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Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
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Speaker 2: Good Morning.
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Speaker 1: This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of my interview series where I talk with fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome.
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Speaker 2: And any advice they might have for the rest of us.
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Speaker 1: So today I am delighted to welcome Cal Newport to this show. Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown and he's also the author of several books on productivity, including the recent Slow Productivity and Deep Work, a very famous one. So Cal, welcome to the show.
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Speaker 3: Well, Laura, it's always a pleasure to talk with you.
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Speaker 1: I'm excited to have a conversation and get to share it with our listeners. So Cal, I mean, something that's always interesting to me about you is that many of us who wind up, you know, creating content about productivity basically just do this and you still also have a normal job. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you structure your life in order to make space for both.
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Speaker 3: Well, I carefully would probably be the short answer. When it comes to podcasting. That particular type of content creation. I was very wary about it, right because I knew there was a regular time schedule footprint that this would demand. I'm very wary about adding things into my life that can make a regular commitment on my time, and so I really put it off and kept putting it off until the pandemic came and suddenly I had so much time that it didn't seem like so much of an impact. But I worried then, hey, when things get back to a normal type of schedule, I don't want this to have too big of a footprint. And so the rule I came up with for podcasting was one half day once a week. I was willing to give up one half day once a week, but no more, and that I would have to figure out how to stay within that. So to grow the show, or to do more episodes, or to do more research, or to have more sophisticated things happening on the show, I would just have to find ways to fit that within the week. So I went slowly. It was me at my house, and then I brought on a producer, and the producer could do more things, and that gave me more time to try to do other things. And if we want to update something about the studio or the setup. This might take a very long time because again I have these half days once a week to work on it. But I was careful about it. When it comes to my writing, that's a little bit different because professor's write, so it's not so incongruent with the other things I'm doing as a professor. Professors write books, professors do interviews, and so that I was used to doing my whole life as an academic, from grad school through all the ranks of professors and full professor. Writing today has all been about making sure you're writing all the time, So that fit much more naturally that I try to write every day. I try to write first, first thing every day. Sometimes it's a computer science paper, sometimes it's a book, Sometimes it's a New Yorker art sometimes it's a digital ethics article. That felt more natural. That was a more natural fit for what I was doing, all right.
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Speaker 1: But the idea of blocking off a certain amount of time for a project is a key part of your work. I mean, you're always teaching people about the idea of time blocking, and maybe you can explain a little bit to people what that actually means and how that's kind of what you're doing with the podcasting.
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Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm a big believer in giving your time a job, at least during your workday, right. I think if you approach your workday from the mindset of just when I have time, let me think about what I want to work on next? Like what am I in the mood to work on? Or maybe I'm a David Allen afficionado, so I'm going to load up some context list and grab a next action off of it. I think this approach doesn't work well given the pacing and workloads of modern jobs. It's much better to actually directly confront what is the time I have available today? What do I want to do with it?
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Speaker 1: Right?
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Speaker 3: Okay, maybe if those first thirty minutes of the day I have free, what do I want to do with those thirty minutes? Like? Am I going to work on this project? The flip side of time blocking is not only does it allow you to make more of the time you have from a productivity standpoint, it also lets you to better take time off. When you're controlling the time of your day. Now, you can say something, for example, like, in my time block plan, I'm going to take this two and a half hour block in the afternoon. You know what, I'm exhausted after this project that I just hit a deadline on. I'm going to go watch a movie. And when you're time blocking, you can do that with complete comfort because you say, I know what i'm doing. This is what i'm doing before, that's what I'm doing after that, this is part of a bigger plan.
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Speaker 2: This is fine.
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Speaker 3: So I'm a big believer of give your time a job. Figure out when you're going to work on things, when you're not going to work on things, what confront the reality of your schedule, confront the reality of your workload, and then make the best decisions you can.
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Speaker 1: And when do you do personally this confrontation? I mean, what does your planning process tend.
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Speaker 2: To look like?
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Speaker 3: Well, I'm a believer in multi scale planning, right, because I think the key problem with any sort of organizational philosoph is that in the end, you're trying to do something very difficult, which is connect on one side of the spectrum of the scale spectrum, a big picture aspiration for you in your life, to the other end of the scale spectrum, which is what am I doing to the next minute, right, that's actually kind of hard to do because you can't minute by minute be continually rehashing what are my goals for my life? What am I trying to accomplish? So how do we get from big picture visions down to end the moment execution. I think you should have multiple scales of planning that essentially filters this intuition down. So what I mean by that is your biggest scale might be a plan that you do at the scale of like a season. Right, okay, for the fall, I'm making my plan. I get back in touch with my goals before my life. What's important to me. I'm going to take a whole day and do this. I'm going to reflect what do I want to accomplish this season? What changes am I trying to make? What major projects I want to make progress on. You make that plan. Now you look at this plan once a week. So now once a week you can create a weekly plan. This is when you review that big picture seasonal plan in your weekly plan. Now you're confronting your calendar. Hey, what days are more crowded than others? Where are there going to be good opportunities this week to make progress on things that are important? But not urgent. I often recommend during the weekly planning that you're putting priorities onto your calendar at this point where you can protect them, like meetings or appointments that you're used to. Right you say, you know what, I am grabbing Thursday afternoon, which is still free. I'm going to grab that for working on this big riding project. And now now that's protected and other meetings and calls can't take up that time. Weekly planning is also where you could see there might be obstacles that are punching above their weight class. So what I mean by this might be Tuesday morning is perfect for me to like really push through and finish this project, except I have this coffee with like a colleague that I agree to three weeks ago, and it's across town and it's at ten. That destroys the entire morning. And when you see the whole picture is when you can say, you know what, why don't I just call that friend or that colleague and say can we do this like Thursday afternoon instead? They don't care. But you've just cleared up a big chunk of time, all right, So now you have made your weekly plan. Each day you can time block the working hours of that day. All right, what's my plan for the day? Reference your weekly plan. So if there's anything you wrote down put on your calendar, wrote down to your weekly plan, just reference that you're only looking one scale up into multi scale planning, and then you make your plan for the day. But those seasonal aspirations are filtering down through your weekly plan down to your daily plan. And then when you get to the moment, you're just doing what your time block plan says for you to be doing that moment. So your action in that moment is connected through these four links back to your bigger aspirations and dreams without you having to confront them continually throughout the day.
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Speaker 1: Absolutely, I think I do something very similar. I tend to plan my weeks sort of later in the previous week, either Thursday or Friday, looking forward to the next week. I'm curious when you.
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Speaker 3: Do this, I want to do what you do. I actually think Friday end of day would be optimal because then you go into the weekend with the psychological suker of knowing I've looked at the week ahead, I have a plan for the week ahead. Otherwise you kind of have this in the back of your head, sort of anxiety of like I don't know what's happening next week. I often don't get to it Friday afternoon because I like to shut down early on Fridays, and I often don't quite get to it. So Monday morning is almost always when I'm doing this. I accommodate that reality, however, by going pretty light on Monday meeting. So what I try to do is keep Monday relatively open so that I can spend non trivial time, first thing, for example, making my weekly plan, and not have that run right up against some sort of meeting or call or recording session.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I find a really maybe psychologically need to know what's happening, because otherwise I do think about it over the weekend a lot and get worried about like, well, something's not going to happen Monday, that had to happen Monday. And so yeah, I've learned to do it earlier in the day on Friday so it doesn't get bumped.
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Speaker 2: I guess is how I do it.
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Speaker 1: But I know people do it a lot of different times. Some people will swear by Sunday sessions, for instance.
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Speaker 2: I think that's probably another common time.
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Speaker 1: Well, we're going to take one quick ad break and then we will be back talking more with Cal Newport. So I am back talking with Cal Newport, who is a productivity expert, the author of several books on the topic in addition to being a computer science professor at Georgetown. But Cal, one of the books people know you best for is Deep Work, which came out several years ago now, and you know, you talk about all the things that people have sort of historically done to limit their distractions as they produce their their masterpieces. And you know, so I know a lot of us are trying to get more in the deep habit, deep work habit, in this very distracted world. What are some steps we can take to limit the interruptions, limit the distractions, create more of a deep work habit. Given that you know neither you are I are going to wind up in a tower for three months.
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Speaker 3: Well, I think the key idea in deep work is that cognitive context switches have for real cost. So, just from a very practical neuroscience perspective, if I'm trying to do something cognitively demanding, let's say I'm trying to come up with a complicated business strategy, right something, and I switch my cognitive context. So I look at an email inbox, for example, Even if that check is brief, I have initiated a cascade of neurological changes in my brain to try to switch the target to my attention away from what I'm doing into that inbox. And when I wrench my attention back, I'm now in a confused state, and my ability to produce work with my brain reduces, exhaustion goes up. So the main neurological idea behind deep work is when you're working on something hard, try to give it your full attention. Right, These back and forth checks will really drag you down, all right, So now the question is in the work context at least, why are we doing these checks? And here's a place where I think we get it wrong. We often abstract behavior like checking email or slack as an entirely optional behavioral quirk. Right, We say, look, just batch your email, don't check it, right, check your email less often while you're working on your project, like it's just a willpower issue. That's the issue. It's the user error. But one of the big things I uncovered is I worked on this topic and as I wrote the follow up the deep work, which was called the World Without Email. One of the ideas I uncovered is the reason why we're checking these inboxes and these chat channels all the time, completely destabilizing our ability to deep work is our underlying collaboration strategies that we're too willing in the moment to collaborate by just sending ad hoc messages back and forth. In the moment, it's easier if something comes up I need to figure out with you. In the moment, it's easier to dash off a message, Hey, what's going on with this question mark sind But what we don't realize is over time, what happens with these ad hoc back and forth exchanges is that we have to keep checking communication channels because we need to bounce these messages back and forth enough times to get to a conclusion within whatever deadline is relevant. So when I send you that message this morning that says, hey, what's going up with this right, and it's something we need to really figure out today, I have actually probably just have locked myself in to the need to have a ten message back and forth interaction that's happening unscheduled, which means I'm going to have to keep checking my inbox to find your next message in time to reply and time for you to reply, which means I might have accidentally just generated fifty extra inbox checks just by in the moment saying hey, what's going on with this question mark? So, I think the deeper cures, at least in the office, the deeper cures for getting towards more deep work is moving more collaboration out of ad hoc on schedule back and forth messaging, consolidating it, having process around it, or using consolidated synchronous times like office hours or group office hours. That is like the most important thing I think for getting people some mental energy back and the ability to do more deeper work.
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Speaker 1: So maybe like scheduling a regular one on one with somebody that you work with closely, and then you save most of the questions you have for that regular meeting.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think everyone should have daily office hours. It should last for forty five minutes, It should be in a well publicized time. Your door should be open, you should have a zoom room open, and your phone is sitting right next to you. Anything that requires more than a single response, so any message that requires a little bit of back and forth. The default should be this is we should get into this when grab me at the next office hours you're available, and we'll get it done. Like I think that should absolutely happen. I think teams should have at least twice a week a dock at clearing meeting or any issue that comes up that needs to be discussed as a group, you put it in a shared document for the team. When you get to that next meeting, you go through that document line by line by line, just nailing things one after another, everyone together. It's not about saving overall amounts of time, right because you might say it takes me no time to reply to email messages. What it's reducing as context shifts. If I can take fifty inbox checks and can selllidate that in the fifty minutes of real time office hours, it's a massive win for me.
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Speaker 1: And I imagine people can do this in their personal lives too. I mean I could see that. You know, my husband and I go back and forth a lot on the details of planning our lives, and it's probably worse than any slack channel out there. But consolidating that into one particular meeting every you know, it could be in the evening, or it could be every couple days or once a week or whatever people need to do. But then you would hash through all the major issues at that point and then ideally not have to hash through them at other points.
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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I think definitely. You know, if you're in a partnership, you're married, or whatever's going on, you probably need especially if you have kids, you probably need a morning check in like, hey, are we on board with the game plan for today? And then you need a more like substantial This is when we do it. We do it right before dinner. We do it o we're doing the dishes. We also we're big believers in having a physical inbox, right because you generate a lot of paper. It's oh, here's the thing from the car dealership. Here's like a form that we have to fill out for the kids camp. So we have a physical inbox so that when we have this meeting, we can actually go through the physical artifacts that have to be discussed. I'm also a big believer with friends, because it's a big issue people have. It's like a double edged sword. It's fantastic to be social, but in an age of text messaging, it can put you into this continual, partial attention of where I'm constantly dealing with, you know, what's going on with different friends or this or that. The commute office hours is a fantastic hack where you just tell all your friends this is when I'm driving home, call me whenever, right, and you actually end up being more socially because it moves more of these like ad hoc back and forth text conversations to like people call you when you're driving home and you can catch up with people and answer questions, and yeah, I think you're right. In your personal life, these same ideas can help.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, the group text can in fact consume a ton of time, a ton of attention. Although you know, as I think about what, you know, how I get distracted. I mean, sometimes it's email, but I can't fool myself that somebody's that's really trying to reach me. It's just you know that I kind of want to check email or whatever. Because sometimes wrestling with complicated, concentrated work is challenging, right, I mean it can feel kind of unpleasant almost sometimes in the moment as we're struggling with it.
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Speaker 2: I mean, oh, do you sense this too?
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Speaker 3: Deep? Work is not natural? Right, in a sense, that the human brain, it's evolved to give sharp attention temporarily to things that are highly salient in our environment. So we can focus really hard if we hear a rustling and we're like, okay, is that a bear or whatever. Focusing for a sustained amount of times on symbolic abstract concepts in our brain is something we're just hijacking our brain apparatus to do that, just like reading is something we're not evolved to do. We have to hijack parts of the visual and audio apparatus in the brain and rewire it, brute force rewire it to do this artificial thing. So deep work is hard, right, And so that means, for example, there's a limit on how much you can do. It's practiced right. And I often have to remember this when I'm giving talks about this is I've spent my entire adult life training at the highest levels to be a theoretical computer scientist. That is not most people's situation, right. I Mean, it's like someone who was training to be a professional athlete saying, hey, you should be in the gym six hours a day. So it's something you get better with that practice, And most people aren't super practiced at it, and sometimes you just can't do it. I told you offline, I was sick for most of the last week. You know, I couldn't do deep work. You know, it's so hard that there's no way you can take a compromised mind. And the thing is our minds are compromised by a lot of things. I think it's a really good point. We should respect the difficulty of deep work and use that to let ourselves off the hook a little bit when we're not doing and jew Wiles in his attic in Princeton solving Fermat's last theorem over seven years.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think I use all my brain much, not that I would ever be able to do that, but it's true. We you know, thinking of it as an athletic sort of thing that you are be in training, and probably most of us are just sort of in the walk around the block kind of level of fitness, and with some concerted effort, money of us could do more. You know, you could run a five k, you could you know, lift a reasonable amount of weight. Then there's some people who are going to be, you know, running two hour and ten minute marathons, and they're a whole different class, but most of us could be better than we currently are if we if we work at it.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I like that.
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Speaker 2: Yep.
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Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then we'll be back with a little bit more from Cal Newport. We're here after the ad break talking with Cal Newport, who is a computer science professor at Georgetown, the author of several productivity books, also a podcaster. You should go check him out. But we talk a lot about routines on this show. You talked recently in this interview about doing a shutdown richeal.
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Speaker 2: You said you did this relatively early on Fridays.
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Speaker 1: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what your shut down ritual looks like and then why you do it.
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Speaker 3: Well, it's inspired by goes back to David Allen. David Allen was inspired himself by Dean Atchison, who was a consultant who a business consultant who is Alan's mentor. And Atchinson had this idea, which I think is correct, that open loops, so things that you are involved with are obligated to do or committed to do, that are not captured somewhere that exists just in your head. Are a source of anxiety and stress. And it's a very naturalistic and kind of common sense theory because your mind, if it deems something is important and doesn't trust that it's taking care of or will be taken care of, it has to keep remembering it refreshing itself so you don't forget it, and this takes up mental resources and ultimately becomes a source of stress or anxiety. So Alan channeling Atchison said, oh, full capture with this terminology is important. Everything should be written down in a trusted system. And I really have found that to be successful in my own own sort of mental life is trusting I have a plan for what needs to be done, and there's nothing I need to remember in my head. Gives me peace. And so I realized a big missing piece of all of this for me was that at the end of the day, if I just said, okay, I'm done working now, now I'm doing my personal life, it was very difficult to move past the open loops because even if I had done the David Allen thing and captured tasks in lists that I was going to review, there was other things going on, like what's my plan for getting this done? Do I need to keep working on this. Maybe this isn't working at all. Like I actually developed my shutdown routines while working on my doctoral dissertation. I'd be very stressed at the end of the workday about like a proof that wasn't working, and like maybe I should keep thinking about this. What if everything falls apart? So what I started doing was a simple routine where at the end of the day I closed down all open loops. So partially that's capturing open obligations and systems. Partially it's looking at my calendar and seeing what's coming up ahead, making sure that I'm not forgetting something that's going to happen. And partially it's looking at my inboxes to make sure there's not something urgent I missed or just arrived. And partially it was looking at my plan, what's my plan for the rest of this week in convincing myself I have a good plan for making progress on the things that matter, and then I would do a really demonstrable ritual to indicate to myself i'd shut down. I used to actually say the phrase schedule shutdown complete because it was an unusual phrase. It's a weird phrase, and so I could then use it as a hook to tell my brain when an hour later it was like we gotta worry about our thesis or where everything is following apart, I would say I said that weird phrase, And there is no way I would have said that phrase unless I'd actually checked everything was comfortable. We're done shutting down, And so the shutdown routine became like a key way for me to actually resist rumination. And what happens with shutdown routines is that you have to deploy the conversation a lot at first. At first you have to say to yourself a lot, no, no, no, I'm not going to get into this. I did the shutdown routine. But over time it trains your brain just not try the ruminations in the first place, and the level of professional rumination post work really reduces.
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Speaker 1: And so then you can just kind of relax on the commute home. Then if you know that the shutdown.
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Speaker 3: Is, it's so fantastic and you can put on like a podcast and just yeah, Like, I had a very hard day yesterday with concrete right because I'm still recovering from the sickness, and I had five I consolidate a lot of stuff when I'm on campus into the same day five meetings. Boom boom boom. This is not my hat, you know me, Laura, My happy place is not five meetings. My happy place meet yeah, right right, So this just exhausts me. Right, my voice is going, I'm just really tired. I do my shutdown routine and then I was like, okay, I had saved for my drive home. I was like, the Rewatchables podcast is doing the Blair Witch Progress project and my movie Guy and it's October first, I'm a Halloween guy, and I could just give into that, and thirty minutes of just enjoying my drive home, the shutdown routine made all the difference.
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Speaker 2: Made all the difference.
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Speaker 1: And you have to think about movies and something else. So Cal, I wonder if you could tell us, you know, part of the tagline of this show is taking our days from great to awesome? So what is something that you have done lately to take a day from great to awesome? Obviously, listening to that podcast on the commute home was probably a good thing. I wonder if you've got anything else fun you've done lately.
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Speaker 3: I've been more willing this fall to take things off my plan for the day, and I, you know, I get I get into this mode sometimes more than others. Where I've been I've been more willing to say, you know what, what if we just stopped today at two? You know what if we watched the movie this morning? And I've been doing a little bit more of that. I think I was inspired by thinking about these ideas. In my last book, Slow Productivity. I had this whole part about working at a natural pace. I've been doing that a lot this fall. It's just it's it's been a busy fall. It's been a hard fall, and I've been reacting to the hardness by going easier on myself. And I don't know, a random Wednesday just saying I'm gonna call it. I'm going to call here and not in a haphazard way. I'm going to do a shutdown routine. I've covered my bases. I'm not being negligent here. But instead of making progress on this, I'm just gonna go for a walk. I'm going to watch a movie I've that has been useful to me. Counterbalancing the hard, the unusually hard with the unusually easy balances everything out in the end.
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Speaker 1: I am a big fan of taking a longer break in the middle of the day. I mean, especially if people do wind up doing some work outside of normal working hours for whatever reason, moving those tiles around is just really helpful. I mean, like I've been sometimes taking a long lunch break and going and having a picnic somewhere, like in a botanical garden near my house, and it's a great, like just way to celebrate the middle of the day. I mean, there's a real reason for it, but it definitely makes me return feeling a little bit more refreshed.
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Speaker 3: Well, I always say it's it is arbitrary. I mean, if you're working, for whatever, an eight hour day or something like that, like you can get a lot of stuff done, But the idea that that duration is exactly the right amount of time to get done exactly what you need to get done, is preposterous. Right, Clearly, there's way more than you can do than you're ever going to have time to do. Right, you could work twelve hours a day I still want to get done. You could work five hours day, it's not going to get done. So this idea that if I don't fill these arbitrary hours completely with effort, then I'm going to fall short of some sort of goal is just preposterous. That's not how these things work. What you're trying to do is make progress on the things that are important consistently while trying to make sure that the non like the urgent, annoying things don't drown you. Right, that's the game, and that game doesn't have to require a very consistent pace, a very consistent number of hours. I write about it in the book, write the new book. I have the whole thing about having much more variation and intensity over different time scales is what we're wired to do. So I'm been a big fan of actually implementing that.
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Speaker 2: Sounds good.
00:25:50
Speaker 1: Well, is there any thing that you are particularly looking forward to? It sounds like Halloween might might be a big thing in your household.
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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, big, big Halloween, big Halloween guy.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:26:03
Speaker 3: So it's it's we're recording this on the second this next few days. I'll start. I start by putting out the base lights, right, so it requires twenty five different like wiring electronics elements. I have it all sort of inventory. I have two sets of lights that are computer controlled. I built my own computer controllers for those lights. And then there's a bunch of spot lights and motivated lighting effects. So I'm gonna start getting that out and then we bring out our figures. We're doing a ghost town theme this year, so I'm excited.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: My goodness, like six foot tall ghosts in the yard.
00:26:35
Speaker 2: I mean, what are we talking here?
00:26:36
Speaker 1: Are?
00:26:36
Speaker 3: So? I usually use skeletons as my base for all of the different scenes. This year, the new thing I tried is working with pink foam to actually do carvings, and so I made a multi level water sluice so that the prospectors can be have like a water sluice that they're at the skeleton prospectors.
00:26:53
Speaker 2: That sounds awesome. I want to trigger trade at your house.
00:26:58
Speaker 1: Well, Cal, thank you so much for joining us.
00:26:59
Speaker 2: Where where can our listeners find you?
00:27:02
Speaker 3: So you can My podcast is called Deep Questions. You can find that wherever you do podcast. You can find out more about me and my books at Calmnewport dot com. I don't do social media, however, so you're not going to find much of me on there.
00:27:14
Speaker 1: Sounds good. Well, Cal, thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to check out his books and if you have feedback on this or any other episodes before Breakfast. Feel free to reach out to me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com and in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to.
00:27:32
Speaker 2: Making the most of our time.
00:27:40
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from US iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
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Speaker 2: Good Morning.
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Speaker 1: This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of my interview series where I talk with fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome.
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Speaker 2: And any advice they might have for the rest of us.
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Speaker 1: So today I am delighted to welcome Cal Newport to this show. Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown and he's also the author of several books on productivity, including the recent Slow Productivity and Deep Work, a very famous one. So Cal, welcome to the show.
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Speaker 3: Well, Laura, it's always a pleasure to talk with you.
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Speaker 1: I'm excited to have a conversation and get to share it with our listeners. So Cal, I mean, something that's always interesting to me about you is that many of us who wind up, you know, creating content about productivity basically just do this and you still also have a normal job. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you structure your life in order to make space for both.
00:01:14
Speaker 3: Well, I carefully would probably be the short answer. When it comes to podcasting. That particular type of content creation. I was very wary about it, right because I knew there was a regular time schedule footprint that this would demand. I'm very wary about adding things into my life that can make a regular commitment on my time, and so I really put it off and kept putting it off until the pandemic came and suddenly I had so much time that it didn't seem like so much of an impact. But I worried then, hey, when things get back to a normal type of schedule, I don't want this to have too big of a footprint. And so the rule I came up with for podcasting was one half day once a week. I was willing to give up one half day once a week, but no more, and that I would have to figure out how to stay within that. So to grow the show, or to do more episodes, or to do more research, or to have more sophisticated things happening on the show, I would just have to find ways to fit that within the week. So I went slowly. It was me at my house, and then I brought on a producer, and the producer could do more things, and that gave me more time to try to do other things. And if we want to update something about the studio or the setup. This might take a very long time because again I have these half days once a week to work on it. But I was careful about it. When it comes to my writing, that's a little bit different because professor's write, so it's not so incongruent with the other things I'm doing as a professor. Professors write books, professors do interviews, and so that I was used to doing my whole life as an academic, from grad school through all the ranks of professors and full professor. Writing today has all been about making sure you're writing all the time, So that fit much more naturally that I try to write every day. I try to write first, first thing every day. Sometimes it's a computer science paper, sometimes it's a book, Sometimes it's a New Yorker art sometimes it's a digital ethics article. That felt more natural. That was a more natural fit for what I was doing, all right.
00:03:08
Speaker 1: But the idea of blocking off a certain amount of time for a project is a key part of your work. I mean, you're always teaching people about the idea of time blocking, and maybe you can explain a little bit to people what that actually means and how that's kind of what you're doing with the podcasting.
00:03:23
Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm a big believer in giving your time a job, at least during your workday, right. I think if you approach your workday from the mindset of just when I have time, let me think about what I want to work on next? Like what am I in the mood to work on? Or maybe I'm a David Allen afficionado, so I'm going to load up some context list and grab a next action off of it. I think this approach doesn't work well given the pacing and workloads of modern jobs. It's much better to actually directly confront what is the time I have available today? What do I want to do with it?
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Right?
00:03:55
Speaker 3: Okay, maybe if those first thirty minutes of the day I have free, what do I want to do with those thirty minutes? Like? Am I going to work on this project? The flip side of time blocking is not only does it allow you to make more of the time you have from a productivity standpoint, it also lets you to better take time off. When you're controlling the time of your day. Now, you can say something, for example, like, in my time block plan, I'm going to take this two and a half hour block in the afternoon. You know what, I'm exhausted after this project that I just hit a deadline on. I'm going to go watch a movie. And when you're time blocking, you can do that with complete comfort because you say, I know what i'm doing. This is what i'm doing before, that's what I'm doing after that, this is part of a bigger plan.
00:04:33
Speaker 2: This is fine.
00:04:34
Speaker 3: So I'm a big believer of give your time a job. Figure out when you're going to work on things, when you're not going to work on things, what confront the reality of your schedule, confront the reality of your workload, and then make the best decisions you can.
00:04:47
Speaker 1: And when do you do personally this confrontation? I mean, what does your planning process tend.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: To look like?
00:04:53
Speaker 3: Well, I'm a believer in multi scale planning, right, because I think the key problem with any sort of organizational philosoph is that in the end, you're trying to do something very difficult, which is connect on one side of the spectrum of the scale spectrum, a big picture aspiration for you in your life, to the other end of the scale spectrum, which is what am I doing to the next minute, right, that's actually kind of hard to do because you can't minute by minute be continually rehashing what are my goals for my life? What am I trying to accomplish? So how do we get from big picture visions down to end the moment execution. I think you should have multiple scales of planning that essentially filters this intuition down. So what I mean by that is your biggest scale might be a plan that you do at the scale of like a season. Right, okay, for the fall, I'm making my plan. I get back in touch with my goals before my life. What's important to me. I'm going to take a whole day and do this. I'm going to reflect what do I want to accomplish this season? What changes am I trying to make? What major projects I want to make progress on. You make that plan. Now you look at this plan once a week. So now once a week you can create a weekly plan. This is when you review that big picture seasonal plan in your weekly plan. Now you're confronting your calendar. Hey, what days are more crowded than others? Where are there going to be good opportunities this week to make progress on things that are important? But not urgent. I often recommend during the weekly planning that you're putting priorities onto your calendar at this point where you can protect them, like meetings or appointments that you're used to. Right you say, you know what, I am grabbing Thursday afternoon, which is still free. I'm going to grab that for working on this big riding project. And now now that's protected and other meetings and calls can't take up that time. Weekly planning is also where you could see there might be obstacles that are punching above their weight class. So what I mean by this might be Tuesday morning is perfect for me to like really push through and finish this project, except I have this coffee with like a colleague that I agree to three weeks ago, and it's across town and it's at ten. That destroys the entire morning. And when you see the whole picture is when you can say, you know what, why don't I just call that friend or that colleague and say can we do this like Thursday afternoon instead? They don't care. But you've just cleared up a big chunk of time, all right, So now you have made your weekly plan. Each day you can time block the working hours of that day. All right, what's my plan for the day? Reference your weekly plan. So if there's anything you wrote down put on your calendar, wrote down to your weekly plan, just reference that you're only looking one scale up into multi scale planning, and then you make your plan for the day. But those seasonal aspirations are filtering down through your weekly plan down to your daily plan. And then when you get to the moment, you're just doing what your time block plan says for you to be doing that moment. So your action in that moment is connected through these four links back to your bigger aspirations and dreams without you having to confront them continually throughout the day.
00:07:37
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I think I do something very similar. I tend to plan my weeks sort of later in the previous week, either Thursday or Friday, looking forward to the next week. I'm curious when you.
00:07:45
Speaker 3: Do this, I want to do what you do. I actually think Friday end of day would be optimal because then you go into the weekend with the psychological suker of knowing I've looked at the week ahead, I have a plan for the week ahead. Otherwise you kind of have this in the back of your head, sort of anxiety of like I don't know what's happening next week. I often don't get to it Friday afternoon because I like to shut down early on Fridays, and I often don't quite get to it. So Monday morning is almost always when I'm doing this. I accommodate that reality, however, by going pretty light on Monday meeting. So what I try to do is keep Monday relatively open so that I can spend non trivial time, first thing, for example, making my weekly plan, and not have that run right up against some sort of meeting or call or recording session.
00:08:36
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I find a really maybe psychologically need to know what's happening, because otherwise I do think about it over the weekend a lot and get worried about like, well, something's not going to happen Monday, that had to happen Monday. And so yeah, I've learned to do it earlier in the day on Friday so it doesn't get bumped.
00:08:55
Speaker 2: I guess is how I do it.
00:08:57
Speaker 1: But I know people do it a lot of different times. Some people will swear by Sunday sessions, for instance.
00:09:02
Speaker 2: I think that's probably another common time.
00:09:05
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to take one quick ad break and then we will be back talking more with Cal Newport. So I am back talking with Cal Newport, who is a productivity expert, the author of several books on the topic in addition to being a computer science professor at Georgetown. But Cal, one of the books people know you best for is Deep Work, which came out several years ago now, and you know, you talk about all the things that people have sort of historically done to limit their distractions as they produce their their masterpieces. And you know, so I know a lot of us are trying to get more in the deep habit, deep work habit, in this very distracted world. What are some steps we can take to limit the interruptions, limit the distractions, create more of a deep work habit. Given that you know neither you are I are going to wind up in a tower for three months.
00:10:02
Speaker 3: Well, I think the key idea in deep work is that cognitive context switches have for real cost. So, just from a very practical neuroscience perspective, if I'm trying to do something cognitively demanding, let's say I'm trying to come up with a complicated business strategy, right something, and I switch my cognitive context. So I look at an email inbox, for example, Even if that check is brief, I have initiated a cascade of neurological changes in my brain to try to switch the target to my attention away from what I'm doing into that inbox. And when I wrench my attention back, I'm now in a confused state, and my ability to produce work with my brain reduces, exhaustion goes up. So the main neurological idea behind deep work is when you're working on something hard, try to give it your full attention. Right, These back and forth checks will really drag you down, all right, So now the question is in the work context at least, why are we doing these checks? And here's a place where I think we get it wrong. We often abstract behavior like checking email or slack as an entirely optional behavioral quirk. Right, We say, look, just batch your email, don't check it, right, check your email less often while you're working on your project, like it's just a willpower issue. That's the issue. It's the user error. But one of the big things I uncovered is I worked on this topic and as I wrote the follow up the deep work, which was called the World Without Email. One of the ideas I uncovered is the reason why we're checking these inboxes and these chat channels all the time, completely destabilizing our ability to deep work is our underlying collaboration strategies that we're too willing in the moment to collaborate by just sending ad hoc messages back and forth. In the moment, it's easier if something comes up I need to figure out with you. In the moment, it's easier to dash off a message, Hey, what's going on with this question mark sind But what we don't realize is over time, what happens with these ad hoc back and forth exchanges is that we have to keep checking communication channels because we need to bounce these messages back and forth enough times to get to a conclusion within whatever deadline is relevant. So when I send you that message this morning that says, hey, what's going up with this right, and it's something we need to really figure out today, I have actually probably just have locked myself in to the need to have a ten message back and forth interaction that's happening unscheduled, which means I'm going to have to keep checking my inbox to find your next message in time to reply and time for you to reply, which means I might have accidentally just generated fifty extra inbox checks just by in the moment saying hey, what's going on with this question mark? So, I think the deeper cures, at least in the office, the deeper cures for getting towards more deep work is moving more collaboration out of ad hoc on schedule back and forth messaging, consolidating it, having process around it, or using consolidated synchronous times like office hours or group office hours. That is like the most important thing I think for getting people some mental energy back and the ability to do more deeper work.
00:13:00
Speaker 1: So maybe like scheduling a regular one on one with somebody that you work with closely, and then you save most of the questions you have for that regular meeting.
00:13:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think everyone should have daily office hours. It should last for forty five minutes, It should be in a well publicized time. Your door should be open, you should have a zoom room open, and your phone is sitting right next to you. Anything that requires more than a single response, so any message that requires a little bit of back and forth. The default should be this is we should get into this when grab me at the next office hours you're available, and we'll get it done. Like I think that should absolutely happen. I think teams should have at least twice a week a dock at clearing meeting or any issue that comes up that needs to be discussed as a group, you put it in a shared document for the team. When you get to that next meeting, you go through that document line by line by line, just nailing things one after another, everyone together. It's not about saving overall amounts of time, right because you might say it takes me no time to reply to email messages. What it's reducing as context shifts. If I can take fifty inbox checks and can selllidate that in the fifty minutes of real time office hours, it's a massive win for me.
00:14:04
Speaker 1: And I imagine people can do this in their personal lives too. I mean I could see that. You know, my husband and I go back and forth a lot on the details of planning our lives, and it's probably worse than any slack channel out there. But consolidating that into one particular meeting every you know, it could be in the evening, or it could be every couple days or once a week or whatever people need to do. But then you would hash through all the major issues at that point and then ideally not have to hash through them at other points.
00:14:33
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I think definitely. You know, if you're in a partnership, you're married, or whatever's going on, you probably need especially if you have kids, you probably need a morning check in like, hey, are we on board with the game plan for today? And then you need a more like substantial This is when we do it. We do it right before dinner. We do it o we're doing the dishes. We also we're big believers in having a physical inbox, right because you generate a lot of paper. It's oh, here's the thing from the car dealership. Here's like a form that we have to fill out for the kids camp. So we have a physical inbox so that when we have this meeting, we can actually go through the physical artifacts that have to be discussed. I'm also a big believer with friends, because it's a big issue people have. It's like a double edged sword. It's fantastic to be social, but in an age of text messaging, it can put you into this continual, partial attention of where I'm constantly dealing with, you know, what's going on with different friends or this or that. The commute office hours is a fantastic hack where you just tell all your friends this is when I'm driving home, call me whenever, right, and you actually end up being more socially because it moves more of these like ad hoc back and forth text conversations to like people call you when you're driving home and you can catch up with people and answer questions, and yeah, I think you're right. In your personal life, these same ideas can help.
00:15:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, the group text can in fact consume a ton of time, a ton of attention. Although you know, as I think about what, you know, how I get distracted. I mean, sometimes it's email, but I can't fool myself that somebody's that's really trying to reach me. It's just you know that I kind of want to check email or whatever. Because sometimes wrestling with complicated, concentrated work is challenging, right, I mean it can feel kind of unpleasant almost sometimes in the moment as we're struggling with it.
00:16:14
Speaker 2: I mean, oh, do you sense this too?
00:16:16
Speaker 3: Deep? Work is not natural? Right, in a sense, that the human brain, it's evolved to give sharp attention temporarily to things that are highly salient in our environment. So we can focus really hard if we hear a rustling and we're like, okay, is that a bear or whatever. Focusing for a sustained amount of times on symbolic abstract concepts in our brain is something we're just hijacking our brain apparatus to do that, just like reading is something we're not evolved to do. We have to hijack parts of the visual and audio apparatus in the brain and rewire it, brute force rewire it to do this artificial thing. So deep work is hard, right, And so that means, for example, there's a limit on how much you can do. It's practiced right. And I often have to remember this when I'm giving talks about this is I've spent my entire adult life training at the highest levels to be a theoretical computer scientist. That is not most people's situation, right. I Mean, it's like someone who was training to be a professional athlete saying, hey, you should be in the gym six hours a day. So it's something you get better with that practice, And most people aren't super practiced at it, and sometimes you just can't do it. I told you offline, I was sick for most of the last week. You know, I couldn't do deep work. You know, it's so hard that there's no way you can take a compromised mind. And the thing is our minds are compromised by a lot of things. I think it's a really good point. We should respect the difficulty of deep work and use that to let ourselves off the hook a little bit when we're not doing and jew Wiles in his attic in Princeton solving Fermat's last theorem over seven years.
00:17:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think I use all my brain much, not that I would ever be able to do that, but it's true. We you know, thinking of it as an athletic sort of thing that you are be in training, and probably most of us are just sort of in the walk around the block kind of level of fitness, and with some concerted effort, money of us could do more. You know, you could run a five k, you could you know, lift a reasonable amount of weight. Then there's some people who are going to be, you know, running two hour and ten minute marathons, and they're a whole different class, but most of us could be better than we currently are if we if we work at it.
00:18:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like that.
00:18:25
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:18:26
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then we'll be back with a little bit more from Cal Newport. We're here after the ad break talking with Cal Newport, who is a computer science professor at Georgetown, the author of several productivity books, also a podcaster. You should go check him out. But we talk a lot about routines on this show. You talked recently in this interview about doing a shutdown richeal.
00:18:56
Speaker 2: You said you did this relatively early on Fridays.
00:18:59
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what your shut down ritual looks like and then why you do it.
00:19:04
Speaker 3: Well, it's inspired by goes back to David Allen. David Allen was inspired himself by Dean Atchison, who was a consultant who a business consultant who is Alan's mentor. And Atchinson had this idea, which I think is correct, that open loops, so things that you are involved with are obligated to do or committed to do, that are not captured somewhere that exists just in your head. Are a source of anxiety and stress. And it's a very naturalistic and kind of common sense theory because your mind, if it deems something is important and doesn't trust that it's taking care of or will be taken care of, it has to keep remembering it refreshing itself so you don't forget it, and this takes up mental resources and ultimately becomes a source of stress or anxiety. So Alan channeling Atchison said, oh, full capture with this terminology is important. Everything should be written down in a trusted system. And I really have found that to be successful in my own own sort of mental life is trusting I have a plan for what needs to be done, and there's nothing I need to remember in my head. Gives me peace. And so I realized a big missing piece of all of this for me was that at the end of the day, if I just said, okay, I'm done working now, now I'm doing my personal life, it was very difficult to move past the open loops because even if I had done the David Allen thing and captured tasks in lists that I was going to review, there was other things going on, like what's my plan for getting this done? Do I need to keep working on this. Maybe this isn't working at all. Like I actually developed my shutdown routines while working on my doctoral dissertation. I'd be very stressed at the end of the workday about like a proof that wasn't working, and like maybe I should keep thinking about this. What if everything falls apart? So what I started doing was a simple routine where at the end of the day I closed down all open loops. So partially that's capturing open obligations and systems. Partially it's looking at my calendar and seeing what's coming up ahead, making sure that I'm not forgetting something that's going to happen. And partially it's looking at my inboxes to make sure there's not something urgent I missed or just arrived. And partially it was looking at my plan, what's my plan for the rest of this week in convincing myself I have a good plan for making progress on the things that matter, and then I would do a really demonstrable ritual to indicate to myself i'd shut down. I used to actually say the phrase schedule shutdown complete because it was an unusual phrase. It's a weird phrase, and so I could then use it as a hook to tell my brain when an hour later it was like we gotta worry about our thesis or where everything is following apart, I would say I said that weird phrase, And there is no way I would have said that phrase unless I'd actually checked everything was comfortable. We're done shutting down, And so the shutdown routine became like a key way for me to actually resist rumination. And what happens with shutdown routines is that you have to deploy the conversation a lot at first. At first you have to say to yourself a lot, no, no, no, I'm not going to get into this. I did the shutdown routine. But over time it trains your brain just not try the ruminations in the first place, and the level of professional rumination post work really reduces.
00:22:09
Speaker 1: And so then you can just kind of relax on the commute home. Then if you know that the shutdown.
00:22:13
Speaker 3: Is, it's so fantastic and you can put on like a podcast and just yeah, Like, I had a very hard day yesterday with concrete right because I'm still recovering from the sickness, and I had five I consolidate a lot of stuff when I'm on campus into the same day five meetings. Boom boom boom. This is not my hat, you know me, Laura, My happy place is not five meetings. My happy place meet yeah, right right, So this just exhausts me. Right, my voice is going, I'm just really tired. I do my shutdown routine and then I was like, okay, I had saved for my drive home. I was like, the Rewatchables podcast is doing the Blair Witch Progress project and my movie Guy and it's October first, I'm a Halloween guy, and I could just give into that, and thirty minutes of just enjoying my drive home, the shutdown routine made all the difference.
00:23:01
Speaker 2: Made all the difference.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: And you have to think about movies and something else. So Cal, I wonder if you could tell us, you know, part of the tagline of this show is taking our days from great to awesome? So what is something that you have done lately to take a day from great to awesome? Obviously, listening to that podcast on the commute home was probably a good thing. I wonder if you've got anything else fun you've done lately.
00:23:20
Speaker 3: I've been more willing this fall to take things off my plan for the day, and I, you know, I get I get into this mode sometimes more than others. Where I've been I've been more willing to say, you know what, what if we just stopped today at two? You know what if we watched the movie this morning? And I've been doing a little bit more of that. I think I was inspired by thinking about these ideas. In my last book, Slow Productivity. I had this whole part about working at a natural pace. I've been doing that a lot this fall. It's just it's it's been a busy fall. It's been a hard fall, and I've been reacting to the hardness by going easier on myself. And I don't know, a random Wednesday just saying I'm gonna call it. I'm going to call here and not in a haphazard way. I'm going to do a shutdown routine. I've covered my bases. I'm not being negligent here. But instead of making progress on this, I'm just gonna go for a walk. I'm going to watch a movie I've that has been useful to me. Counterbalancing the hard, the unusually hard with the unusually easy balances everything out in the end.
00:24:20
Speaker 1: I am a big fan of taking a longer break in the middle of the day. I mean, especially if people do wind up doing some work outside of normal working hours for whatever reason, moving those tiles around is just really helpful. I mean, like I've been sometimes taking a long lunch break and going and having a picnic somewhere, like in a botanical garden near my house, and it's a great, like just way to celebrate the middle of the day. I mean, there's a real reason for it, but it definitely makes me return feeling a little bit more refreshed.
00:24:49
Speaker 3: Well, I always say it's it is arbitrary. I mean, if you're working, for whatever, an eight hour day or something like that, like you can get a lot of stuff done, But the idea that that duration is exactly the right amount of time to get done exactly what you need to get done, is preposterous. Right, Clearly, there's way more than you can do than you're ever going to have time to do. Right, you could work twelve hours a day I still want to get done. You could work five hours day, it's not going to get done. So this idea that if I don't fill these arbitrary hours completely with effort, then I'm going to fall short of some sort of goal is just preposterous. That's not how these things work. What you're trying to do is make progress on the things that are important consistently while trying to make sure that the non like the urgent, annoying things don't drown you. Right, that's the game, and that game doesn't have to require a very consistent pace, a very consistent number of hours. I write about it in the book, write the new book. I have the whole thing about having much more variation and intensity over different time scales is what we're wired to do. So I'm been a big fan of actually implementing that.
00:25:49
Speaker 2: Sounds good.
00:25:50
Speaker 1: Well, is there any thing that you are particularly looking forward to? It sounds like Halloween might might be a big thing in your household.
00:25:58
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, big, big Halloween, big Halloween guy.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:26:03
Speaker 3: So it's it's we're recording this on the second this next few days. I'll start. I start by putting out the base lights, right, so it requires twenty five different like wiring electronics elements. I have it all sort of inventory. I have two sets of lights that are computer controlled. I built my own computer controllers for those lights. And then there's a bunch of spot lights and motivated lighting effects. So I'm gonna start getting that out and then we bring out our figures. We're doing a ghost town theme this year, so I'm excited.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: My goodness, like six foot tall ghosts in the yard.
00:26:35
Speaker 2: I mean, what are we talking here?
00:26:36
Speaker 1: Are?
00:26:36
Speaker 3: So? I usually use skeletons as my base for all of the different scenes. This year, the new thing I tried is working with pink foam to actually do carvings, and so I made a multi level water sluice so that the prospectors can be have like a water sluice that they're at the skeleton prospectors.
00:26:53
Speaker 2: That sounds awesome. I want to trigger trade at your house.
00:26:58
Speaker 1: Well, Cal, thank you so much for joining us.
00:26:59
Speaker 2: Where where can our listeners find you?
00:27:02
Speaker 3: So you can My podcast is called Deep Questions. You can find that wherever you do podcast. You can find out more about me and my books at Calmnewport dot com. I don't do social media, however, so you're not going to find much of me on there.
00:27:14
Speaker 1: Sounds good. Well, Cal, thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to check out his books and if you have feedback on this or any other episodes before Breakfast. Feel free to reach out to me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com and in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to.
00:27:32
Speaker 2: Making the most of our time.
00:27:40
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from US iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
