I find that a week is a really good unit of time to think about life. It is small enough that you can see with pretty good clarity what's coming up. You can have a general sense of what's going to be important, what your energy level is, what you will be working with. On the other hand, it is big enough that you are not artificially limiting yourself and in terms of what can fit or in terms of your planning.

The problem in people just plan day to day. I mean, obviously, it's better to plan day than not plan at all. But when you're only looking forward one day, you will miss opportunities to make life more calm. Like if you have a big deadline on Thursday and you don't start thinking about that until Wednesday, there's a lot that can go wrong in that scenario. Whereas if you're looking at the whole week and see that Wednesday is busy, then you can move some of that work to Monday and Tuesday and then, you know, feel more in control of your whole life. So I think the week is long enough that we can also put things in that don't have to happen daily, but that can still be part of our lives. So for many people, things like hobbies and exercise and getting together with friends, they're not all going to happen daily, but they could all happen within the course of a week.

So I tend to like to look at life in terms of weeks. Now, that doesn't mean we never look forward longer. And I also make a daily to-do list each day. But the meat of the planning is the weekly sort. I mean, I think a key thing you said in there because it's been key to my practice as well is that idea when you're at the weekly scale, you can make some changes. And you'll often notice at the weekly scale, oh, if I just made this change, if we got a ride for this kid today, if maybe they didn't go to this activity, or if I canceled this coffee and it took these two big blocks of time and connected them together, everything unfold. So like massive benefits happen. And it just seems to me it's very hard to make those changes day of.

But when you're looking at the week, there is some shuffling to do. And you move this, cancel this, get a right here, connect these two things together. And it can make a really big difference. So this gets to, I think you talk about it, as rearranging as being one of the key strategy. So this is a place where you'd be doing a lot of, not a lot of, but this is where the rearranging could happen. The small changes with big impacts. And if you do stuff enough ahead of time, like on the weekly scale, it's generally not a problem. Like if you on, let's say, Friday, planning the next week, the next Monday to Friday

week, asks somebody to move something that is happening next Friday, that's not a huge imposition. That's not messing up their schedule all that much because it is, you know, a week in the future. And most people are willing to make changes at that point. It's when you're calling somebody at 11 a.m. on Friday morning that you're supposed to be talking with on noon and saying like, everything's falling apart. I can't do this. That's more of a problem, right? That's when we get that sense of chaos. So the weekly scale allows us to do things in a more calm way. I'll tell you the magic, you probably the same thing. The magic shift at the weekly scale for us is when we figure out, oh, if I shifted this one thing to here, I can handle two or more

carpool, I can link two or more carpool duties together into like one seamless. Oh, that's always the magic. Like pick up this kid, drop them off here as I pick up this kid and end up here and bring them back. Ah, man, is there anything more satisfying when you figure out how to make those pieces click together. When life is efficient, it is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And anytime less spent in the car is also a big win. All right. So I was already a big fan of weekly planning. I talk a lot about it. But then the next part, when you're talking about the ringleader that caught my attention was new to me. I really liked this notion of house rules. So having these set rules that simplifies dealing with complexity. That's a weird sentence. But it does. It simplifies the dealing with the reality of

complexity. So walk me through a little bit what you mean by house rules or setting your own rules. So part of managing a complex life is that you don't want to have to be actively planning more than you need to. Like you want to reserve your planning executive function capacity for the things that truly require it. And so as much as possible, if you can have things on repeat, on autopilot that happen in the same way each week, then you don't have to think about it. And so, you don't have to think it unless there is some sort of aberration. So the example I like to use for people is that we always have pasta on Monday nights. And that is because everybody likes pasta. Nobody wants to plan dinner on Monday nights as we're starting the week. And so that's one thing we don't have to think about,

right? There's always going to be stuff. Whoever goes grocery shopping is going to have the things for pasta there because we always eat pasta on Monday night. So it's just very automatic. There is nothing to think about. And it makes, you know, the process of Monday that much more brainless. And given that we have limited cognitive capacity, we don't want to be using our brains for things that don't really require them. So same thing with like the weekly schedule planning. You talked about the kids, you know, who goes where on that. It would be madness to every week be like, now who wants to drive to tennis this week, right? Like, you, no, no, you want to have it set each week unless there's a really good reason. So one party is always doing tennis and the other party is always doing piano.

And if you need to, you can switch. But that's, you know, the higher executive function thing that is only brought in when it is required. I mean, people do this at work too. You know, if managing a large team is not that dissimilar from managing a large family in terms of what's going on. You know, it's like, okay, I always take a direct report to lunch on Wednesdays. That's a way I have a good habit. It's a house rule for the, you know, the group. And that way, I don't have to think about it. I know if it's Wednesday. It's the next person in line. We're going out to lunch. And so that's why you're interacting with and investing in your team without putting too much extra effort into it. All right. So that's key. So house rules can also be not just for dealing

with complexity, but also making sure that like good things are happening on a regular basis. Like we, our kids, we take them the bus stop relatively early in the morning. Like my wife and I figured out we should both go because when we walk back, that's a guaranteed walk and talk. Whereas if you were saying we're going to plan a walk together every day in the afternoon or morning. Man, it's so hard. Like some day, sure, but some days, you know, it's impossible. But that makes sure it happens, at least a day starts that way. So that would also be, that's a rule to not just deal with complexity, but to make sure. Yeah, make sure that the good things happen in your life, right? And as much as possible, if you can build those things in, then they will happen regularly

because so much of our lives is, in fact, on autopilot. And so we want to use that to our advantage. All right. Then you also talk about there's negative things that happened that you want a net, so to use the circus metaphor, and that that actually saves a lot of stress and consternation and schedule blowups if you have these safety nets. Maybe you could walk us a little bit through a little bit more of what you mean by that. Well, so life happens. Things go wrong. And if your life requires everything to happen perfectly according to plan for it not to be a disaster, then you're going to have a problem. You're going to have a lot of stress in your life because things do go awry. People are late. You know, stuff happens. People get sick. You know,

like three of your employees are going to have the flu at the same time, right? This is just the way life works. And so it's important to think through what your option B is if option A is not available or goes badly out of kilter. So one way to think about this is especially people who have commutes, if you also need somebody there in the afternoon for, you know, kid pickup or something, you have to bring in the possibility that there could be traffic. This is not a surprise or that a flight could be delayed. Like if your whole life is built on the idea that a flight will never be delayed, you're going to have a big problem. Whereas if you build your life with the assumption that, yes, sometimes they are delayed. I have a net in place for that. You know, first choice is this. Second

choice. I have my neighbor, you know, always, I know their schedule and when they might be able to do something to help out or, you know, grandpa is 30 minutes away, but he could get there if he needed to. And so you have your option B set up. Then you feel much more calm in the moment when the, you know, when you fall into the net. And even if, you know, a circus performer, like a pro doesn't anticipate falling into the net in a normal set of events, but it could happen. And so they want the net to be there, but not just there, that it's well thought through. I actually talked to some people in the circus world about this. You can't have a net that's any given place. It's at a certain level from where the tricks are happening. So you fall into it in the right way so that you're not

popping out of it and falling back on the ground or something like that. So, I mean, extending this metaphor again, you want to make sure that the net is there and it is well thought through. But if you do, life feels a lot less chaotic. And then the final piece of this, ringmaster analogy was this idea of adding delight into there, right? If you're going to go through the effort of containing or controlling the complexity, might as well add stuff in it that's going to be really fulfilling as well. What do you mean by managing for delight and what's the importance here? So just because we've managed this complex circus, it doesn't mean we want to be trudging through the whole thing. Like, you know, this is all work. This is no fun. You know, I've made it through

this very complex weekend where everyone got where they were supposed to go, and I've just muscled through it. Like, I think we should actually enjoy our lives, and I think it is possible to enjoy complex lives. But again, we think about it as a circus. A circus is managed for delight. It's not just like, okay, first we get this guy shot out of a cannon, then we do the trick, and it's all going to be fine. It's like, no, no, you want to make it look fun. You want to make it look exciting. And it's the same thing with our lives. So I tell people you can plan this beautiful week, you've got a backup plan when things go wrong, but what are you genuinely looking forward to? Like, what is on your calendar, your tutusist, or your schedule for the week that you're like,

oh, that's going to be awesome. I can't wait to do that. And if you put those things in, life just feels entirely different. It doesn't feel like it is all work. It feels like it's enjoyable, too, and that's what I want for everyone as they manage their time. Like your whole week can feel different. if, yeah, you had some idea, we're going to, we're going to all go to this new restaurant or, like, this past weekend, me and one of my sons, we built a video game cabinet and my office is here, right? It can make the whole week feel like, oh, that was a fun week, even though this might have just been a few hours out of a, out of 169.

168, but yes. Well, I have a special, you have an extra hour at the day. You have an extra hour at the day. I have a special technique, yeah. I know you are going to manage your time. So maybe you'll share it with the rest of us eventually. That's going to be my next. book, Laura, 169 hours.

Well, you know, funny, we get those one time a year, right, when we fall back and the time change. But sadly, most people do not do anything with it. That's a big part of my productivity philosophy is capturing that extra hour you get from time changes to get more work done. That's going to be, yeah. That's the winning idea. Let's be a better. Okay, let's talk about the other thing I really liked.

And I'll tell the listener, by the way, I'm just selectively touching on a few topics because there's many in here. and I want you to read the book. So I'm pulling out a few that I want to emphasize here. I like the way you thought about big projects, right? That this is an important part of life, whether it's like a big trip or whether it's a big sort of personal hobby project, but having big things you're working athletic things you're training for.

A lot of people think about I can't do a big thing without big swaths of time free. So unless I significantly simplify my schedule, I can't do big projects or big dreams that are optional. You have a different approach built around small steps towards, big goals. Walk me through that because I really like this. So my theory is that even big things can be accomplished in small amounts of time. The thing, though, is that we need to string those small amounts of time together in pursuit of one big thing as opposed to using those bits of time randomly. And, you know, people have ideas of big things they'd like to do in the future when

life calms down or, you know, when the kids are older. And because they do assume that they're going to need big chunks of time. Like, oh, I'd love to get back into art or I'd, you know, love to read more. But again, my life is so busy and I'm not going to quit my job anytime soon. The kids are still little. So instead, if you have any sort of big goal, see if you can break it down into even smaller steps and spread it out over a longer chunk of time. So this year I have a project where I'm listening to all the works of Mozart, which is a lot of music. I mean, he died relatively young, but he was very productive until he did. And so there's a lot of Mozart's work. But it's a limited amount, and it's a finite amount. So if I spread this out over a year, I'm really only

listening to about 30 to 40 minutes a day. And I know from tracking my time that I spend 30 to 40 minutes a day in the car just driving around to random places. And so if I'm listening to, you know, a Mozart sonata during that time versus, I don't know, random other things, then I will get through all the music. I haven't changed anything about my life. I haven't, you know, quit my job. My kids are still there. They're still going all the places they're going. But by the, repurposing these small bits of time in pursuit of something bigger, I can get through big things. And I've seen this happen with all sorts of people. You know, if 30 to 40 minutes in the car listening to music isn't much because I'm already in the car, but other things like reading or writing, it might be need to be

smaller bits of time for somebody who has a really big, you know, busy life. But could you find 10 to 15 minutes a day for something? If you could, you could read war and peace in a year, right? It's 361 very short chapters, so you read one chapter a day, takes just five to ten minutes each day, you'll get through it in a year. And the fun part about this is that when you have really big projects that you are doing and you are completing, like you are making progress on them and you are getting through them, it changes the story you are telling yourself about your time. Because you can't be starved for time and be reading war and peace. Like the fact that you have time to read War and Peace, like, tells you that you have free time. And then once you have that

story, you start to seize more of it and take advantage of more of it. And so I think that mindset shift is incredibly important. The word busyness is confusing to me because at the same time, two things are true. Like, sometimes I feel too busy and it's a stressful thing. There's, there's too many things going on professionally and non-professionally. And I feel like, ah, these pieces are stacking up. On the other hand, nothing really. leaves my stress better, for example, than if it's an evening or a weekend where I make a lot of progress on things that are interesting to me are optional. Like, oh, I'm less stressed because I cleaned up my office, I ordered this, I built a new, whatever, rack to store stuff

in our medicine cabinet. And so doing more things makes me feel less stressed. So I'm wondering, like, busy is probably the wrong word because it captures too many things. So, I don't know, maybe help me understand this. There's like a difference. between having a full schedule that's intentional and being overwhelmed. And you might say you're busy in both cases, but there's two different things going on here. So what is it about having a lot of things to do if they're the right things feels good? Having a lot of things to do when they're not those things can feel bad. How do we distinguish what? Like what's going on here? What distinguishes between these two states? I think it's about how much agency we feel over what we are doing with our time.

So when there are lots of things coming at you that you feel less control over, then that sense of busyness is more of a negative one. Like there's all these things happening and I don't know how I'm going to get through all of it. There aren't enough hours in the day to get through all of it. When we have a full life of things we have intentionally chosen and we are spending time on those things, I mean, we're busy but we're busy in a different way. It's that sense of agency. And I love a study that I had come across in the course of writing big time where there was a study in like a lab, you know, college kids go in and do these psychology things. And one group had been assigned to edit essays for at-risk students. Like they were supposed to spend their time doing that.

The other, you know, reported in like they were supposed to. And then they were told they could just leave the lab. Like they were like, go home, you know, you're done. And so they got a windfall of free time. But when they did follow-up surveys, the people who were assigned to do the editing actually felt like they had more time than the people who had just been sent home with a windfall of free time. And then they felt more like they were willing to put time into things, the people who had been assigned the editing. And what it is is that we feel like you're doing meaningful things with your time.

And you feel like you have this sense of agency like, I'm doing good in the world, I'm making progress, I'm doing awesome things. that sense of time abundance carries forward to everything else. Whereas when time is not spent on anything particular meaningful, it just disappears. So as much as we can put more meaningful and enjoyable and progress, you know, causing things into our lives, we will feel it's the same amount of time. But we feel very differently about it. Right. Like we like going to the spa, for example. If you're thinking about having nothing to do, we'll do a little bit of time of like, oh,

I don't have to do anything. I can just sit here and I relax. But really, there's only so much of that that we actually enjoy. Like if you actually scheduled into your schedule, here I'm just going to, here's time where I'm just going to sit in a chair. I have nothing I need to do. We actually get pretty antsy. So what we're looking for is not free time that stays free. We're looking for meaningful activity to do with our time. And those are two different things. And time that we can direct, right? I mean, I think that's one of the reasons a lot of people stay up late. is this idea that we get to a point of like, now I am directing my time. You know, I've spent the rest of the day working or doing housework or, you know, caring for family members, and that's all part of it. But, you know, then now everything's quiet and I can have my time, right? So that's the, you know, people feel like they want that agency over the time. But I found, you know, that when you can get people to kind of consciously and intentionally build in some of that time that they have a sense of agency over earlier in the day, through various scheduled choices in terms of how they spend their breaks, how they manage their time after work. They don't feel that same sense that they need to stay up late in order to get the me time because they've already had it.

So it's that we want a certain amount of agency over a certain amount of time. But if we can organize our lives to get it, then we start making healthier choices instead of staying up late. Is there a state where you have too much obligations, right? I mean, I know you say it's less, this isn't really about simplifying. That's a different book. But how do we know, you know, when we're going through this methodology, how might we know of like, you know what? I think I have jammed too much in and taking out some key obligations here are going to open up a lot more possibilities to manage this circus. How do we know when we actually do need to make some changes to what we're actually trying to do or obligated to do?

One thing you can do is ask yourself, how would you react? if somebody offered you something like to do that was really cool, like really exciting, you know, maybe this weekend or even tonight or something like that. And, you know, they'd be willing to help with the logistics. Or let's say it's a couple days from now. Like tonight is probably bad. But, you know, a couple days from now, somebody offers you something really cool, really exciting. Would you be like, yes, let's make it happen. Let's go do it. Or would you be like, oh, I just can't. I just can't. Life is too overwhelming right now. And if you wouldn't have the capacity to take on something that in the abstract you would really, really want to do, then that suggests that you are feeling

a little bit too overwhelmed, right? So, you know, really good friends is going to be in town. It's like, I'd love to go grab dinner and you're like, I just can't. I just can't. Well, that's a sign that you probably need to change stuff to feel a little bit less overwhelmed. Now, I'm not saying you can do it immediately. Like we all have certain amount of things that are a little sticky in terms of how to get out of them. But if you find yourself feeling that overwhelmed, maybe over the next six to 12 months, you'd be able to make some changes to free up a little bit more mental space. So you are capable of saying yes to stuff that you really want to do. I like that heuristic. Yeah, not that you could do that every night, but if you couldn't do it

for some night coming up, then you're probably packed too tight. Yeah, to my obligations. So it sounds like tools don't play a major role in the sense of this way of thinking about time. You should have a calendar. You should have rules. You should do a weekly plan to make sure that you're hitting the different rings of the circus that need to be there. But I read this properly. Like, this is not, unlike a lot of time management discussions. It's not a game of tools.

It's not about do you have the right app or just the right planner that you're using to keep track of it. If anything, you're pretty tool agnostic because you don't need that much complicated of equipment. This is more of like a mindset process type of approach. Is that accurate? Yeah, I would say that's accurate. I'm not a huge tech person myself. I still have a lot of analog stuff. I mean, my analog planner, I actually have an analog calendar. I've gotten away with that for a long time. I'm sure it's going to change at some point, but I'm holding fast to my paper calendar still. And part of the problem,

as you well know, I mean, there are apps that are helpful, but the cause of productivity in general is not advanced by spending more time on our phones. And the more interesting, the more interesting, interesting your phone is in terms of more apps it has on it, the more time you're going to spend on it. And it is the rare person who can go to the productivity app, stay on there, and leave immediately and do nothing else on their phone after they've done it. I mean, they're going to check email. They're going to, you know, check, they see alerts from something else. They're going to look at their texts. They're going to, you know, and then next thing you know, whatever time you have gained through this productivity app is gone in terms of the wasted time that was trailing.

on with it. So, you know, it would have to be really worth it. And I know there's stuff. There's stuff that people use, but I tend not to be a huge tool person myself. I mean, nothing you've discussed so far would be benefited by a complicated tool. It's a mindset. It's scheduling and some rules, which I'm sure you could have an AI-enabled app. I'm sure. Well, and time tracking. I know some people have really struggled with doing it on spreadsheets or even a notebook or anything like that. And I think there's nothing wrong with the time tracking app. There's some that make it a lot more automatic.

And all you're doing is like clicking and then choosing what you were doing. And then click again a couple hours later and choose what you were doing. And that can be very simple for people who don't want to think about it too much. So, you know, there's some upsides to that. So do you recommend everyone do your time tracking experiment just as a way of recalibrating their relationship with their time? Absolutely. I mean, the first thing is a lot of people don't even know that.

there are 168 hours in a week. So that's the first breakthrough. Like when people are looking at this spreadsheet or looking at the upcoming 168 hours and seeing where it's going. And people fill it in. And among the things they discover, even if you're working full-time hours, that's a pretty small proportion of 168. You know, 40 hours is not 168, even if you're sleeping. You still, you've got a lot of hours for other things. And so then the question is, well, where does those hours go? And we have our have to do is we have our things that go in there. But a lot of time winds up being incredibly amorphous. And when people see that, they, you know, have different reactions to it. Sometimes people, like, feel a little, you know, they want to be more accountable for their time.

I mean, the upside of time tracking is it does make you a little bit more accountable. You don't want to write down that three-hour YouTube binge, so, you know, you don't do it. But generally, people feel better about their time when they track their time. Because whatever negative story you have been telling yourself is probably not 100% accurate. It, you know, maybe you don't see as much of your friends as you'd like, but it's not that you sent zero time on friends whatsoever. Maybe you had a quick, you know, text chat with a friend, or maybe you had coffee with a work friend in the course of, you know, both of you grabbing your break at the same time. It's not a lot, but it's not zero. And you see that it's not zero.

You feel better about your time. So, you know, I think everyone should try it. And it will reset how you feel about time in general. All right. So if we're going to continue to be concrete, I'm someone now who, oh, I feel too busy. I feel like I don't have enough time. And my life has been a little empty, like it's just grinding through things. The time tracking can help. Concretely, what else should I be doing, you know, week one after reading your book?

What are the other changes I do to try to feel that time abundance? Well, I'm a big fan of the weekly planning session. So you should try building that in. But something you can do really quickly, like you could do, tonight, if you're listening to this, is come up with some 30-minute intention for your evening, something that you would like to do over the course of the evening that, you know, hopefully be relaxing and enjoyable for you. It might be reading a book for 30 minutes.

It might be going for a family walk. It might be a hobby. It could be screen time as long as it's chosen. Like, it's like, I really want to watch this particular show. And, you know, I'm saving it up. My spouse and I are going to load it up as soon as the kids are in bed and we're going to watch that show. and it's going to be our thing for tonight. But think about what you could do for 30 minutes tonight.

That would be fun for you. And think about when you could put it in. And then try it. Hopefully it'll happen. If it doesn't, you can sort of troubleshoot. Well, what went wrong? Right? Like, why couldn't I do my 30 minutes?

Was it, you know, the kids were up too late or there's too much housework we didn't do earlier? You know, I had a work spilling over into that time. Okay, well, let's see what we can troubleshoot with that. You know, could we do 15, 20 minutes if we couldn't do more? Maybe we could try to do the fun. first and then, you know, get to the housework. And so we're compressing the housework instead of compressing the fun.

You know, but troubleshoot and try it again for the next night. And if you keep putting something fun into your evenings, you will feel differently about your time. You'll feel like you have more time because your leisure time is spent in enjoyable ways. That's interesting. So if you have that rule of like, can we get 30 minutes fun in per night? It sounds like you're getting two effects. One, it's going to troubleshoot as some easy wins in your schedule. like, oh, we're always leaving whatever till the evening and eats up all the time.

That's easily fixable. And then two, having the 30 minutes is going to completely change your relationship to your time going forward. All right. So we got weekly scheduling and try to make the 30 minute rule work. Now, just to dive in a little bit to the weekly scheduling. So you said when doing that, you have these three different topics you want to make sure are covered. I mean, what does that look like concretely? Is it really just I'm looking at my calendar and I want to see time scheduled for each of these,

three areas, which I mean, obviously work will be scheduled, but the other one was relationships and self. Or what else should we be thinking about when we sit down with our calendar to plan for the week? So what I do is I open a new page on my planner, like a new page for a new week. I look at my calendar for the upcoming Monday to Sunday week. And on the left side of the planner page, I make a list of my top work priorities for the week. So sometimes that's stuff that's already on there, right? Which, you know, ideally it is stuff that's already on there. Like, I've got, you know, something big that's happening that I'm excited about, and that's going to be a priority. But sometimes it's also that I need to make progress on another project. Like, I've got a

book deadline coming up in the future, and I need to work on X in there, and I need to, you know, put in time for that. Then on the right side is where I put priorities for relationships, so that's family and friends, and self. So that's things that are important to me personally. And that's where I will put in, well, is there something big coming up with the kids that's already on the calendar that I want to be aware of and also, you know, celebrate. Like, you know, we've got, it's that time of year when we're recording this, May, there's all sorts of concerts and end of year celebrations and the like. But, you know, being aware of where those are and if there's anything that needs to happen beforehand or if we're going to be celebrating afterwards,

like I'm taking my daughter and her friends to Wawa afterwards for slushies or something, you know, just that we know about it. And I'm excited about it and I've thought about it. And the same for itself. Do I have something for me that is coming up? And sometimes it's already on the calendar, like this past weekend, I sang in a choir concert. And that was a me priority for the week. But sometimes it said I need to schedule something in. I see like, hey, there's nothing really fun for me happening this week. I better find something. I better block something into my week. So I have something to look forward to. So that's what I do. And then, you know, so it's back and forth between listing the priorities, making sure they're on the calendar, looking what it's already on the calendar. making sure I'm aware of it and have thought about how to give it the due that it is, you know, that it deserves. Now, what about rules?

Because if you had an electronic calendar, you could have recurring calendar items for, oh, I always do this on Wednesday mornings, et cetera. But you use an analog calendar. Do you have your sort of house rules written down somewhere that you're referencing? Or is it, look, you're going to internalize this pretty quickly? How do you actually mechanically deal with that piece of this puzzle? Well, since it's only me looking at the paper calendar, I've a lot of that internalized. So, for instance, I always work out with a trainer on Mondays, and that is, you know, a priority for me. It's good to be strength training as I don't want to have my body fall apart. But that is automatic. Like, it's going to happen the same time unless he or I have changed it for some reason. And same with, like, my choir practices. Like, I always have a choir practice on Thursday night. I tend not to put that on the calendar because I know it. And I would know not to schedule something. at 7.30 on Thursday night without thinking about it. And so for me, I don't have to. Now,

if you have an electronic calendar that other people can see, that other people are putting things on, then I think you probably do want to put stuff that you intend to do more on a recurring fashion, just because you don't want somebody putting something at 7.30 p.m. on Thursday or at, you know, noon on Mondays or whatever the time it is, if you have already built that into your house rules for your life. I love this, this mindset shift. I mean, I'm just reflecting on all the things you're saying, right? And the mindset shift, I'll sort of summarize for my listeners, that really affects me is this idea that free time is not by itself the goal. We think that's the goal. I want free time. But actually what we want is what free time gives you, which is

the ability to make choices about what you're doing with your time. You actually want your schedule to be pretty full of interesting stuff mixed in with obligations. You don't want a lot of free time. You want choice. And so the goal is, did I get a good mix of things in my waking time this week that deal with different parts of my life? Does that feel like an interestingly balanced, interesting, delightful, and meaningful week? If so, that's a good week and I feel abundant, otherwise it's not, which is very different than, did I have whole days where I had nothing to do? Did I have something or not in the evening? And, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying is when you switch to that mindset of am I putting interesting stuff into my week a good

variety, you just feel really different about your relationship with your time and your week. you don't feel like make me feel better about this, you're not going to feel as stressed. You're not going to feel as anxious, right? That having stuff to do doesn't stress us out. It's not having control over what we're doing or feeling like there's no time for things that are important. So is it not that it's that simple,

but like our really, we really can feel different about our time without having to do a major overhaul of our career and our lifestyles. Like, convince, just give us our reassurance, Laura, this is possible. This is possible. I do believe it.

And it was just what you were saying. because the thing is you can't do nothing. Like time will be filled with something. But the problem is our something tends to be pretty low quality leisure, right? It's the scrolling around online. It's, you know, checking email after you checked it five minutes ago. Like, that is leisure. Nothing was accomplished by doing it in terms of, you know, professional growth or development

or anything like that. I mean, it's just, you know, misspent leisure. And so with that, like, We want to substitute higher quality activities for these sort of lower quality activities. And that requires being a little bit intentional about it. But almost universally, people would rather spend time on their hobbies, on, you know, interacting with friends or family members, on having adventures on the weekend, than, you know, these electronic hobbies of doom scrolling and things like that. So it's not comparing it to nothing. It's comparing it to what else you would be doing.

I think in general, when we can substitute high-quality leisure for lower-quality leisure, yes, we will feel better about our lives. I mean, it's pretty inherent right there and how we're talking about it. I mean, I bet people will use their phones less once they're following this. Just based on my experience with this is once you have more things in your schedule that are intentional, your life is more interesting. And then the allure of what's happening on that device is less. And I'm assuming once someone goes through this practice of being more intentional about their

time that they find, oh, I really haven't been that attracted to Instagram or TikTok recently. Because I have a lot of things on my calendar, schedule things for myself, and this walk is coming up, and I'm going to listen to Mozart, I'm going to do this or that. And that's feeling great. I don't have a lot of time left where I have nothing to do and I get dragged into the phone. So I think, ironically, though, it's not the point of the book. It's also a good approach to reducing technology's footprint in your life. I mean, assuming you probably see that, that the more intentional people get, the less

interesting, the low-quality stuff seems to them. Absolutely. I mean, it's like what you wrote about in digital minimalism, right? You want to first look at your leisure and make sure that you have good stuff in your life because it crowds out the less good stuff, right? I mean, time is going to be spent on something. And putting the good things in means there's less space for the stuff you don't care about as much.

I mean, this happens at work, too. I mean, it's not with leisure per se. But when you're working on a project, you're really excited about and you're making progress on it, you're having a great conversation with a colleague about it, like, you're not checking your email every two minutes. Like, you're still getting whatever messages you're getting. So it's not that there was a certain amount you had to check email. It's just, it's less attractive. Like, you don't need to be filling your time with it because you're seeing something else that's going on that you're making progress on. So it's not that you discovered any

cool email hack for having email take less time. It's that you filled your life with better, more exciting, more enjoyable things, and email naturally took less space. And so, same thing in our personal lives, the more we put in the exciting stuff. You know, if you're at a choir practice on Thursday night, my guess is you are not scrolling around on Instagram because it's pretty hard to do that while you are singing and looking at the music. And so that's a couple of fewer hours you spent on it and, you know, it'll still be there. Like, you want to go

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Well, I want to wrap up the interview where you opened a book because I think it's such a good adjustment. I mean, you talked about you have somewhat idiosyncratic interest in extinctions from times way in the past, but that that helped give you a different mindset

about how should we think about the privilege and joy is an awesome of what life is today. Maybe you can walk us through that reframing of having a busy schedule with control over parts of it, how this is not some terrible burden, but kind of makes us some of the luckiest people who ever lived. How do you think about that? Yeah, we are pretty lucky. I mean, we're lucky from the fact that we even exist, right? So I mean, you hit today, I have these obsessions with like the ancient earth. And if you read about the ancient earth, you know, Earth went through a series of extinctions over the course of its time. And obviously,

people know about the dinosaurs. But there was a much bigger one that happened about 252 million years ago, where 90% of the species on Earth were wiped out. And, you know, out of that, like some animals survived. And, you know, if that hadn't happened, like a different set would probably survive. And because of that, you know, eventually there are primates that, you know, develop the ability to use fire and walk up right and read time management books. And so that's pretty exciting for all of us that we're here. But even if you don't like that, I mean, just, you know, like if you were conceived two seconds later, you would not be you, right?

You'd be a totally different person. Like the fact that you are you is just this random, you know, like, what are the odds? And so, you know, if you think about it, like we've won the lottery by being here. Like in all of the universe, we have won the lottery by being. there. Now, if you were to win a lottery that you hadn't even asked to enter, like if somebody hands you a winning lottery ticket, you know, that they picked up at the 7-Eleven or handed it to you, like, what would you be your reaction to that? Like, maybe you would be thinking like, oh, geez, now I have to pay taxes on this or, you know, I wish this is bigger. Like, why wasn't my winnings

bigger? But I would hope that you would think of it as some sort of like, wow, this is so exciting. I've got this pot of money. I get to manage now. And it's the same thing with our pot of hours. You know, we have this unasked for, unmerited, like, who knew that that would happen? Like, you would be here, hours to manage in our lives. And I think that's pretty exciting. So that's why I find time management so magical, and I hope other people will too. Yeah, you get to add up to a lot of cool things that you got to do and you got to choose. And a lot of it's done in air conditioning.

I know. Well, even better. Right. Or not, you know, a constant pain for many of us. I mean, as people do. But, you know, that, like, our medical care is better. Like, how exciting is that? Yeah.

It made me think about a friend of mine. They just bought a new house that they just moved into. And this house has all of these crazy features on it, right? It has, like, it's not a huge yard, but there's a pool and a giant pool house, and there's like a Chinese pagoda that has a hot tub in it. And there was, like, this full bar in the basement. Like, all these, there's art installations. And it's just, like, exuberant collection of stuff and projects and it's all kind of fun.

And I was asking him about it. And he's like, yeah, the original owners who, who did all of this, it was a Holocaust survivors. And you just get this sense that they were like, life is for the living now. Yeah, let's build a Chinese per gun and put a hot tub bit.

Let's build like, let's build a giant pool house. Let's do, life is interesting. This is fun. We're building stuff. There's original artwork in it. There's skein glass windows.

And it was almost like a metaphor for, you know, our time more generally. They're like, this is cool. We have a lot of time. No, we don't get to choose every minute exactly what we do.

But like, we're driving kids around and get to talk to them in the car. We get to listen, you know, have projects we're working on. We're training for an athletic event. We have hobbies that are interesting. We do things in the community and we're on boards. And it's a pain sometimes, but also it's fun and it's important and there's always a lot going on. And it's a lot better than, you know, being in 11th century Europe as a surf or something that you're just in the field and you're going to die at 35 or whatever. I just thought that was such a good shift. We are so lucky. I mean, you know, most people listening to this, I mean, the possibilities

you have in your life and the things that are available to you that you can do with your time, it's just amazing. And so rather than be unhappy about the obligations we do have or about the moments when we're too stressed and busy, just to embrace the wonderful opportunities that are there and try to make the most of it. All right, so I was going to end it there, but now I've got to pull this thread just briefly because now I'm thinking about it. But it feels like such a different way of thinking about time, especially outside of work, than the other way that's put on this, which is often thinking about like, hey, don't be optimising everything. Don't always try to be so efficient.

This is very different, right? What you're talking about is like, yeah, you have obligations, and then you have free time that you want to do interesting stuff in, and you want to make sure the obligations don't, you know, have too massive a footprint. And it's about building the right portfolio of activities for the time you have. This seems almost like efficiency and optimization. They're not in this conversation. And they often dominate conversations of time management.

So it's just, I don't know, I want to get your take on this. And when you're thinking especially about life outside of work, you're kind of divorcing time management from these notions of like, I'm always trying to be productive. I'm always trying to optimize. And it's like, no, I'm building a portfolio of things to do with, I have this much time to spend today. What am I going to do with it? It just has a very different valence to me than the way this is often discussed. Yeah, I mean, I think partly it's that, I mean, you and I both have a lot of different things going on in our lives and like, you know, busy young families. They have a lot of stuff they're doing.

And so if I'm, like, thinking that I need a weekend completely free in order to, you know, have time for the things I want to do, that's never going to happen. Like, any weekend has stuff. I mean, that's just the reality of it. But by thinking ahead of time of, like, where are the kids need their stuff and sort of building that schedule and then thinking about the time that's around it, I can sort of have space for my adventures and my projects and my hobbies as well. And so it all fits. And, yeah, it's probably a little bit more full. and a little bit more thinking about scheduling downtime than maybe a lot of other productivity literature talks about. But that's how I make sure that I have my fun too.

So, yeah, I don't know. Is that helpful? Yeah, I think it's just useful, right? To think about it this way that there's not necessarily a negative valence to time management. It's like, well, the time is here. It's going to get spent. And a lot of people have complicated lives, not chaotic lives, but complicated lives, especially with kids and other types of things we have going. on. But that's fine. Complicated is not bad. And you've got a bunch of stuff going on. You want to get a good

balance of things and piece together a nice schedule that has a lot of good things in it and a mix of things in it. And that's great, you know, and anyways, I just, I get a lot of, I hear a lot from people that instead will be like, well, you're optimizing, you shouldn't talk about time management. You're taking the, the capitalist mindset from work and pointing to the rest of your life. It just feels very different to me. It feels like life is cool and exuberant and there's a lot to do. And You want to make a good plan for it, so you get a lot out of your hours each week, but do it with flexibility and good humor, and it can make life pretty interesting. I think it's just such a different way of thinking about this than the sort of we are being put upon, and I guess we have to rebel,

or whatever the message, you know, whatever the message is. I don't know if we really need to rebel, but I mean, in all spheres of life, we're just, we're managing a resource, right? And we want to do cool things with the resource that we have in terms of our time. And so, you know, I don't think that's capitalism telling us to do it in our personal time. I think we, you know, it's more fun to make progress on a project. It's more fun to have cool hobbies going on in our lives. And yes, that requires some intention. But, you know, we can't do nothing. So we may as well do the some things that we enjoy. Well, I enjoyed this conversation a lot. As always, I always think you have really good grounded, as sort of realistic, but also very humanistic and uplifting views about time

and time management. I want to point people towards you. The book is big time, a simple path to time abundance. You can find out wherever books are sold. But you have two different podcasts. One co-hosted with Sarah Hart Unger, who I had on the show to talk about planning a couple months ago, so my listeners might remember. But walk us through what those two podcasts are, your newsletter. What else do people need to know if they want more Laura? If they want more Laura, yeah. Well, you should check out Best of Both Worlds, which I co-host with Sarah. We talk about the intersection of work and family from the perspective of people who truly love both. We think that is possible and we should celebrate all aspects of life.

I also host one called Before Breakfast, which you've been on Cal, that we do a short productivity tip four mornings a week. And then one day a week, I have an interview with somebody cool that they talk about how they manage their time. I have a couple of newsletters. I mean, just, you know, I started one through MailChimp years ago that comes out every week or so. And then I also am on Substack, as many people are these days. I have a newsletter that's called Vanderhacks. And these are also tips for living your life better, making the most of your time.

So hopefully people will come check me out there. You and Sarah, the last two people I know who use paper calendars, by the way. We're in sync on many things. But she and I both love our paper products. We love planning our lives. We both have very complicated lives. So it's not that you can't do it on paper. But I like the idea of using paper.

I don't know how you do it. Well, I have like seven Google calendars that all overlay, and each one is shared by like different groups. Maybe that's the problem right there. That should be the heuristic. If you need seven Google calendars that all overlay with different permissions, that's when you have to simplify. That's when you have to simplify. That could be. You may be on to something there, Cal.

That's the key. All right, Laura, always a pleasure. Everyone needs to check out what she is talking about. We talk about all the time on the show, right? It's not just about fighting the distractions. It's about building the life on the other side. that's so appealing the distractions don't matter as much. And this is some of the best thoughts I've heard on it.

All right. So until next time, thanks, Laura. Thank you. All right, so there we go. That was my conversation with Laura Vanderkamp. You know, Jesse, I've had similar thoughts before. It's an interesting time in my history. But I've written about similar ideas back when I was doing student advice books.

I had this realization in one of my student advice books that what stresses out students is not, the fact that they have a lot of schoolwork to do. Stress is not generated by doing work. In fact, doing work can be quite fulfilling if you're on top of it and you have good systems and you're making progress. The source of stress was the collision of deadlines. Oh, this is due, but also this is due. And I didn't start in time. And I don't know if I have enough time to get this paper done at the same time that I'll be prepared for my computer science exam. That's where stress came from. So it was more about these details of your schedule than just the stuff that's in it. And I think that is roughly in the same universe what Laura's talking about when it comes to our schedules in our life writ large.

It's not that we have lots of things to do. It's a myth that what we really want is long periods of free time. It's that we want to have some control over what those things we're doing and we want to have flexibility. Like for me, that's the big thing. Like I get antsy if I have long periods of nothing to do. But I want to have a lot of the things I'm doing be things that that I chose and that are flexible so that if I get sick, I always call it the sick day test or something comes up is not a big deal. Like to me, that day is never stressful.

Even if I'm working 10 hours that day, if a lot of what I'm doing is things I chose and it's flexible, like if I needed to push this to another day or work on this book chapter research next week instead of this week, it wouldn't be a big deal. That seems to be a sweet spot. So I think she's on to something here. Yeah.

And one of your big things with those student advice books was when you had the students look at the, calendar at the beginning of the semester to see like when to map things out and when to place things out you have a plan for like the next three months he was like the simplest piece of advice it was go through your syllabus every exam and paper due date put on the calendar and then work backwards from that to when you need to make your plan for working on that paper studying and that avoided most of those deadline stresses because what you would always find if you do this that there would always be at least one potential pile up like oh wait a second there is a paper

and an exam that are both due on the same day If you see that at the beginning of the semester, you can do very, like, sensical things. Like, well, let me just start a week earlier on the paper writing that I otherwise would have so that I can have time for studying for the exam when we get closer to that, and I'm not going to juggle that with the paper. You're doing the same amount of work. All you are changing is when you do it, and yet the difference between those two schedules is the difference between I'm having a good time and college is really stressing me the hell out. So it's not just about, this is kind of a cool idea about Laura. It's not just about what you have to do. I like how she fights back against the cult of simplicity.

It's not about I have to drastically simplify what's on my plate. That's not the solution sometimes. It's doing whatever the you version is of starting the paper a week earlier than you always would have. Like the stress we get from our schedule is not always about what we do, but how we do it when we do it and how we actually think about it. So Laura, thanks for joining me. All right, but that's enough about my thoughts. Now let's hear what you have to say.

as is our tradition on Mondays we open the show's inbox to read some of your messages remember if you have a question, comment or interesting article or idea to share you can reach us at podcast at cal

newport.com I actually got a message from speaking of college a college student who wrote about me in her admissions essay and then got into the school she wanted to get into

and then she sent me a copy of the essay. Really? Yeah. The essay started is pull pot Joseph Stalin Cal Newport

figures that taught me that evil exist in this world and it is up to us the pushback against it but you know got into school so whatever works all right

what messages do we have this week Jesse our first message is from a psychologist who found that eliminating distraction and prioritizing deep work made him unreasonably productive who I like these type of stories

all right let's see what we have here I realize that in reading your work I subscribe to so much of what you promote, and it has created productivity beyond what I could have ever imagined two decades ago. As a married father of eight kids, I've been able to write seven books, hundreds of articles, and engage in all sorts of endurance endeavors,

including Iron Man and Ultramarathons, while also being training director of my field and helping to start a new doctoral program. Over and over, as I was reading the ideas put forth in your book, it was confirming just how much deep work this has provided for. Also, I don't have a cell phone, and as I tell people, this gives me at least seven to ten hours a week and severely cutting down on shallow work that

others don't have. It's an interesting point, right? This guy is doing a lot. How is he doing it? He says he doesn't use a phone. Ten hours a week is a lot of things. That's training right there if you're training for an ultra marathon, right? That's writing a book right there, 10 hours of work a week.

And a lot of these things stack. That's another point I used to make back in my student days is when you look at the resume may have a very impressive student, like a Rhodes Scholar. It can be unbelievable in the moment because you're looking at these multiple things and imagining them doing them all at the same time and see, man, how is that possible? Do they have more hours in the week than I have? But often these are things that stacked. They did one thing that another than another than another.

And after 10 years, you look back and you list them all together, and it seems like a lot. So the psychologist here talks about books, articles, endurance endeavors, starting up a new doctoral program. not doing that all the same day. It might have been I wrote a book this year. And then like this two-year period, I was doing a doctoral program. And then I really got serious on doing like an ultramarathon this year. And you look back and it all stacks up. So if you can free up a reasonable amount of time and productively apply it week after week,

month after month, year after year, a lot can build up. This was a big point in the interview with Laura. Like she was making this point pretty clearly. You don't need a clear 50 hours a week and go for your new goal real big. It's enough if you can get four or five hours a week or three. three hours a week or even two, as long as you keep going intelligently. I think her terminology was small steps, big goals. I have a big goal, and I'm going to take small steps every week to get towards it that are

smart. Things over time get accomplished. I think that is a great example. All right, what else do we have? Our second question is from Daniel, and it asks for advice about batching email responses. I'm like a classic, I'm looking at this now just like a classic question from old school deep questions, where we just get like the straight up productivity questions. I'll see what we got here, Daniel.

I've started batching when I check my work email, and will sometimes be in a rush to process everything to get back down to inbox zero before my batch email meeting is complete. This process has been great, but sometimes I'll send a thank you note to someone for sending a project that was due, but then we'll have to send a sheepish follow-up asking about edits or something missing in the project.

What recommendations do you have for ensuring I get through everything during my batch email meeting while ensuring I take care of the longer task, like reviewing those projects to ensure everything needed has been completed. All right, it's a common question and a common issue, Daniel. The problem is, is your video gameifying your inbox. Like, my goal is to get to an empty inbox during the time I set aside for batch processing my inbox. That's not your goal.

You don't get points for that. That's not the activity on which your company makes money. That's like an arbitrary thing that feels good. And it's becoming its own sort of abstract ring towards which you're grabbing. But there is no actual intrinsic value. And, hey, the amount of time I happened to put aside happened to match the emails I had in my inbox and I was able to get to zero. If you have time set aside for processing email, then you're doing the best email processing you can during that time, even if it doesn't get you back to zero. Now, at that point, you either time block more time for it, change your schedule, or you'll just make more progress next time you have an email processing block.

coming up. So I want to get out of your head that this is some competition and you win a point if you get through all of your inboxes. Okay, so now what you have to do, if you are processed emails, is you have to give each email the time it actually deserves. And if it is, for example, a project that you need to review and give careful notes about, well, that becomes a task, right? You're not going to do it right then. You're going to get out of your inbox. It goes to your task system. Maybe it goes onto your calendar depending on how you actually manage your time and your task. That's up to you and your system, but it should be entering another place. Your inbox is not a task management system. It's not a to-do list. So, I mean, I often recommend the easiest

thing is just find time on your calendar, put aside a half hour, review this project. Or go to task list if you review your task list commonly. But it needs the time that it actually needs. Don't rush it just so you can get that abstract point for finishing getting through your inbox. Two other things to mention. When processing your inbox, you want to batch by type. This is cognitively more conducive to concentration. So go through and find all the emails of a certain type, put them in a folder, give them the same tag and Gmail, and deal with those one by one so that you're in the same cognitive context as you go through.

Do this type by type, right? Because what you don't want to be doing here is jumping straight from an email about like a client meeting right over to an email about an HR issue and then back to an email about a client meeting, your mind just having whiplashes, it switches back and forth context, and you will feel that as fatigue. And you'll end up giving up or just jumping around looking for easy messages to answer. The third and final thing I'd recommend is get less email. You want to have less emails that you have to respond to.

I wrote a whole book about this called The World Without Email that I've been pushing recently because I think it's underappreciated. You need to know about this book. But you have to look at these emails the way I would do it if you have a little bit of time and say, what is like the process, the ongoing process this represents? What is this connected to? Oh, it's connected to client report editing. Oh, this is connected to the process of trying to book this upcoming meeting. Oh, this is connected to the processor goal of, you know, making sure that we have the presentation ready for the next quarterly meeting or whatever. And then say, if this is the process or goal, the service is, what's the actual best way to collaborate on this?

And almost always the answer is not going to be ad hoc back and forth on scheduled messaging. You're like, okay, what we need to do is we need to get together. We could do these three things in one hour. We could do it in real time and figure it out, and we need to stop sending messages back and forth. So you want to try to find alternative collaboration modes. You should have office hours. You should move more stuff to office hours. You should have docket clearing meetings for your team, where you can get through multiple things all in one meeting, these sort of batch meetings.

So you want to just be thinking through. Is there a way to get whatever this is out of unscheduled back and forth messaging? And if it's an ongoing thing, it's a process happens again and again. We write these reports every month. do we need a structured process where we move things to different places at different times? It doesn't require unscheduled messaging. So really your ultimate goal is to reduce the number of urgent messages that are part of a back-and-forth conversation. You want to reduce the number of those messages that show up in your inbox in the first place.

You want your inbox to be more about information transfer. Here's the thing you wanted. I can attach it to a message and send it to you or questions that can be answered with a single message in response. Those are the two best uses of email. you want to get to more synchronous or more structure collaboration for other things as is possible. We got time. Let's do one more. Our final message is from Chris, who wants to know about Cal's upcoming books. Yeah, we get asked similar questions a lot.

So Chris says, I think Cal mentioned in passing that he is going to start working on his next book this summer. I'm excited. I wanted to know if it's in defense of thinking. All right. So here's where I am with books. So the next book that I'm publishing is called The Deep Life, and that's going to come out in less than a year. It'll be like spring of 2027, like early March. Right now, it's on schedule to be roughly the same time as like my last book, that kind of time of year. We're in the editing process right now. So the manuscript is it's in.

We're going back and forth, and we're getting it ready for the copy editing and production. So that book's coming together really well. I think it's nice. It's tight. It's practical. It's got interesting stories. It's got techniques in it that I've talked about on the show and a lot of techniques I haven't and I think it's going to be a cool book. Yeah, I'm on sabbatical now starting this summer and I do want to be thinking about and doing research for whatever will become my next book.

It might be in the fence of thinking. I haven't sold anything yet, so everything's on the table. I'm definitely pushing deeper in that topic. I just started reading Michael Pollan's rereading Michael Pollan's book in The Fence of Food to get a sense of the format and approach he took in that particular best of. seller, but it doesn't mean that's what I'll end up doing. Right? So we'll see how the year unfolds. There's other candidates here. For example, I have this epic fantasy in mind about a productivity expert who teaches at a

dragon training school who ends up in a fairy romance. So I think that could be good, Jesse. Do you think it'll sell, because last time you had a two-book contract, right? Yeah, I'll probably do a, my last two deals have been two-book contracts. But I think almost certainly I'll probably do a single book contract for my next book. just because things are changing so quickly now. I don't want to predict too far out. Right.

I don't want to predict too far out. And I have confidence my books will do well. And I don't, you know, I don't necessarily need the comfort of the two-book deal. So, no, my plan is to do my next deal will be a single book deal. I was inspired by Dave Epstein when he came on the show, I don't know, it was like a month ago. Yeah.

Yeah, talking about his book inside the box. He was talking about how his approach to writing. He will now, for the last book, he did like a year of work first, just doing research and thinking, and not just doing research, but thinking about how the ideas come together, what the chapters could be before he started writing. As opposed to having a looser idea of like, here's the 10 chapters, but kind of figuring out as you go along what's going to be in each. And he said it was a really cool way to do it if he had more sort of intellectual flexibility. And when it came time to actually write, he was like, why is this not taking long?

because he had done so much work of like, here's exactly my point and here's exactly the examples. Let me get a better example here. I want to try something like that for the next book, I think. Like really gather and think, I mean, usually I've talked about my ideas for years ahead of time, like on the show and in my articles, but like really deep journalistic research,

if I could really play with the ideas before I get too locked into, like, this is what the structure is going to be. Does your agent want you to write a book about AI? Well, if I did in defense of thinking, that is in response to AI. Oh, okay. The problem about writing a book about specific AI technologies is it gets dated too quick.

Yeah. It's really hard to do. Like, you've got to – if you're going to do it, you've got to do it fast. It's got to be short and fast. But, I mean, think about, like, our AI reality checks, right? Like, six months can be a huge difference. You know, six months ago, we weren't talking about coding harnesses for agenda coding. And now it's, you know, last Thursday I had a whole episode.

It's like the big topic. The Thursday before I had another episode about it. God knows what the – it's six months from now. something different. And it's one of the things that actually frustrates me about a coverage of AI is that people will grab onto online to the current thing and be like, this validates everything we've ever said about AI. The terminators are here in a week, right? And then maybe that'll fizzle a little bit or become a normal technology and evolve in a way that's like less dramatically disruptive. And a new thing comes along. Like, no, this is what we were telling you. See,

we told you. And it's often this sort of straw man dichotomy between AI never does anything or or it's going to do everything we said. And they're like, see, people are using this now over here, so all of our fever dreams are true. So it's a really hard thing to, I think it's good for articles. I think it's good for columns. It's why, like, my New Yorker articles, I'm on it. We're on it on this podcast. This seems like the better medium for, like, of the moment, AI stuff.

But if I write a defensive thinking style book, it will, I mean, it's in response to AI without me having to get too much in the weeds of, you know, Claude Opus 4.7. Like, I'm not going to have a chapter with a lot of big. benchmarks from Claude Opus 4.7. All right, let's move on. I like to end my shows on the Monday episodes with giving an update about what I'm up to. I always start with what books I finished in the last week. Jesse, I'm going to be honest with you.

I finished three books last week. So I was behind on my May list. We're recording this on whatever it is, like the 19th. And now I'm boom. Knocked out three books. And so I'm back in it. So now you can do a twofer? I can do a twofer, but I'm going to read the Michael Pollan book, which won't take me

long. then I'll probably start a two-fer after that that I'll finish in June, but it'll get me going with a two-for probably. All right, so what did I read? I finished, unless I just talked about some of these last time, I don't know, I can't keep track, Jesse. You did not. All right, grow healthier as you grow older by Dr. Kenneth Cooper. So Dr. Kenneth Cooper, you might remember him from my New York Times op-ed about cognitive fitness.

I opened on these two examples from the mid-20th century of the fitness and health revolution that happened. And one of my examples was Kenneth Cooper's book, Aerobics, which was published in the 1960s, which introduced the idea that cardiovascular exercise can help you live longer. Like it was healthy. And the point was no one understood that before that. In fact, the advice was prior to this book that over 40, you shouldn't exercise. That was the standard advice in the 60s. They said that is a, you're going to have a heart attack. And they were telling, and the other advice at that time was women shouldn't break a sweat.

It's not healthy for them. And so there was a lot of pushback on Kenneth Cooper's book aerobics. I think it was like 1968 where they're like, the street is going to be full of dead joggers. You're having people over 40 who aren't in the military. They're not baseball players. They're not athletes. and you have them running, they're going to be dropping dead, right? But obviously it kicked off the idea of cardiovascular exercise.

Anyways, that was 1968. I get a note after I published that New York Times article from Dr. Kenneth Cooper, who is still alive. He's 94 years old. Get out. 94 years old. It's still working. He runs the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, which my dad used to go to when we grew up in Texas,

where you would get these really extensive annual, they called executive. physicals, the preventative medicine physicals, right? Anyways, he's still around. He read the article and he liked it and he sent me a signed copy of his latest book, which was Grow Healthier as You Grow Older, which was interesting because it told his whole story. So not just what he found, but the whole story of his life and how he discovered these things.

He was working for the Air Force when he came up with this. The Air Force needed like a better test for the fitness of the soldiers or whatever. And he started coming up with these ideas. And then anyways, it was an interesting book. So I enjoyed that. He had a cool life. Then I read, I guess I reread this. I think I had read this at some point during the pandemic.

The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Eiger. So that's the now former, recently made former CEO of Disney Corporation. And he wrote this pre-pandemic. It's his like business memoir. An interesting book. He came up through ABC. ABC Sports is how he. he got started and doing like Olympic coverage and stuff like that and then and it became like head of

programming at ABC and then ABC got bought by Capital Cities and he kind of became like number two at Capitol Cities and then Disney bought Capital Cities ABC and he was like number three at Disney for a while and then eventually took over for Michael Isser. I like media. Right now I'm liking media company like business memoirs because like we have a media company so it sounds it's interesting to me. it's definitely of its time because it was right before the pandemic. So like here it's all this like 2019 stuff.

He's talked about all these events like when this book came out and you and you're just like, oh, I know what happens next. But like obviously he didn't when the book came out. It was also from that time where you felt like if you were writing this book, which I don't think it's the case now, if you're writing a book as like a business leader then, you have to like go through every issue that'd be relevant under the general rubric of like political correctness. or wokeness and we would have to like make a long treatment of each of them of like let me talk about you know X let me talk about how I dealt with like harassment let me talk about how I talked about like racial inclusion in my movies let me talk about it was at a time where you had to

go through and like hit all these points even though it was a little out of place in a business memoir but you had to make these big statements he was thinking about back then of running for president so that was also another sub substrate that went through this book so it was interesting. And then I just finished reading this morning, MurderBot, All Systems Red. So it's the first of the MurderBot novels by Martha Wells, which just got turned in to a series on Netflix where Alexander Scarsguard plays the lead role. That's interesting. It's like a short speculative fiction. I read it because it won all these awards. I think it was like Hugo, Nebula, and there's eight of them. But I read the first one because

it's a complicated story. And it all connects to Brandon Sanderson. But basically, so my son's a big Brandon Sanderson fan. Brandon Sanderson is making a series out of one of his TV series out of one of his books, a Stormlight Archives book series. Apple is making a TV series out of it. And they hired the executive producer who made the Murder Bot TV series, which a lot of people like. And so I thought maybe I want to watch that with my son,

but I was like, well, I want to read the book. before I watch a series. So there you go. There's the chain of events that led me to that book. All right. Other things going on around the HQ.

We got our arcade cabinet. What do you think, Jess? You haven't played yet, have you? You have to play with somebody else or you play it by yourself? You can play by yourself. Okay.

We can play a single player. We got, so we have an NBA jam video game cabinet as part of the slow. I didn't, I didn't realize it was like going to be,

I thought it was going to be something that attacks onto the wall. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's like an arcade game. game. It's arcade cabinet. Now we could put a second one next to that or we could keep the

fridge there and put some of the stuff. So I'm trying to figure out, I have plans. I like, because I work here a lot, I like to have things I can go and like get five minutes of distraction. So I love about those old-fashioned games. It's the opposite of like addictive stuff on your phone. You can like play like a quarter

or a game will take you 10 minutes and you're like, yeah, that's about enough. You might have to show people a picture on your newsletter in that you're not going to post it to Twitter or Instagram. All right, maybe I'll put up a picture of the cabinet. My sons don't know who any of the players are, because it's the game from the 90s.

They probably know Charles Barkley, right? Maybe. He's an announcer. I don't know. They didn't know who Akimilogian was. We were playing. I'm not surprised about that. Yeah. They know who Michael Jordan is. But he's not in it, right? Scottie Pippin. Michael Jordan wasn't in the so we watched the video about it. He wasn't in the original, but then like all the NBA players

were playing it. And supposedly Shaq brought a cabinet. They traveled with it. With the team would travel with an NBA jam cabinet so they could play wherever they were. And then Jordan was like, wait, I want to be in on this. So he's in some of the later versions. And this cabinet has like three of the versions in it. Okay.

Yeah, so there's a version, there's definitely a version that, um, there's definitely a version there that he's actually in. But anyways, things are about to start moving quicker on a renovation, by the way. We have the electrician coming to install our super fancy light. And I don't want to hang things on the wall. So, uh,

I have a handy, my handyman's going to come and hang all the things. And boom, it's going to be, we put the rug down. We're going to have to take pictures and put in the newsletter so people can see. Yeah. All right. We will take pictures or do a short video once we actually have the renovation actually complete. All right. Anyways, enough of that nonsense. Thank you for listening. So we'll be back next Monday with another advice episode of this podcast.

And on Thursdays we have almost every Thursday our AI Reality Check episode. So check them all out. Until next time, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth. in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at Calnewport.com slash ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, Caldernupor.com slash ideas.