Skip to content

Podcast

Ep. 360- One-Page Productivity

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Source ↗ ← All highlights
  • One-Page Productivity Concept
    • Cal Newport draws a parallel between athletes’ training and managing productivity to avoid burnout.
    • He introduces “one-page productivity,” a minimal system to maintain organization while recharging. Transcript: Cal Newport So here’s the truth about modern time management that we often ignore. The systems required to tame the avalanche of messages and meetings and tasks that bury us in this current world of digital work, these systems are demanding to run. They require focus. They require a lot of energy. So after a while of running these complicated time management systems, we can feel burnt out, which could lead us to consider abandoning formal time management altogether. So I recently set out to find a solution to this issue, and I want to share with you today what I came up with. So I started my quest by noticing that there was a connection between this topic and athletics, right? Because athletes seem to have similar issues in the sense that to do really well in professional sports, you have to train hard. It’s really demanding. It uses a lot of energy. You’ve got to be very careful and precise about how you train. But they know if they train all out all the time, their bodies are going to break down. So athletes seem like they have to deal with this, that they need to do this really hard thing to succeed. But if they do it all the time, they’re going to burn out. So I wanted to understand how athletes deal with this a little bit better so that we could translate that understanding over to our world of burning out from having demanding time management Systems. So to help out here, I called up my friend Steve Magnus, who is an elite professional running coach. He’s also the author of some great books, including notably Do Hard Things and more recently Win the Inside Game. And here’s what he had to tell me. Can you play this clip, Jesse? You just can’t train hard all the time in athletics. I know in social media and everywhere else, we just think grind, grind, grind is the way we get to the top, but that’s not how it actually works. You have to balance the hard work with the recovery. Jesse And it’s in the recovery that you absorb, you adapt, and often allows you to bounce back and do more hard work when you get back to it. But the key here that I think most people miss is they think of extremes. Cal Newport Either I’m working really hard or I’m taking time off, and that’s not how it works. I like to frame it as either you’re building where you’re emphasizing something, you’re going for something, or you’re maintaining, meaning you’re doing the minimum dose where you Can pick right back up where you left off, essentially, without detraining. Because if we just took time off, if we just stopped, if we just said, hey, I’m going to rest for weeks on end, you’d start detraining so much that it would take so long and so much time to Jesse Get back to even where you were before you took time off that it’s not. All right. Cal Newport We’ll cut off there. So here’s two observations I want to make about that. First, I was right in my instinct that, yeah, athletes do have to pull back occasionally from their training schedule. In fact, they have to do this on a regular basis. Steve had a name for this pullback mode. He called it maintenance mode. But second, and this really caught my attention, when they go into maintenance mode, they don’t just stop training altogether. They figure out what Steve called minimum dose. So just enough exercise for them to maintain their fitness, but avoid what he called the D training that would set them back so that after they recover in maintenance mode, they are able To kind of pick up more or less where they were without being too far back. So recovery without D training. This I think is a good analogy thinking about our challenge of demanding time management. What we need to figure out is what is a productivity maintenance mode? In other words, the way I want to think about this is imagine that what we want to do is once or twice a year go into productivity maintenance mode to try to recharge and take a break from Our sort of more demanding organizational time management systems, but figure out a minimum dose of organization that prevents us from falling into chaos or having to start from scratch To organize our lives when the maintenance mode is over. So I want to try to find a system today that could play this role. Now, here are the constraints I’m placing on myself in trying to come up with this system. One, it should be enough organization to save you from the acute stress generated from forgetting a task or forgetting a deadline. So we don’t want to be so disorganized or disconnected from our work that we have to suffer from acute stress because that sort of defeats the purpose of recovery. Two, I want whatever this system is to prevent you from having to keep track of anything in your head. We know from David Allen that this is a source of background low-key stress that also drains your cognitive capacity. It’s a slow trickle of exhaustion that we want to avoid. At the same time, it should also allow you when you’re done with this maintenance mode to be able to relatively easily go back to a more fully featured time management system of the way, The type that I talk about for taming sort of the typical workflow. I want a system that can do all of that, but just barely because I want to maximize the (Time 0:01:51)
  • Minimalist Task Management System
    • Use only your calendar and a single sheet of paper for minimal task management during productivity maintenance mode.
    • Transfer tasks to your calendar when possible and refresh the paper regularly by copying over important items. Transcript: Cal Newport And for a reason that will become clear shortly, I call this one-page productivity. All right, so here are the pieces. One, you have to keep up your calendar. It’s the only tool really in most sort of digital office environments that everyone assumes you have. A lot of modern work features a lot of meetings and deadlines. These happen on calendars. Other people are going to send things to your calendar. So we can’t get away from our calendar. So that will remain our main central digital tool. Really, our only digital digital tool during one page productivity will just be your calendar, which you’ll put appointments on like normal and you’ll look at during the day to see Like if you have a meeting coming up. In addition, I want you to use a single sheet of paper. This is where the name of the system comes from. I think the best way to do this is to have a legal pad or a notebook and the sheet of paper you’re using is just the top sheet on top of that legal pad or the top sheet of that notebook. This is going to be your main non-calendar tool while you’re using this system. So on this single sheet of paper, you can jot down things that come up that at some point you need to do, new obligations. If possible, move these things from this paper to your calendar. So maybe there’s a particular time you want to do it, or there’s just a particular day you want to do it. You can make it an all-day event that’s not tied to a particular time. And when you do that, you can cross things out. Other stuff is just on there. There’s like a list of things that you don’t want to forget or keep in your head. And if you do something from the list, you can cross it out as well. And then you just do your best to sort of go through your day, use your calendar to know where your appointments are, grab things on that sheet, cross things off when you do them, look at The sheet when you need to, maybe you’re thinking about, hey, what am I going to do next or this afternoon? Look at the sheet once or twice during the day. All right. That’s basically it. That’s my one sheet productivity system. Now, a couple maintenance things with the system. What happens when that page gets full? A lot of things on here. You cross a lot of things off on here. The page gets full. You rip it off the notebook or the legal pad. You copy onto the fresh new page whatever tasks that you need to still remember. This is a good opportunity, by the way, when you copy it over, if you look at some things and say, you know what, that’s not really that important. I’m kind of in maintenance mode. Don’t copy it over. Ignore it. Or maybe you say, you know what, I want to get this on my calendar. This needs to be done. I’m going to do it on Wednesday. Let me go to my calendar and write that down or better yet, put a little appointment on there about when I’m going to do it. It’s an opportunity when you copy tasks from one messy page to a new page. It’s an opportunity to shrink what makes it onto your list there. For big projects to come onto your plate, right? Like, oh, here’s a big thing. It’s not urgent necessarily, but it’s a big thing and and it’s important. Go add a note on your calendar or after you leave maintenance mode to say, get into this and plan this thing. So for big things, don’t deal with big things during your maintenance mode, because as we’re going to say in a second, these modes don’t last that long. Just go throw some notes on your calendar for the future when you’re coming out of maintenance mode. Like, okay, here’s something we got to put aside sometime to figure out. Here’s something else. You’re like, I’ll deal with that when I’m back to using my full-time management system. And that’s it. (Time 0:07:20)
  • Timing and Limits of Maintenance Mode
    • Maintain productivity maintenance mode for 3 to 8 weeks once or twice a year to recharge.
    • Be permissive with email during this time and aggressively defer or decline additional work. Transcript: Cal Newport Questions people have. How long should maintenance mode be for ideal recovery? Well, we don’t have a precise answer because this is not something that we’ve studied with the same sort of quantitative precision that we’ve studied athletic training. But I’m going to say somewhere between three to eight weeks, one to two times a year. So maybe the first three weeks of July or the week before, during, and after Christmas. And you’re going to this maintenance mode. You don’t declare it. You don’t tell anyone. You just sort of slip into it. What about your email? If you have a normal office job, of course, you still have email as well. You can’t just turn it off. You just have permission to be bad at email for that period. You know, you kind of do your best. You look at it sometimes. You fall behind things. You apologize some. You don’t need to be systematic about your email during the maintenance period. What if a lot of new work is coming in and it threatens to destabilize your maintenance mode? During this period, be way more aggressive about either saying no or sort of deferring work to later when you leave the maintenance mode. Like, yes, this is a good project. I want to help on that. I got my plate full for the next two weeks, but let’s circle back to this in a month and I think I’ll get into it. So just you can deflect things or just be saying no at a higher rate. Now, here’s the thing about saying no at a higher rate. We’ve talked about this before on the show. If you do it year round, it’ll get noticed. And I’ll be like, okay, this guy never says, he says no to everything. You do it for a few weeks, but the rest of the year you’re at a higher rate of saying yes, no one notices. I talk about that in (Time 0:10:41)
  • Limits of One-Page Productivity
    • One-page productivity is not a sustainable long-term system.
    • It helps avoid chaos temporarily but leads to backlog and stress if used continuously. Transcript: Cal Newport Long term. If you just said, this is how I’m going to organize my knowledge work job from here on out, and there are some people who essentially do this. You’re going to find yourself increasingly backlogged in tasks. You’re going to find yourself not making progress on non-urgent but important matters that move the needle or important to your own advancement in your job. You’re going to find yourself becoming super reactive, spending more and more time just answering emails and jumping on and off of calls. It’ll be a very frenetic, pseudo-productive existence, but you’re going to be pretty stressed out and your performance is going to suffer. So it is not a long-term solution to trying to tackle the chaos and freneticism that is modern knowledge work. (Time 0:12:37)
  • Decide, Then Maximize Outcomes
    • When choosing between two good options, just pick one and commit.
    • Focus energy on making the chosen path successful, not on fearing missed opportunities. Transcript: Cal Newport First questions from Dominic. Jesse How do you approach decisions when you’re torn between two reasonable options, both which have pros and cons and no obvious bad choice? In particular, how do you calm your mind and decide when the future is uncertain? Cal Newport So here’s the thing, and I think this is a cultural issue that I’ve pushed back against in my work before. You just said there there’s no bad choice. So what are we worried about? Right, for some reason, and maybe this is an American cultural thing, I don’t know, or maybe it’s just like our current moment in modernity. But for some reason, when we think about choices, we have this huge sort of FOMO, this sort of fear of missing out. We don’t fear that any one of these choices is going to be terrible. We fear that the choice we missed on might in some way be better than the one we did. And that Delta really worries us. But that’s not the right way to think about decisions. You want to avoid traps. As long as you’re not putting yourself into a bad situation where this is much worse than that, what matters then is what you do with the decision after you made it. How do you respond to it? How do you act on it? How do you take full advantage of it? Can you get something good out of it? And if the answer is yes, then go for it. So if you have a situation here where there’s two choices that seem good and none are obviously bad, flip a coin. What matters is what you do after you make that decision. So I had this memory when I was thinking about this question that, look, I wrote about this in a New York Times op-ed. I went and I looked it up. So back in 2012, it was the first New York Times op-ed I ever wrote. I’ve written a bunch since then, but it was the first one I ever wrote. And it was connected to the book that had just come out back then called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which was about why follow your passion is bad advice. And I got into that looking at my own career trajectory in that op-ed. I sort of got into this idea that if you have multiple reasonable what matters is what you do once you choose one. Don’t overthink it. So I’m going to read a little bit from my 2012 article. There’s no way to write this, by the way, Jesse, without it just sounding like the ultimate humblebrag. So prepare yourself. This was definitely the description of this essay. But okay, here we go. I’m going to read an excerpt from it. In the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard decision about my future career. I had a job offer from Microsoft and an acceptance letter from the Computer Science Doctoral Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had also just handed in the manuscript for my first nonfiction book, which opened the option of becoming a full-time writer. These are three strikingly different career paths, and I had to choose which one was right for me. All right, now in the op-ed, I go and talk about kind of the meat of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, so about career capital theory. Don’t worry about your passion. Focus on getting good at things and leveraging those skills to take control of your career. Let me pick up towards the end of the article here. Returning to my story, I decided after only minimal deliberation to go to MIT. True to my alternative career philosophy, I was confident that all three of my career options could be transformed into a source of passion. And this confidence freed me from worrying about making a wrong choice. So even back then, Dominic, I sort of had an answer to this question worked out, which was given multiple reasonable choices with no obvious downsides, just choose one and turn your Focus to what you do with it. That’s almost always what matters for whether or not a decision ends up being good or bad. It was kind of a humble brag, but actually it was just a brag. I was like, look, I would, I was doing impressive things back then i guess it was the setup yeah (Time 0:18:17)
  • Managing Teen Phone Addiction
    • Restrict teenagers’ smartphone usage to reduce distraction and sleep loss.
    • Encourage alternative phone options and highlight social media’s exploitative nature. Transcript: Cal Newport As a teacher, how can I get the most out of screen addicted and sleepy teenagers? Jesse Most of my students have unrestricted access to their smartphones and stay up well through the night scrolling TikTok or playing Fortnite. Cal Newport It’s a good question. I’m assuming corporal punishment is off the table, but I think there could be a sort of shock therapy here that would have some success. Look, here’s the thing I want to step back and say first. It’s a terrible problem. Teachers will tell you this just like Caleb is here. If you give a teenager or God forbid, a pre-adolescent unrestricted access to the internet and video games, guess what? They are going to look at the internet and video games. Just do that in every waking moment, right? It’s like the equivalent of like, Hey, everyone, welcome. Uh, I’m going to give, I, I know a lot of you, your parents gave you a crate full of, you know, whiskey pornography and loaded guns, but like they had to because everyone else was doing it. So you can just use these crates all day and I hope it’s okay. That’s basically what’s happening when you give a 12-year a phone and just shrug your folders like, yeah, but everyone else is doing it. And, you know, they need to call me sometimes. So I think it’s a huge problem. And Caleb’s description here emphasizes it really does have an impact. So the real solution here is cultural, of course. Smartphones in high school. Social media, if ever is 16 or later and make it seem like this is, you know, it’s like driving a car or something. That’s something later in your life. Don’t even worry about it right now. It’s not even on the table. And when they say all my other friends are doing it, you say, I really don’t care. And when they say yes, but there’s a circumstance where I have to take the bus and what if it doesn’t work? You give them a dumb phone. We actually just bought a new one, Jesse. What’d you buy? Well, so we originally had, which I love, the cheapest flip phone available on Amazon. And then we used a Mint mobile SIM card. But it was so terrible. Like, I mean, to use it, it made no sense. It was like you had to type in a special sequence of keys just to get like the letter A to come up. My wife was like, all right, enough is enough. And we got a light phone. Okay. And that’s kind of cool too. It’s the material on a Kindle, like E-ink. And you can call and you can text, but it’s not cryptic. It’s just here’s a list of numbers. You press one and it calls it. And if you want to text, there’s like a little keyboard on the screen and you can type it in so it’s not purposefully almost like that phone the other phone was aggressively bad it was almost Like an april fool’s joke so we got a light phone but anyway it’s easy to do we it’s we we have a sim card from mint mobile that we pay like 15 a month for it’s the other way by the way a lot of kids That are too young to have phones end up with phones is the phone company’s like man, we’ll just give you another phone on your current plan. No big deal. Just here you go. Just, it’ll be like an extra. Don’t worry about it. And they’re like, well, that’s just easier. So here’s the crate of pornography, whiskey and guns. Have fun. You know, I don’t care that it’s easier. So you buy a dumb phone or you get a light phone or, but again, the Amazon phone’s fine. It should be bad because it’s for emergencies. You can call if your bus gets stuck and it might take you 15 minutes to turn the crank and to put the antenna up and get a clear view of the AM radio tower or whatever. But whatever, it’s for emergencies. What can a teacher do? I mean the best thing you can do is help work on the culture in the classroom, right? So you want to do two things. One, you want to validate the possibility of an alternative. You don’t need to convince every kid not to use a phone, but you can do your best to validate that as a possibility for kids who don’t want one. You’ve got to get that over the collective action problem of every single person has a phone. It’ll be a problem if you don’t. And you got to sort of validate and celebrate. There’s phone people and non-phone people, and it’s fine to be a non-phone person. It also seems to help with teenagers to emphasize the exploitative nature of social media. This was very successful in the 90s and the early 2000s in terms of anti-tobacco campaigns aimed at youth as they really emphasized the tobacco executives. Here are guys in suits, right? Look at these guys, older guys in suits, I guess, I don’t know, boomers or maybe even older back then. And they’re just trying to like get you addicted and take your money. And do you really want to, these like weird guys with white hair, do you really want them to win? Come on. It’s like corporate exploitation and young people don’t like that. And that helped. Same thing, man. Be like, look, you really want to help mark zuckerberg by the second half of of kawaii or wherever he owns all that land like it make it seem like this is an exploitative thing you are the Product older people god forbid people in their 40s with computer science degrees from ivy league schools that they got in the early 2000s are just out there trying to make money off Of you this is it’s not cool it’s not authentic it’s avant-garde. It is as conformist as it can be. You have to sort of make this seem like that 1950s book, The Organization Man, but now it’s the social media man. There’s nothing more conformist or unimaginative or showing of a lack of authenticity and self-regard than to just sort of let bite dance chew up your existence into points in a multidimensional Vector space they use to serve dancing videos to you. So that seems to work well with teenagers as well, that there is a countercultural authentic validity to not being on these devices. And being on them is the equivalent of Jesse and I’s childhood of proudly listening to mmm bop by Hanson. That’s what you want to do psychologically, make it easier for kids to feel like they don’t want to use those phones. So thanks for that lesson, Caleb. It’s good for parents to hear teachers be like, trust me, man, it’s a problem. It is a problem they have these phones. Don’t shrug your shoulders. Do you remember Mbop? Oh, sure do. Of course you do. (Time 0:22:07)
  • Using LLMs in Writing
    • Use large language models as advanced Google searches for research and grammar aid.
    • Verify facts from LLMs carefully to avoid misinformation. Transcript: Jesse Next up is Kirsten. Have you considered using LLMs to assist in your writing? Cal Newport All right, so people have been asking about this. Here’s how I currently use LLMs in my writing. The most frequent use would be as I sort of smarter Google search. So a place where I would have used Google, but I’m now using typically like chat GPT or something. I don’t know the different numbers, but one of those. I’ll use it as a smart Google search, right? So for example, I might say, and this was from this morning, actually. I was working on a chapter for my book about, and I was writing about Thomas Paine, and I was trying to actually compare aspects of Thomas Paine’s life to the life of Benjamin Franklin. Don’t get too excited all at once, you know, hearing about this book, but that’s what I was writing about. And I would say something like, here’s early in my research phase, here’s a claim I’m thinking about making because it kind of matches what I sort of roughly know. Does it seem correct? And it’ll always say yes and be pleasant. But can you point me towards some reputable sources that helps back it up? And the hope is that’s like an advanced Google search and you might find some good sources. In this case, it didn’t work that well. So I’ll do things like that. But in this case, I was like, this is no good. And I just went back to my old journalistic skills and like, what was the right way to actually do this in the end? I found three good sources on Thomas Paine’s time, life, what was going on in his life. Was the Britannica, Stanford Encyclopedias of Philosophy, and there’s a Jill Lepore New Yorker article from 2006 that was reviewing a couple of Thomas Paine biographies. And those are so well fact-checked. I was like, great, that actually worked better than asking GPT. But what was useful, I also did a smart Google search about timeline. There’s a little bit of a confusion where in one of the articles they talked about after Common Sense came out in 1776 that Payne volunteered for Nathaniel Green’s army in the Revolutionary War. But also famously, he was with Washington in New Jersey in December of 1776. That’s when he wrote the American Crisis No. 1, which started with the famous line, these are the times that try men’s souls. And I actually asked GPT, explain this. This timeline is confusing to me. How is he with Nathaniel Green? If he was with Washington and GPT said, well, he went with Washington first. Green was later in the war. And then I could look for another source. I was like, oh yeah, that’s right. That’s what happened there. So that was kind of useful. So like advanced Google searching, I will do that a fair amount. Sometimes I’ll use it for grammatical questions. It’s good with that for the most part. Like for today’s podcast episode, I confirmed that one page should be hyphenated and one page productivity. I’ll sometimes do copy editing with it, but all of my writing for the most part now is there’s copy editors involved. So I don’t usually need to care that much. Once, and I’ll never do it again, I made the mistake of having left a source at home and I was at the office here knowing, and I may have explained this before, but I learned my lesson, knowing That the source that was a short story that I wanted to quote was all over the Internet. I was like, well, I won’t go get it. I’ll just instead of Googling it, I could find it online and go find a quote. But I was like, I’ll just save a little bit of time because it’s all over the Internet. Hey, ChatGPT, can you find that article and find a quote about this and give it to me? The short story. And I was like, great, here you go. It was just made up. I mean, it was like the quote, but it just auto-completed it into its own way. A fact checker noted this, and I fixed it. And then I went back to ChatGPT, and I was like, I asked it again. It gave me the wrong answer. I was like, that’s not right. And it was like, oh, yeah, I know. Sorry, it was wrong. Here’s the right one. Made up. I was like, that’s still not right. It was like, I know, I know you got me. I read it. This is the actual right one. Made up. And it was like similar, but not the same. It’s hallucinating. It also did the same thing with some of this Thomas Paine research as well. It came up with the Jill Lepore article, but just confidently ascribed it to someone I’ve never heard of. I think it made the name up. It was like, yeah, this is like so-and article. So beware. But it’s like a smart Google search. Know, the first step in research, it’s like a use instead of Google sometimes. (Time 0:28:03)
  • Benefit of Thinking Walks
    • Take “thinking walks” regularly to focus on professional problems.
    • Walking aids mental clarity but frequency depends on project needs and weather. Transcript: Jesse He even wrote a book about it. How many thinking walks do you take each week? And what do you do if there’s bad weather? Cal Newport You’re a Bochy man, right? I love Bochy. Jesse Yeah, I this guy he said wine he’s a vineyard he’s really cool he’s a bad dog he’s won four championships he’s the man get him on the show let’s go you would love him oh yeah can he come to the Studio i mean he’s probably busy he’s got games and maybe he’s playing baltimore we’ll go walking together oh is he still a manager yeah he’s a manager of texas he won the world series Cal Newport Two years ago so you’re saying and i won’t put words in your mouth it is unlikely that in early july we’re going to get an active major league manager to leave texas to come to washington Dc to do a podcast in our studio that’d be great now you’re fired real producer would make that happen um all right that’s a good question. Thinking walks, the number, so I’m going to differentiate a thinking walk I’m going to define here as being, I have a specific thing I’m trying to make progress on and it is the point of The walk. The frequency of those depends on just what stage I am in, in various professional projects. Like recently, for example, I just came off of a lot of polishing in my book, which meant there was a week or two where I didn’t need a lot of new ideas. It was really just grappling with text and trying to make it better. And I wasn’t working on any new New Yorker pieces and I wasn’t tackling any particular like professional issues. So I wasn’t doing very many thinking walks. Other times I’m doing a lot. Like I’m just starting now part two of my book and there’s a lot more thinking to be done I did a bunch of thinking walks recently to try to I updated that outline over the last few days did Most of that on foot bad weather is a problem actually during the heat wave it was an issue because I was just too hot to do the walks I just didn’t do I just didn’t do the walks and I did feel Myself like physically I felt it but mentally I felt it as well now I try to walk all the time, whether I’m thinking about a particular problem or not. That’s why I was complaining about this being a stupid swamp town earlier, because I was trying to hit my 10,000 steps, part of my back recovery too. And my trainer thinks I should do it more. And I don’t think I’ve ever sweated that much. So I’m a big walker, whether it’s for thinking or not. And if I can do 10,000 steps in a day, I’m happy. Whether those are thinking steps or not just depends on where I happen to be in my professional cycle. (Time 0:32:38)
  • Effective Unstructured Learning
    • Learn new material best through directed projects under time pressure.
    • Passive paper reading is less efficient than mastering key papers that lead to follow-ups. Transcript: Jesse Next up is Tommy. I’m a research engineer in the aerospace field. I’m looking to expand my breadth of understanding my particular sub-discipline. Cal Newport Do you have any recommendations for learning new things from an unstructured curriculum? I mean, this was obviously relevant in my academic career, especially early on, like when I was a grad student, for example. And something, this is personal to me, but something I always felt was that things like journal clubs, where you just get together to read papers that are new, just so you know them. I never found those to be particularly efficient because the hit rate was low. It, you read some papers and it would have no relevance to anything you’re doing. I’m much more of a believer of having an actual project forced to learning, like taking on a project. And in order to succeed in that project, you’re going to have to learn some new things. You’re under time pressure and you have a directed goal. I have to learn this new technique because I’ve taken on this project and I need some version of that technique to really do well in this project. It’s much easier and it gives you a super high applicability rate because you’re learning things that are specifically useful in what you’re doing right now. And so you don’t feel like you’re spinning your wheels. When your mind realizes you’re just sort of sampling knowledge, it slows down. It’s like, we’ll read a page today and maybe tomorrow we’ll read another page. Isn’t that great? But when you’re trying to learn something to finish something that’s due, it’s a way more effective way to learn things. That being said, there are exceptions to this. I’ve talked about this before in my particular academic discipline of distributed algorithm theory, where we would just prove theorems. One of the things that seemed to be true is if you saw a paper that was really interesting and took the time to really master it, almost always you would find a follow-up paper. And this really was a secret that the best students in my group where I was at MIT had really mastered. Take the time to learn the hot new paper and you’re going to get three follow-up papers out of it. Learn the core technique and then you can improve it and expand it and apply it to other places. But even then, I think the way they thought about it was very specifically mastering this paper. I want to write a follow-up. I’m almost certain if I master this, there’ll be a paper I can write. So it wasn’t just randomly sampling information that might one day be useful. So I’m a big believer in the directed acquisition of knowledge if possible. (Time 0:35:00)
  • Lifestyle Engineering for Fulfillment
    • Mike’s parents engineered their lives to prioritize travel and retire early.
    • Their focus and execution during work enabled a rich, fulfilling lifestyle for decades. Transcript: Cal Newport If you have a case study, send it to jesse.calnewport Today’s case study comes from Mike. Mike says, my dad recently passed away. I’ve spent the last few months reflecting on his life and hearing from others about their memories of him. One thing that has come up over and over is how successfully he organized his life to achieve the lifestyle vision he shared with my mom. They both loved to travel. Growing up, the only thing they talked about was where they were going to travel next. They organized their professional and personal lives around being able to take as many trips as they could, mostly road trips because they loved to drive, but also flights to more far-flung Places. They both managed to retire in their early 50s, and for three decades after that, they traveled everywhere they could, even through multiple cancer diagnoses and advancing Parkinson’s. My parents didn’t slow down their travel schedule into the last few months of his life when it became impossible. A few important takeaways that resonate with your work. My parents always had their vision of a meaningful life together. You mentioned from time to time that spouses have to do this whole lifestyle engineering thing together. They were constantly talking about the life they wanted to live and they coordinated their efforts. Two, they were able to retire early because they were really good at their jobs. From time to time after they retired, they could occasionally be lured into a short-term consulting gig if the opportunity was right, but they rejected many more offers than they accepted. Too much consulting would have interfered with traveling, and traveling together was always the priority. Number three, when they were at work, they were ruthlessly focused on work. They were laser-focused on getting things done during work hours, so they never brought things Also, the more efficiently he executed at work, the freer my dad felt to religiously Focus on baseball. Oh, I like this guy. He loves sneaking away one or two days per month to go catch a late afternoon ball game. I don’t think that my dad was familiar with your work. He would have retired when you were in elementary school or middle school, but I know he would have agreed with a lot of it. Be deliberate about what you want your life to have. Work backwards from that vision and execute, execute, execute while you’re still earning a paycheck. Mike, I appreciate the note and the reflection on your dad, who sounds like an awesome guy, and like him and your mom, had a really cool life. Perfect example of the type of deep life vision we talk about on this show. Too much, too often when people think about the deep life, what they think about is like a single radical change that fixes everything. I got this job. I moved to this place. I accomplished this goal. And then the credits rolled and it was happy after. But this is the reality of how remarkable lives are formed. By remarkable, I mean they literally cause people like Mike to remark on them with admiration. You know it’s important. You work backwards from that. In a hundred small decisions, some medium decisions, and a few big decisions, you work backwards from that vision to try to move closer to it. That becomes a life that has more of the things you value and less of the things you don’t. In other words, a life that is deep. So that’s a great example of how that works. (Time 0:37:28)
  • Management Advice for New Staff
    • Manage new employees with frequent check-ins, especially early on.
    • Co-design workflows to lower unscheduled communication and foster accountability. Transcript: Cal Newport Hey, Carol, Jesse, and Jesse Skeleton. As I read to you from my TXT file transcribed from scribbles on my remarkable, it’s needless to say you’ve been a huge influence in my life. My name is Alyssa. I live in Western Colorado and I work in conservation. Lifestyle-centric planning is my bread and butter. I am truly living the modest dream. However, being effective in my job while nursing a nice distraction addiction has been another story. Your work has been instrumental in helping me rewire my noggin and restructure my approach to work. Because of the progress I’ve made, my career capital has grown and my bosses have noticed. I got a promotion recently to manage our incoming staff member starting in a month or so. That said, this is a whole new frontier for implementing our strategies. While our team is subject to the woes of asynchronous communication and inefficient staff meetings, there’s a lot of latitude given to figure out workflows that work for each of us. I’d like to take this opportunity to reconsider how I approach management. This person will largely be setting their own schedule and responsible for fielding calls, managing inquiries, managing and improving our database, and conducting a significant Amount of fieldwork. I’d like for them to have flexibility and autonomy while still encouraging and monitoring accountability. There’s a good chance this hire will be a recent college grad with little workforce experience. Can you give me some advice for how to approach management with a fresh slate? I have so much gratitude for all you do. Thank you. Thank you. All right. That’s a great question. I have a few thoughts for you. A few things that’s going to work. You have flexibility, but you also want whatever you come up with here to be sustainable. So there’s a few things that came to mind. One, with someone new like this, meet with them for a non-trivial amount of time a lot early on, right? It’s like, we’re going to sit down. Here’s our office hour. It’s going to be together. First thing in the morning would probably be best every day at first, and then eventually can move this to twice a week or something like this. If they’re remote, do this on like the phone or Zoom. I think the phone is nice because people can sort of walk and think while they talk. So even if you don’t have an agenda, just make sure that you’re making a connection to this person. Managing. You’re talking to them on a regular basis and just talking things through. Two, you’re going to design with this person workflow systems. I’ll tell you the goal of this in a second, but before you get to any specifics about it, design them with them. Do not come in and say, here is a somewhat complicated, Cal Newport inspired Trello hooked up to a Zapier automation that triggers a Rube Goldberg machine that ultimately leads to a Borough bringing dispatches across the country that’s from me to you in some sort of regular pattern or whatever. And now you’re going to do it. It’s going to be confusing. And when a system is handed down from someone else of any non-trivial complexity and any novelty, what happens is, is the inevitable hard edges rub deep. And there might just be a couple little things that could be easily fixed, but they’re going to seem intolerable to the person because it feels like it was imposed on top of them. So you got to work with the person you’re managing and say, hey, what system should we do for this? What do you think? And you can give some suggestions, you work it out and you say, great, well, we’re talking three times a week or five times a week anyways. Let’s just keep checking in on this. We’re probably not going to get it right at first and we’ll adjust. So work on these systems together. All right. Third, what should your collaboration systems, what should the goal be? To me, the simple metric I want you both thinking about is how many unscheduled messages requiring responses are being generated right now and how do we get that number lower? That is the metric you want to reduce because it reduces context shifts. If there’s a lot of unscheduled messages that require responses, you have to monitor communication channels on a regular basis. If you have to monitor computer communication channels on a regular basis, it is like productivity poison. It’s constantly throwing your brain into semi-completed aborted contact shifts, and it’s like a sandpaper across the skin of your mind. So that’s what you’re trying to reduce. You’re not trying to get speed maximized. You’re not trying to maximize efficiency. You’re not trying to maximize efficient options. You’re trying to reduce unscheduled messages to require responses, even if the resulting systems are a little bit more cumbersome or take a little bit more time or even, God forbid, The occasional thing is lost. Now, if you want a lot of inspiration for what these systems could be and why they’re so important, the right book for my canon to read would be How to Become a High School Superstar. I’m just making that up. Let’s see if he’s listening. No, it’s a world without email. 2021, a world without email makes that case very clearly, gives a lot of examples. Here’s the principles that you need to think about when trying to design these systems. So check out that book. (Time 0:41:12)