Focused - 174: Deep Work, with Cal Newport

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Computer scientist & author Cal Newport joins us to talk about the impact of technology and culture on productivity and shares what we can do to protect our ability to focus.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Excellent. And we're really happy to have a guest on the show today. Welcome to the Focus podcast, Cal Newport. Thanks, guys. Happy to be here. Hey, Cal, your name has come up several times over the years on the show.

Both Mike and I are fans of your stuff. You are on the auto read list for me. When you put something new out, I just buy it and read it. We're going to talk through some of the stuff you've written and what you do. But for the folks in the audience that don't know you, tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I'm a computer science professor here in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown University, but I also write often about the impacts, the type of technologies that computer scientists study, their impacts on our culture more broadly. So my last three books I think of as my technology and culture trilogy,

that's Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. All three of those books tackled different ways in which technologies have upended how we work, how we communicate, how we distract ourselves, and tries to understand what happened, what we can do about it. I also write about these topics for The New Yorker. So since 2020, I've been on the contributor staff there, and that's where most of my magazine-style writing on these issues go. That's where it all shows up these days. Yeah, that's quite a feather in your cap writing for the new yorker i feel like that's the bucket list for a lot of writers congratulations on that gig yeah it's a lot of fun it's a lot of fun but the deep work in particular resonated with me because i feel like that's a real challenge i think i mean a lot of this show is about that. I mean, the point is

that at this point in history, productivity has kind of become a dirty word, I guess you would say, especially kind of the historical view of productivity. But at the same time, we all have so many demands placed on us and so many distractions thrown at us. We really need to cope with that in the modern world. And I feel like that's kind of a running theme through a lot of the stuff you do. Well, I also think our relationship with productivity now in the knowledge sector is different than our relationship with productivity was, let's say, in the early 20th century in the industrial sector. And this is causing, I think, some in the early 20th century in the industrial sector.

And this is causing, I think, some of the confusion and driving some of the commentary surrounding this notion more recently. So especially online, there's a lot of this association with productivity with, for example, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who actually wasn't as influential as people think. I mean, he had his moment and disappeared, but people love this metaphor of the guy with the stopwatch that's trying to make your movements all the way more efficient. But in the industrial sector, productivity was often something that was antagonistic to the worker. So you had this back and forth where the owners of the factory were trying to get more Model Ts per man hour. And so the more they could squeeze out of a worker, the better. And in some sense, productivity was something that you as the worker would have to push

back against, typically through labor organization, through unions, et cetera. My argument about the knowledge sector is this actually quite different. The moment of very low productivity we have right now has been generated by our stumbling backwards, haphazardly, confusedly into the world of modern network digital technologies, and it's helping nobody. So it's no longer this dyadic, combative relationship between the managers and the workers. The managers hate how unproductive people are with 150 emails a day. The workers are miserable trying to keep up with all these distractions. No one's happy about it. So I think we're in a different situation today, which is

we haven't caught up to the new technologies. None of us have. The people who own the companies, the people who are working for the companies, the people who write articles about the companies, we haven't caught up to the new technology. So it's a really different place than when we were organizing against 15-hour work days or harsh conditions in factories. It's a more confusing place, but there's probably more opportunity as well. It's interesting for me because I was of the age, when I started out as a lawyer for many years,

and when I started practice, faxes were just a new thing at the time. And so I started when you communicate with people largely with letters that you like stamps on. And then I saw over my career how things change with this immediate response. Would you say knowledge workers are more or less productive because of technology at this point? I think the last big boom to productivity to the knowledge sector from IT was probably in the 80s and early 90s. This is more of like the back office revolution.

We began to computerize inventory systems, for example. We began to inventory content management systems. That really was a big boon in productivity. Interestingly, putting desktop computers on the individual desk or cubicles of knowledge workers did not seem to create a notable uptick in productivity, certainly not nearly at the levels that other major technological breakthroughs like the back office computer, like the electric dynamo being integrated into factory production. We saw nothing like that boom. And I think there's a couple of factors going on there.

I think one was, ironically, by making a lot of tasks that used to be just hard enough that you had to rely on specialization. I have to have a typing pool, type up my memos because I can't work with a typewriter and the carbon paper or whatever. I have to have an assistant handle my phone calls. Computers and networks made things just easy enough that the one worker could do everything. And I think that actually brought down productivity on the things that mattered. And then the email revolution, and I've written about this extensively, introduced these workflows that depended on heavy context switching. And that really brought down our productivity as well. So I think what we saw was a lot of

technologies were introduced that did things faster with lower friction and more options. But because they were pulling out our attention, they were pulling out our brain's ability to operate. Non-industrial productivity as a labor department metric just stayed stagnant throughout that period. We didn't see any blips. I just think those two forces canceled each other's out. And we didn't even see it coming, did we? Context shifting is a thing that really didn't't land on my radar until i don't know five

ten years ago people started writing about it but but it really is a thing and i know you've done a lot of homework on it um for the modern knowledge worker how does context shifting impact your day i mean it makes you in a literal sense much dumber because the human brain is wired to focus on one thing at a time and is relatively slow to shift from one target attention to another, especially if we're talking about cognitively demanding complex context. So if I'm working on computer code and then I go over and check my inbox and now I'm seeing these are highly salient, emotionally arousing inputs, right? It's a message from my boss who wants some information from me. This is something our brain takes very seriously. That institutes a huge context shift over to the context of that discussion. That could take five or 10 minutes until your brain is fully over into that context.

And so what we do is when we have to jump back and forth, or what I think of as our primary task focus as knowledge over the primary things we do to create value, to add value to information, we have to shift back and forth between that and checking communication channels. We keep initiating context shifts. Before the context shifts can complete, we go back to the original thing. Before we can completely refocus back on the original thing, we jump over to a communication channel and initiate a different context switch.

So our brain is quite simply muddled. It's in between cognitive contexts constantly. It's exhausting. We can't think clearly. It's why we shut down by two o'clock in the afternoon. We just feel we're too fatigued. It gives us a sense of burnout. It's what creates inbox paralysis, where there's so many different contexts represented in your inbox that your brain just freezes. And I think we've all had that where it's very difficult, right? To just take an inbox and do the logical thing. Let me just process one message after another. Our brain freezes when we see so many different contexts. They can only focus on one at a time. So we end up just trying to hunt and peck and find emails that we can answer real easily or go on social media. I mean, it's just a, from a neurological perspective, a disaster, the way that we are organizing knowledge work.

And that whole thing is an accident. And this is why I say it's really different than the labor unions trying to protest Taylorism. It's not like doing that is making more money for someone. It's terrible for everybody, right? And I think that's where we have at least some opportunity here is no one's happy with the current state of affairs. I'm kind of curious, the computer is the promise of efficiency and being able to do your work faster. And you've talked about how that's kind of offset because there's all the context switching and things like that. So

we go back to before the computer, I'm assuming it's a lot easier for someone to be focused on the task in front of the meta-entity or into that state of flow that you talk about in deep work, right? So what do you think is the net result of the increased technology, but the loss of flow? How much did we really lose by embracing the power of the machines, but not really being able to direct it where it's supposed to. I think we missed out on what could have been tremendous continued economic growth in the knowledge sector.

So essentially, the knowledge sector has not enjoyed the economic productivity boom that the industrial sector enjoyed. So if you go back and crunch these numbers during the 20th century, when we had more systematically engineered manufacturing processes, the industrial sector worldwide had this massive growth, 20x growth. Essentially, most of the wealth on which the modern Western world was built in the 20th century came out of this profound, massive increases in the productivity of manufacturing cars and whatever, toasters, right? It was this massive boom. The knowledge sector pretty much never had that. I mean, again, we got some advantages early on. I think there were some telephones, back office computers. So we've missed out on what could have been massive growth in that industry. We've missed out on that. And economists will talk about stagnation is

the word they'll use. People noticed this starting in the late 90s. I've cited some of these articles I've found from the 90s where economists are saying, where's the boom? We have all this new technology. Why aren't these CIOs we're bringing in, bringing all these computer systems, why aren't they bringing with them these massive booms? We just weren't seeing that. So I think stagnation is the answer to the question. We stagnated. Do you think that, you mentioned that

we haven't caught up to the technology. We don't really know how to use it, right? Do you think that that's possible or is the technology always going to be just one step ahead and we're constantly going to be playing catch up? I think it's possible because we, look, other economic sectors have done this, that new technologies come out and we say, oh, great. So now our car manufacturing line is going

to have computer control conveyors instead of a manual. We're going to have robotic arms attached to doors. We were able to adjust to it. The exceptional aspect of knowledge work, and this is the argument I really made in a world without email. So I think of it as like deep work is where I was pointing out for the first time how we think really matters when we're thinking about knowledge, work, productivity, focus matters. And a world without email was why is this so damn hard, right? So that follow-up was trying to understand this.

And one of the main arguments I had in that book is that when knowledge work emerged as a major sector of the economy, this was sort of mid-century US, this is a time period, Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge work, I think, I believe 1958. Drucker in particular, who really helped midwife the knowledge sector, he sort of helped the professional managerial and capitalist class understand what is this new sector. He was really clear about autonomy. He said, knowledge work is too complicated and creative for you to ever come up with an assembly line metaphor. You can't take ad copywriting and reduce it to here's seven steps and we break it up and three people do it. It won't work, right? You have to give the worker autonomy to figure out on their own how they're going to actually execute their task.

And that was such a novel idea to an economic sector that had been completely immersed in industrial growth that he really hammered autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. That became part of the DNA of the knowledge sector in general. My argument is that that went beyond just you should have autonomy in how you execute this task. And it went farther and became there should be autonomy in how you execute this task. And it went farther and became there should be autonomy in how your work is organized. Productivity is personal, which is a crazy notion in the history of the notion of productivity if we go all the way back to Adam Smith using the term in The Wealth of Nations, this idea

that everyone is just up to yourself to figure out how to be productive. This is the pervading atmosphere of knowledge work, that it's up to individuals to figure out how to organize their work. We need to give them clear objectives. We need to give you tools. And we need to give you the needed information. That is the atmosphere in which we fail to make progress at organizing work better, because when it's up to the individuals, there's no way to have good organization-wide solutions naturally emerge.

We're stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. So I think it's that the pervasive atmosphere of autonomy and knowledge work is why we can't do smart things. In Deep Work, you talk about the people who are going to be successful in the next economy. And you talk about one of those categories is the people who know how to use the machines. And I'm kind of curious how you think that applies to all the AI tools in the knowledge sector now, thinking of like chat, GPT. How does that disrupt this and what are the opportunities there for knowledge workers? Well, even well before the modern large language model breakthroughs in AI, I think it's been the story of the 21st century that if you can quickly learn and master new complicated technical systems, it's a huge advantage. And so we can go back to all these different information systems

where if you could learn statistical analysis, if you could learn SAS interfaces, if you could learn how to do whatever the complex tool du jour was, there was a great advantage in that. And keeping up with complicated tools requires you to be able to focus on things without distraction. That's how we learn. AI, I think, is going to have, there's a disruption coming from this new model of sort of human-friendly language model-based AI. There's a disruption here I don't think we're thinking about enough, which is there's actually a lot of energy behind this vision of this AI essentially playing the role of a chief of staff to each individual a leo mcgary from west wing type character a an agent that you can interact with and it can interact with other agents to take care of a lot of the logistical wrangling that causes the context shifts the hey we need to get this a meeting on the books i need this information you tell your agent it talks to other agents this gets figured out things go on the books the information gets back to you there's going to be a plus and a minus to it.

I think the plus is for individual workers in this context. And now we're only like five or six years out from this. There's going to be a lot less context shifting. I mean, I think this type of human interfaceable AI may be the thing that frees us from our current state of context shifting. The flip side of that is there might be short-term contractions. So if I can now get the work done that it used to take three people, because I'm not context shifting all the time,

the smart economic move for my company is to hire two out of three people. I mean, fire two out of three people. But we don't need 20 people. Seven people get the same amount of work done. So I actually think there's actually a real concern here that we're so unproductive because of context shifting. If that goes away quickly, and AI might be one of the ways this goes away quickly, there could be an ugly period where companies' clear move to maximize profitability might

be to actually shed staff. I think long-term, this is going to lead to continued economic growth and innovation. But I mean, I don't think we realize how unproductive we are. And so we don't realize what's going to happen when we don't need a robot to do my job as a creative. We just need AI to make me three times better at my job to have a similar economic impact. You're a computer scientist. So this AI kind of hit the mainstream in the last six months, it feels like. But I'm sure you've seen this coming for some time. You just got done telling us you think it's not that far off until this is truly a productivity tool, like setting appointments for you and handling all that context-shifting stuff that we I mean, what, I guess you've told us

the timeline, but I mean, how do you get there? I mean, what are the steps that are going to happen in between then and now? The whole key to this is just human computer interfacing. And there's been so much energy invested into this. I think the chat models like chat GPT are actually a bit of a red herring here. The real storyline here is what happened with the investment of the FANG companies in household assistance, the Google Home, the Siri, the Alexa. There's a reason why all three of those companies invested in this technology and were selling them basically at a loss is because what are they gathering? Billions of examples of humans interacting with a computer and the computer trying to understand what they're doing it's data data to train models to better understand what the people mean what the people want that's really where the the key breakthrough is see chat cpt these type of

technologies they're really focused more on the ability to generate I can generate text of a certain style, you know, based on your prompt, I can generate these sort of amazing things. But the generation is sort of less important than the understanding. And that can happen, you know, pretty incrementally. You don't have to completely upend your company or your standards

to start to bring in these assistants. And so I think at first it can be, it's going to be meeting, scheduling, for example, and information gathering. There's going to be a lot of this. Could you summarize these statistics? Can you, can you get me that? But it's going to get more sophisticated. And, but I think the key point is, is we do not need intelligence in these agents. So Silicon Valley likes to think about what we need is these agents to sort of figure out, you know, what you need proactively and protect your time and study your schedule and tell you what's going on.

Humans can do that fine. We just need not to have to check our inbox. I think we're closer to that than people think. And that's why I said Leo McGarry from the West Wing. I want people to think about the president in that show. The president never checks a calendar. The president never goes on his email on that show. They just have the chief of staff come in and say, this is what you're doing next.

Here's what you need to read. And so the president is like, great, this is what I'm doing now. Let me read this, talk to this person. And they say, this is what you're doing next, right? AI holds the promise of essentially many, many, many different jobs of having a similar experience. Here's what I need to do next. Here's the information I need. I'm just going to work on that until I'm done. I'm not arranging things. I'm not writing things. I'm not booking things. I'm not touching calendars. I'm not answering all these requests. I'm just interacting with an agent that might say, okay, here's 15 questions I need to ask you about things that came in and you answer them all and they get back to your work. I think it really could be a massive productivity boom.

Yeah. I mean, and that's the case, not just for presidents, but it's also true for CEOs and people that are really wealthy. I mean, there's a lot of people who don't understand why we complain about email because they never see it. And well, not a lot of people,

but hopefully when this is done, there'll be a lot of people. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Watching Netflix without using ExpressVPN is a bit like buying a ticket for your favorite artist, but only being allowed to watch the opening act. Now, you may not know this, but some streaming services have different content libraries for every country. So there are tons of shows available in other countries. And with a VBN, you can access those other libraries. It basically tweaks where Netflix or other services think you are right now.

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Get your money's worth at expressvpn.com. And don't forget to use the link at expressvpn.com slash focused. And don't forget to use the link at expressvpn.com slash focus to get an extra three months free of ExpressVPN for free. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Now, Cal, before the break, we were talking about this transformation with technology. But the other piece of technology that I'd like to get your thoughts on is the way technology has transformed from a productivity tool being created and sold as a productivity tool. I mean, when they made Microsoft Word, they were hoping it would replace your typewriter to now an advertising platform. And so many of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley

are not looking to make you more productive, but to sell more ads. And so the technology industry has also turned on us a bit. I mean, how do we square that? It's an interesting question because there's these, I think of them as fool's gold similarities between the issues we have in the office and the issues we have, let's say, I think of them as fool's gold similarities between the issues we have in the office and the issues we have, let's say with our smartphones and the type of technologies

you're talking about, right? Because in our office, man, I'm on my email all the time, on Slack all the time. I'm very distracted outside of the office. I'm on my phone all the time. I'm on Tik TOK. I'm on, I'm on Twitter, whatever. I'm always distracted. So it feels like often there must be a common cause here. Technology writ large is working on it. But I think you're perceptive to pick up. These are similar symptoms from completely different causes. So in the workplace, we have this issue of distraction because we have these implicit collaboration strategies that are based on just ongoing back and forth messaging. We have to tend to these conversations because it's how collaboration happens.

The tending requires all these inbox checks. So it's not a devious plot. It's an emergent plot that emerged in that atmosphere of autonomy I talked about. Then we get to our phone. It's why I wrote a separate book about this digital minimalism. Our phone and social media, these type of distractions. And here we have complete engineering to accomplish exactly that goal. And here we have complete engineering to accomplish exactly that goal.

And what I think has happened here is, of course, there has always been an attention economy. We can trace this back to the 19th century that tries to use technologies to gather attention. It's just never had the scale or the speed that the late 20th century, early 21st century attention economy was able to gain. So this sort of ubiquitous access to ubiquitous smartphones and the ability to have algorithmic processing of information, the ability to observe, it's just a lot more power was given to this existing attention economy sector that already existed, and it just blew the roof off. I don't think people realize the degree to which the money extracted out of human attention

between 2007 and let's say 2020, it reminds me, I don't know what, maybe the colonization of South America by Spain in the 16th century. I don't know what else to compare it to. I mean, Facebook is a web company from a Harvard guy that ended up with a $500 billion market cap. It was more valuable than ExxonMobil, and it got there in five years. So it's not that they were doing something new. It's that they had new tools. It's like suddenly they could extract this at a level that no one had ever been able to do before.

And I think that's why it got away from everyone. I mean, they have these universal platforms that are mining our attention, here's three services that everyone in the world is using, got out of control and caused a lot of problems, you know? And that's why I think

the healthiest future of the internet is one that doesn't have these platform monopolies. I think we need networks and online expression and publishing to be as fragmented as possible, as niched as possible. We want friction back in there. We want human distributed curation back in there. We want to get away from this idea of let's all use the same private version of the internet that's owned

by a single company. I think it really got away from them. Yeah, I mean, as a podcaster, every time I hear about some company with an idea to create a uniform podcasting platform and get away from the open RSS standard, it makes my skin crawl because that's just leading us down the same rabbit hole with one yet one more medium. Yeah. And subs just not to interject, but this is my concern about sub stack. I mean, I've, I liked it up until recently. It was kind of a pain, but you would just, I have a provider that keeps track of my email addresses and I have a website where people sign up and I control everything. And Substack was like, no, just all, we'll just do it all for you.

But you're giving up. You don't have your, your list is theirs. They're in charge of it. They're monetizing it. I mean, that type of thing makes me nervous. And I'm with you. Podcasting, that's the future of the internet I like because it's what our past looked like. It's distributed, it's idiosyncratic, it's friction, and it's fantastically, I think, diverse and interesting and innovative. we didn't get the productivity boom out of technology in the workplace that we expected.

But these technology companies got the income boom from advertising and social engineering. It's just like you said, it's incredible how much money they've made and how are they ever going to be motivated to do anything but that so long as the gravy train keeps running. Well, it's also worth noting, by the the way though that the the software productivity people like microsoft in the 90s they also made a ton of money that the wealth transfer to microsoft in the 90s was essentially just taking the salary of sort of good uh middle class office jobs and giving them the microsoft that's what the 90s was was we are going to fire all of these assistants. We're going to fire all of these sort of support roles. We'll put all that work onto the plate of the people who are doing other things.

And those savings and salary will give the Bill Gates. Like that was the 90s, basically. The 2010s was basically, it's a different wealth transfer. It's like, let's take all this money that we were whatever, giving to newspapers and television advertisers and writers, and then we'll give that all to Mark Zuckerberg. So kind of a same idea, massive wealth transfers to a small number of people from Harvard. It's just, it's coming from different places. Yeah. I never thought about it that way. The book Deep Work, I really got a lot out of it. I don't want to summarize it with you here, but the idea that people need to be able to focus and give their attention to their

work for an extended period of time is one of the big things I got out of the book. How are we as a society doing on that at this point? It's been a few years since you wrote the book. I mean, are we getting better? Not really. Not really. This is kind of the issue is we're stuck. We're stuck because we don't already have a culture of, as an organization, how do we organize work and assign tasks and collaborate at work? What are our systems? If you have an externalized, I can point to it, description of here is how we work together, now you have something to improve. And you can say, you know what? This isn't working. Let's change this part of it. We don't have that. It's all just individuals with their own personal productivity. We give them a bunch of tools and

say, rock and roll. So there's nothing to actually point that to improve except for our own habits. And that helps, but it can only get us so far so then i thought the pandemic was going to help with this effort right because my argument was shifting haphazardly to remote work makes all of the things that are already sort of bad about the way we do knowledge or productivity it's going to make them all worse uh and i and so i had this thought i published this new yorker piece in may of 2020, where I said, okay, the pandemic is going to force the hand of knowledge work organizations to say we have to actually be more explicit and systematic about how we work because this is just not working. It's not working now, now that we're remote. I was right about the first part.

Things got a lot worse for a lot of knowledge workers. We ended up, people ended up doing these eight hour zoom days where it's meeting after meeting after meeting. People were no longer commuting. They were no longer needing to, you know, go on any errands or any trips. And yet we're working twice as much. So it did get worse, but I was wrong about the conclusion that therefore we would fix things.

Instead, people threw up their hands and said, you know, everything's terrible right now. So, you know, take a number like this is just another terrible thing. So why, why would we focus on fixing this particular thing? Everything's bad right now. And so that's, take a number like this is just another terrible thing. So why, why would we focus on fixing this particular thing? Everything's bad right now. And so that's going to fix it either. Um, so none of that's great. The only hope I have is during the pandemic, we did see the rise of a lot of new companies that happened to start during the pandemic that were remote from scratch. So they were built from day one for a remote workforce. When you build yourself to be explicitly tuned to a remote workforce, you have to be much

more explicit about how collaboration happens, where information is stored. You can't just rock and roll an email. I have this theory I published. This is another New Yorker piece. It came from an entrepreneur named Chris Hurd. He has this theory that that is going to be the sort of panspermia event that's going to spread better working throughout all of knowledge work. These small startups are going to outcompete other startups because they have lower staffing

costs and they're going to grow. And then private equity firms are going to poach away COO types from these companies as they're successful so that they can inject this wisdom into their portfolio companies. Like how do we bring in these smarter ways of organizing work? And from there, it's going to spread to a lot of industries. So there is a hopeful theory that five years after the pandemic, we're going to see suddenly innovative new ways of organizing work to get us away from just, let's just slack and email all day.

We're going to start seeing those popping up and spreading in more places. So it's possible we've seeded a better relationship to work, but we'll have to spend a few years. So in the short term, nothing really changed. Knowledge work is reverting back to more or less how it was. Modulo, some still very high status industries and government are at least still trying to keep things remote. But no one ever changed anything about how they organize their work. Maybe five years from now, we're going to see a change when some of these seed companies that were

seeded during the pandemic actually grow, but we'll have to wait and see for that. We've got a lot of listeners that maybe run their own small businesses or our employees and bigger businesses. Do you have any advice for them if they want to try and get the ball rolling for themselves and their companies? I mean, to me,

the two big killers for knowledge, two things that are going to make you miserable is overload and context shifting. So we've talked some about context shifting. I just want to implant this idea that shifting your attention back and forth is productivity poison. The more you can engineer your work processes to allow you to work on one thing at a time until you're done before shifting to the next. The happier you're going to be, the more you're going to get done, the faster rate and higher quality, you're going to get things accomplished. And this often requires that you have bespoke processes for the stuff you do regularly. Here's where the information goes. Here's when and where we talk about it. Whatever gets you away from, we'll just send some emails or figure things out back and forth on Slack.

Whatever gets you away from that is almost always going to be worth it, even if it's a pain. The other huge killer, this is really important if you run your own company or your contractor or a small entrepreneur, is overload. That is literally the number of things

on your plate is too much. And here the issue is, every obligation on your plate brings too much. And here the issue is every obligation on your plate brings with it an overhead tax, like a little bit of time and attention that's required to, you know, you got to follow up with people about it. It's going to require some scheduling. It, it, it lays a little bit of claim to your time and attention. It's the cost of having it on your plate. When you have too many things on your plate, that overload tax adds up to eat up most of your time.

And then suddenly most of your time is in meetings and emailing about work instead of actually doing work. So this is another killer that got a lot worse during the pandemic. So the degree to which you can be incredibly quota-based explicit about how many things you take on at any one time and keep that load very small, I think this is a huge thing that we're overlooking right now. I think we're too used to this computer processor metaphor of like, it's better to have the queue full than not so that if I have any free moment, there's always something to work on, but we don't keep in account the overhead. The longer that queue of things to do is the more the non-directly productive overhead takes over our time.

So if you, if you you have autonomy over your work, get away from context switching and be incredibly aggressive about keeping a very small and reasonable number of things at your plate. Because missing those two things, I think, is the source of 90% of knowledge workers' headaches. And it's hard, though, for folks, because if you're a small company or an independent contractor, that's your shoes. That's how you pay for your shoes. You don't want to say, well, I need less overload, so I'm going to take less work. But then you worry that you're going to lose that work and be out on the street.

I understand, because I've experienced it myself. But when you can slow down the pace, when you can focus on a few few things to do well it makes such a difference in your overall mental health yeah and it doesn't mean your business is going to be worse yeah right i mean there's this notion of if i have too much work coming on my plate charge more do less and also there's a specialization effect that happens uh i'm i'm leaving this offering and this part of my business and doing this and just focusing on just this one core thing. You do the core thing better. It is a scary leap, but, but, you know, oftentimes you end up actually with a, a certainly a more profitable business.

So in other words, like the, the dollars per hour spent working, certainly that, that goes up typically when people get much more focused on, you can be very careful about what I do and how much I do. I was just telling a listener, not only that you actually add years to your life, I think because what you're doing is going to kill you. Well, and can I just say, there's an example I'm writing about in my new book of an entrepreneur in New

York. And she went through this whole thing and really pulled back. I was very afraid, but it's fine, right? She specializes. She takes two months off a year and she could be making more money obviously that's two months she's not taking contracts and it's a bit of a pain to work around

but my god think about what she gets out of that she basically takes the summer off and it's she didn't go broke it was fine she just arranges her contract schedule it's you know that's i did the math it's whatever it is it's it's you know math. It's whatever it is. It's, it's, you know, um, two twelfths, uh, less income or something. So it's less than 20% less income. It's easier. I think most people would take that trade 20% less income, but I get the entire summer off like, okay, I'll find a place to live as 20% cheaper because that's, that's such a huge benefit, you know?

Um, so it's, it's amazing what you can do when you start thinking that way. Yeah. And I'm not even sure your math is right because when you have that time off, you come up with new ideas. And suddenly the other 10 months are actually more profitable than they would have been otherwise. So you may get a bunch of that back anyway. But you just have to experience it. And it's something a lot of people struggle with. You mentioned the process stuff being missing when people were

forced to go virtual and the eight hours of Zoom meetings and things like that that could have been avoided had we had clear places for things to go and clear processes for people to follow so they didn't have to figure it all out themselves. You also wrote an article, though, about the rise and fall of getting things done in the New Yorker. And I know myself personally and a lot of our listeners have struggled with that GTD process where it's like, this is the system, just follow this. And then you follow it for a while and it eventually feels overwhelming. So where does that approach kind of fall down when it pertains to personal productivity? Well, I think GTD is the personification of personal productivity. And so what it highlights is the shortcoming of the personal productivity approach. So GTD arose, and in particular, that article was focused on Merlin's stepping away from that whole world, which I think is sort of poetic and metaphorical in a lot of different interesting ways. But there was a

moment in the 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s, this was the productivity prawn moment, where there was this belief of, okay, we have this overload and context switch issue, right? Because that arose starting the mid-90s as email spread. And so people were really feeling this by the early 2000s when Merlin Mann came around. And at first there was this idea, if we have the right personal technological tools and systems, we can still tame this. Like we didn't need it before, but now we do.

But if we have Quicksilver set up with exactly the right macro, so if I hit this, it'll seamlessly integrate with KGTD, and this will go into the right context and my OmniFocus view and I can pull out these tasks when I need it. There was this dream of with the right tools, productivity was going to become effortless. It was going to be, I just sit here, my thing tells me what to do next and I just execute. I'm not stressed anymore. And Merlin Mann got really into this because he was very stressed when he was a program or project manager at a web development firm or was working on web development in a project manager capacity. And the email and the meetings were really ramping up in the late 90s. And he was looking for peace.

Basically, that approach didn't work because the core issue was we had shifted with the arrival of new tools like email to this collaboration style I've been talking about that in my book I call the hyperactive hive mind. But we had moved towards this collaboration style where we figure things out on the fly with back and forth emails and later back and forth slacks. And there was no amount of tools that were going to prevent you from having to keep checking in on these conversations and moving things forward. The other issue was this email got rid of the friction required to assign work to someone. I don't have to walk into your office and see your face

and pay the social capital required to put something else on your plate. I just click and hit send. So the amount of work just kept spiraling upwards and the need to have the constantly context shift began really amplifying.

And OmniFocus couldn't solve that. GTD couldn't solve that. GTD couldn't solve that. Having good context and task list. I mean, GTD crumbled in the face of email. You know, that's basically what happened with GTD is it had an at computer context and people had 300 emails a day. But my broader point in that article

was why did productivity become personal and why putting this on the plate of the individual was never going to solve the problem. We have to solve the frictionless assignment, unchecked frictionless assignment of work to each other, which causes overload. And hyperactive high bind is our primary mode of collaboration because that causes context shifting. No one individual can change that, no matter how smart of a book they read or how good their software is. That's at the organizational level. We have alternative ways to collaborate how we communicate. We have actual systems

for keeping track of how much you're working on. It should be very small things at any one time. We have external systems to keep track of things that need to be done. It's not on your plate.

It's in our external system. And you can pull something off of that as soon as you have cycles. Those are the type of fixes we need and they're not personal productivity fixes. Yeah, email is a to-do list that other people can write on, and Slack just makes it exponentially worse. I'm dealing with this at the day job, and you're right. It's expectation setting. It's getting everybody to agree, this is the way that we're going to communicate and get work done. Yeah, but the issue there is it has to be an

alternative collaboration process. It's why the rearguard action to just have better norms and habits around email and Slack won't solve the problem. If you don't have an alternative, clearly defined process for collaboration, all we have to fall back on is Slack and email. And so it doesn't work to tell people, check your email less often. Like, forget you. I have 15 things that are unfolding with back and forth emails and they're kind of urgent. And we're going to have to do 10 back and forth emails to get an answer on this issue that our client needs by close of business. So these are five emails I have to see right when they arrive so I can bounce them back. That's the only way we're going to get

this issue resolved because we have no alternative way of collaborating. Well, if I have to see these five messages each as they arrive, I'm going to have to check my inbox once every four minutes because I can't go too long with missing it. So don't talk to me about batching my email checks, Tim Ferriss. Like our whole work is happening with these back and forth conversations that have to keep having the metaphorical communication ping pong ball knock back and forth. So it's, you know, when I first was talking after deep work came out, when I would talk to executives, they were always using that word norm.

And there's this moment of denial where they thought, no, our only issue is people have an expectation for a quick email response. And if people just knew it's okay if you wait to respond to emails, we'd be fine. I was like, this is not your issue, right? People aren't checking their email all the time because they have a bad habit. It's because there's these 15 ongoing conversations that have to be resolved today. And so they have to see the next message for each of them when they come and they don't know when they're going to come. And so they have to check it all the time. It's why Tim Ferriss's autoresponder,

I only check email once, twice a day to better serve you, disappeared because the emails were all the work was happening. And so I ended up ranting about this, but basically, uh, for a long time, I got so tired of hearing C-suite people tell me, yeah, we do have to fix our norms. Our employees just have bad norms. I was like, it's not norms. They don't have an alternative. Uh, you haven't shown you need to, it's incredibly hard work. This is how this work happens.

We track the incoming task here. There's a system by which you pull them out. Here's our set times to interact about all this type of work. And we deal with issues one after another in a quick 30-minute burst. And this is three times a week. We use office hours for small things. Everyone has their own office hours. Anything that requires more than a few messages back and forth, you have to go to that person's office hours. There's so many things we can do. We use a scrum-inspired and agile-inspired task management system where we have a common store of things. You only pull things when you're done with the first thing. There's ideas out there, and they're all hard. And it's sort of my sermon, so I'll bring it in for a landing here. But basically,

we have to do that hard work. It's not just that people have bad habits around they check their email too often or write bad subject lines. That rear guard action completely failed to GTD failed. It wasn't a matter of not keeping track of information well enough. Rear guard actions about better email habits failed because it was the collaboration process. The need to constantly check it was the problem, not bad habits. And so now I think we're left with the real solution, which is we got to get smarter about this is how we actually work. It's not just here's your email address. Here's your Slack handle.

Here's your Google calendar with invite capability. Here's your Zoom account. Rock and roll. Be a star. Be a 10Xer. We have to move past that and say we have to be more explicit about how does the human brain alchemize information into value and how can we set up our business to support that. One of the best things that we've done at the day job, which is a small team, around 12 people, was implement a short daily huddle.

15-minute meeting, talk about where you're blocked, and you have space built in at the end where, okay, let's collaborate and let's remove the roadblocks so we can move forward. But there was a lot of resistance to that idea initially because we were doing it the wrong way. And people thought, well, this is going to take an exorbitant amount of time and kind of the default that people were going to because they didn't want to do it on Slack, they didn't want to do it on email, is they just had all these other ad hoc meetings all the time. You add those up over time, you look back and you're like, wow, did I really spend 25 hours in meetings last week? Yeah, you did.

I mean, it's like the two easiest things you can do is everyone has a daily personal office hours. So any email that can't be answered with a single email in response, which is a great use for email, by the way, if it's a question I can answer and that's it, email's great. But anything that requires more than one message, hey, you have to come to my next office hours because you know what? great use for email, by the way. If it's a question I can answer and that's it, email's great. But anything that requires more than one message, hey, you have to come to my next office hours. Because you know what? In three minutes, and this could be on Zoom. It could be on Slack. It doesn't matter. But the key is it's this set hour every day. In three minutes, we can figure out

something without 13 emails. And then you have, whatever, twice a week, these group, what I call docket clearing meetings where okay our team or company just whatever scale is relevant here here's a shared doc anything that comes up that we need to talk about as a group or figure out i just throw it on that document and when we get to the docket clearing meeting you know twice a week we just go boom boom boom just start going down that list okay ignore that this is now on your plate. Ignore that. Here's what we're going to do for that. And as things pop up during the week, you throw it on that list. And yeah, you're right. People don't understand.

You cut the other meetings by, I don't know, a factor of three. And you cut the, it's not the amount of emails that matter. It's the amount of emails that require an urgent response because you're pushing forward a conversation. You cut those drastically as well. And that is worth almost any pain. I mean, if someone came to me and said, we can cut those emails by half, we can cut those meetings by half, but you're going to have to walk across coals every morning and go into a cold plunge, I would say it's probably worth it. I mean, that's such a big win. And so those two things can revolutionize a

company, but it requires buy-in. It's not just what one individual does. It requires some buy-in and there's a little bit of friction up front, but man, the rewards are just massive. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by ZocDoc. We've all been there. You're trying to find a cause for why you don't feel well. You look up your symptoms, you stumbled down a TikTok rabbit hole, and now you're even more worried than before. There are better ways to get the answers that you want

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focused. Our thanks to ZocDoc for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Cal, you have the time block planner that you sell, and you wrote about this extensively in deep work, how you use a time blocking method to keep yourself working on important things as you go throughout the day. Both Mike and I do similar things.

We're big fans of the idea. When did you start doing that? I mean, I certainly wrote about it in deep work, so I must have been doing it for years before then. That's a book I wrote probably in 2014 and 2015. So I can't even go back to the beginning, but it would have been at some point probably during my grad student career. And part of my issue was as a grad student, it was a great place to incubate time blocking because grad students have a huge amount of autonomy. We don't really have that much to do. It's kind of a fake job. So we have a lot of flexibility, but unlike other grad students, I kept my working hours to

nine to five because my wife worked. And as I figured I want to be home when she's home. So I'll just keep my grad student. So I had the set amount of time to work each day and a lot of flexibility. And so I, I, at some point in there, I got in the habit of why don't I build a plan for my time? Uh,

I'll do this here, that there, and Oh, if I'm done, then maybe I could be done early. And I think that's where the seed was planted, but then it became a big part of my philosophy that you should control your time,

give your time a job, as opposed to reacting to what other people want you to do with your time. If you get into a reaction mode, then it's email till your eyes bleed. But when you go the other way around, let me make a plan for my time. What's the best use of the time I have?

You get more out of it, you're less exhausted, and you gain really fine-grained information on how much work you actually do, what you're actually spending your time on, how long things actually take. I mean, it's an incredible source of eye-opening feedback that you can use to reshape your working life going forward. I mean, the first time I'd heard of the concept was people would refer to it as making an appointment with yourself. And, you know, the whole idea of like, well, if you've got something important, treat it like a, an appointment with another person. Cause we're always good about, Hey, if I say I'm going to be at the dentist, I'll be at the dentist. But

if we have something important to us, it's hard for us to make time for it. So you make this appointment with yourself, but I'm sure with the, um, that you've heard from a lot of people over the years that are a little resistant to it. I mean, I think some people with the, um, that you've heard from a lot of people over the years that are a little resistant to it. I mean, I think some people feel like, well, it's not giving me the freedom I want, or it seems like it's too anal retentive. Um, what are some of the common, um, feet, negative feedback you've got back to that? And how do you respond to that? Well, people are, their main concern is the schedule having to change something takes longer or something falls on my plate to which I say, great.

Change your time block schedule. You know, I mean, it's not, I guess we gamify it sometimes that, oh, that I get the reward. If the schedule I set at 8am, I managed to stick through throughout the whole day. But the reality is who cares? The key about time block planning is not, I get a magic reward for being able to figure out exactly in advance how my days unfold. It's to have at any one point during your day intention. Let me look with what remains and make a good plan for it that makes sense. And then if something changes, when you next get a chance, you come back and say, okay, let me revise my plan for

the rest of the day. What's the best I can do to make use of what remains. And if that changes again, so it's like in the planner I sell, it's the day it's divided into columns. And so you build your initial plan in the column all the way to the left. And there's many columns next to it. Why? Because that plan's not gonna, you're gonna fall off it.

You just move over one column to the right and build the new plan for the time that remains. And when you fall off that, you move one column to the right and build a new plan. I mean, it's actually built into fall off that, you move one column to the right and build a new plan. I mean, it's actually built into the system. So my argument is, the real question here is, do you want to have expressed some intention

for what you're going to do with your time for the rest of the day or not, and just let it unfold randomly or reactively? Intention is always going to end up being better than reacting. There's no scenario in which not having some intention or forethought about what you want to try to do with your no scenario in which not having some intention or forethought about what you want to try to do with your time, that somehow not having that is going to be better. The other argument is it opens up more free time. It opens up more relaxation and freedom

because when you're giving your time a job, you are able to then with confidence put aside time for doing completely unwork related thing. It's what lets you say, I'm going to stop work at three today because I, here's my plan. It makes sense. It's what lets you say, I can spend a 90 minute lunch today. I'm going to go to this museum and really just unwind. And I've, you know what? I moved these meetings in the morning so that it's the afternoon is less stressful.

You can start playing with your time, like a chess piece and have confidence in the schedule when you're just in reactive mode, you just always feel busy and you will always feel guilty if you're not working and you'll always be behind on things. I just think the argument for being reactive somehow has some sort of advantage over intention. Even if the intention is being applied in a messy landscape, just the argument never landed for me. Well, I can say that coming across your idea of time blocking was kind of transformational for me. And pretty much overnight, I went from feeling stressed out because there's always more to do to being able to calmly focus on what I had set aside time for, because you're right, it's the intention. You know, the quote

I love by Dwight Eisenhower is, plans are worthless, but planning is everything. And that really clicked as soon as I started time blocking because it's like, oh, I don't have to worry about any of the other stuff that's bouncing around in the back of my brain. This is the thing I already decided was the most important use of this time. And I really can't describe how magical that was for me.

My brain, very logical, very analytical, tend to overthink everything. So I'm constantly, well, is this really the best use of the time? And that immediately went away the minute that I started creating the plan. And you're right, you never stick to it. And I would also say the key to this working is, like you said, you make a new plan, it's the iterations. So you do it, you realize, were you messed up? Okay, well, this generally takes a little bit longer. You got to build in more of a buffer there, right? And so over time time my blocks have gotten bigger right and i've built in more margin just so

i can follow through and accomplish the things that i want to do during the day yeah i mean the system is self-correcting if you pay attention right you get better at it i think that's that's a big part of it is that that feedback and so say in the instructions to my time block planner, I say, if you were new to this, build your plan for the day. And then before the day starts, add 50% more time to all your blocks. Because that's roughly how much you're going to overestimate. I always say, you know, a fellow time blocker, because if you send them an email send them an email, that's like not super important, but easy to answer to, you don't get a response right away. Most people will respond to an email like that right away because they're constantly

in their inbox and having context paralysis. So if they see something come in easy, they're like, great, this is something I can take care of. Time blockers have time to check their email. It's like the next three hours from now is my next time. Uh, so, you know, a time blocker because they don't respond to your emails unless you happen to hit them during a block set aside for emails. Also, you know a time blocker because if your email is like poorly written or not urgent at all, days might go by because they have blocked aside time for email and they can't necessarily

get through all their emails in that time. So they have to triage to the more important things. And again, if you live in career reactive mode, everything you're just sort of dealing with as it comes in. Yeah, you can always tell if someone's time blocking because you don't hear from them at first. Your planner is obviously analog. And you talked about how you have the different columns so that you can make revisions as you go.

I'm kind of curious, do you feel strongly that that is the right way to do it? I mean, I guess we got both ends here. I, for a long time, have done it fancy paper, fancy fountain pens, completely analog, right? David, Max Sparky, digital on the calendar. What are the advantages and disadvantages of analog versus digital when it comes to time blocking in your opinion? Well, I have a hybrid approach in the sense that I think in many modern knowledge work context, you need a digital calendar for your appointments to live. Things are being set on your calendar many months in advance. There's invites that are being sent around. You can append, like I like to do, things on my calendar with information within the event for I need, okay, for this meeting,

I start adding notes straight there. So I have a digital calendar where anything connected to a specific time, any appointment, et cetera, lives. And then each day I look at that calendar, pen and paper, make my time block plan for that day. Now I'm copying things off the calendar for that day onto my time block plan. So I want my planner for the day to be analog so I can bring it with me when I'm away from the computer or I don't want to be engaging with my computer. I want the discipline of actually writing out everything I'm going to work on that day, actually drawing those boxes and seeing how my time is spread. But the planner, I'm not a big believer. I think paper planners can't keep up with storing. It can't be the permanent storage solution for

everything you need. I think this was the issue that bullet journaling had when it collided full strength with the modern knowledge work environment is you can't keep track of all of your appointments and tasks and everything that needs to happen and all your plans in a notebook. It's just too much information. So I have my digital world, and then I project what's happening that day each day into the analog world. Yeah, I think that's the way a lot of us are kind of evolving. You have the bank of tasks, and you've got the few that you write down, you've got the bank of, of, of events. And then you've got the few that you write down. But what I do hear from you is that you are using the paper planner to do the

blocks of what I was calling earlier, the appointments with yourself, the, the deep work time goes there. It does go on there. Exactly. So, I mean,

when I do a time block plan for the day, every minute of my workday is a part of a block. There's blocking every minute. And I do that on paper. I will say, however, I will often, when I'm planning on the weekly scale, for example, will go onto my digital calendar to protect time that I'm going to want to spend for working on like a project doing deep work later in the week. I don't want a meeting to take that over. So when I do a weekly plan, I might go to Thursday

and put an appointment with myself on my digital calendar. Now, when I get to Thursday, this is all going to be written down on paper, but between Monday and Thursday, I want that time to already be spoken for. So I don't, you know, on Tuesday say, sure, let's do a call then, or let's, you know, let's, let's jump on some zoom or I'll, I'll come to your meeting then. So appointments with myself will show up on my digital calendar when I'm trying to figure out when am I going to get this very important thing done? That's going to need 10 hours of thinking. And I get worried about it. I might go and find those hours and block them off on my digital calendar in advance to protect them. But I don't block every minute of my time on my digital calendar in advance to protect them. But I don't block every minute of my time on my digital calendar.

But every day, my time block plan does. Yeah. Well, it makes sense. And the other thing that you are conveying here, which I think people need to hear, is that this is really flexible. I mean, and you've said it already, but I just want to say it again.

You are not carving this into a piece of stone. It's okay if something happens. If your kid gets sick or if something else comes up at work, back when I had a lot of clients, I would make these blocks and then suddenly the whole thing would get blown up and I wouldn't beat myself up over it. I'd say, okay, well, those blocks aren't going to happen today and they're not going to have to happen another day. And you just move on. It's not, don't make it more than it is. Yeah. No one is giving out medals for block preservation. No one knows you changed your time block plan three times. And so we focus on, yeah, you know, at two, uh, I got the call from the nurse and I had to go pick my kid up from school and it blew up the rest of my blocks. But what you forget is from nine to two, you actually, those blocks meant you made

really good. You got these like key tasks done really early. Uh, you, you, you between lunch and another meeting, you were able to go to the post office to get that done and you protected this 90 minutes. And now you've made progress on this report. You're writing that your time up until that point was really well spent, you know? And so they're like a real, if you give up blocking altogether, it's just what I emphasize is the, the antonym of a time block schedule is a haphazardly reactive schedule. And there's just nothing good about that. You know, there's nothing good about that. Um, or if you say it the other way, the opposite of a haphazardly busy schedule is not every

minute is properly planned. Do you never deviate? It's a world where you're not haphazard. You're intentional and you do your best to make a plan. The plan shifts. You say, great, that's a feature, not a bug. I'll roll with it and then adjust my plan. Progress, not perfection. You wrote this great article in the New Yorker about slow productivity. And I thought that was a really, it's a nice way of putting an interesting concept. Could you share just a little bit about that with us? So in that article, I was grappling with the challenge of, like we talked about earlier in this episode,

if we don't, we don't really have a workable definition of productivity and knowledge work right now. We just sort of rock and roll in email and everyone's overwhelmed. And so I said, let's try to put out some alternative definitions. Like this is what I want productivity to mean. This is what I'm aiming at, right? Let's put out some alternatives. So slow productivity was my attempt. And that article, it was the first piece of a philosophy that has evolved since then. So in that article, what I focused in on in particular was work volume. And I said, look, I think having, I wrote this column for the New Yorker, uh, that fall, I wrote a twice a month column that was all about work disruptions in the pandemic. So this was

really on my mind. And then this was the last article of that column. So I did this, it was a limited run column. It was like four months long. And this was like the, the, the final capstone column, right? It was the slow productivity column. And I said, one of the biggest things I learned is uncapped work volume is the source of a lot of misery. And so my notion of slow productivity was then we should do many fewer things. And it sounds like we're going to lose value and do worse and our companies will do worse. But I said, I don't think we will because there's this overhead tax we pay for everything on our plate.

If you keep those things off your plate and just work on one thing at a time, you're still filling your time, but you don't have that overhead of trying to keep track of these other things. People are going to be happier, but they're going to produce better work. And it's not at all going to reduce the rate at which things are accomplished. Having things not exist on your plate,

as opposed to being on your plate, doesn't change how much time you have to work. This whole big argument. I then evolved that because I'm writing a book about slow productivity now. And as I thought more about this alternative philosophy, like here is a target we could have as knowledge work, two other principles arose. The principle one is do fewer things. Principle two is work at a natural pace. So I realize there's something very unhealthy and natural about fill every hour during the workday at this constant state of just processing things as quickly as possible. And there's a real argument to be made for seasonality at all sorts of different scales, busier time of years than other, busier days than other days in the week,

busier times of your day and other parts of your day where you pull back. We need more variation. And then the third principle of this evolving philosophy is obsess over quality. You're doing fewer things. You're working at a natural pace, but the things you're working on, you really like a craftsperson are obsessing about. I really want to do this really well. And I think that recipe, those three things is sustainable. It matches human nature. It completely sidesteps burnout. It makes work much more satisfying and it's still going to produce a hell of a lot of value. It's still going to, you know, companies can be very profitable. Freelancers can do very well. Solo entrepreneurs don't have to be sweating. It's not necessarily a trade-off of I'm stepping off the success treadmill or something like

this. I actually think it fits better human nature. So we produce better and are going to be happier. So anyways, it's a philosophy I'm evolving right now. On that second point, I observe this thing with the people I talk to and sometimes in myself, what I call just-in-time knowledge work. And it seems like so much of the work we do these days, because we get so much thrown at us, is we end up finishing things as they're on their way out the door.

And when you observe that in yourself and others, you see there's additional stress, the quality isn't as good. And for some people, it's just the way they live. I mean, I actively work against it. I grade myself each week on that. If I find myself doing too much just-in-time work, I realize that I've got to throw something overboard or make changes. But I think that is a systemic problem for a lot of people. I mean, volume causes a lot of this, right? We bring on too much. Why do we bring on too much? Well, I wrote a different piece about this where part of my argument was we have no cultural

conventions. We have no accepted methods for workload management. So what do we do then? When do we start saying no is typically once we're so overloaded and stressed that the negative emotions of how stressed we are is what finally gives us psychological cover to say no. So until we're at a place where we're at a breaking point, we don't feel comfortable saying no.

we're at a place where we're at a breaking point, we don't feel comfortable saying no. That system basically maintains overload because you don't actually start pushing back on incoming work until you're already overloaded. That's how that feedback system works. So we all run around having 20%, 25%, too many things on our plate. This is a real problem. And so it's like one of my big arguments is that we need more explicit systematic methods for workload management. How many things do I want on my plate? What's really the right answer there? And use that as the basis for which saying no or for taking core businesses off of your offering as a small business because I can't do this, this, and this and keep at this small workload. It's what allows you with confidence to say to the boss, like, look, I'm very careful about my time and I'm at my limit.

So, you know, I, I can get to that in three weeks. These are the things I'm doing now. We need a better method for when we start capping our work than simply I'm so stressed out that I have psychological cover for saying no, you know, and it's partially by the way, why remote work made this worse. I, and this was an argument I had back in 2020 is when I could see you, it was, I could see the stress on your face. I could see the crestfallen expression as I leaned in the door and said, can I take this on? And there was a social capital cost of putting something on

your plate that went away when all things went digital. And one last thing is I pointed to this experiment that Gloria Mark from UC Irvine, who does a lot of work on attention and knowledge work. She did this great experiment where they went into a company, took six people and said, no email for a week for you. And they didn't really prep people. They're just like, take you off email. And one of the things she told me about, it wasn't in the study, but she told me about it after the fact, was there was one particular employee that participated in this experiment. And he was really fed up with the amount of time his boss would shoot him these emails with all these little small urgent requests. And this guy had a job, this was a research company. He had this job where he had to set up lab equipment. It was very complicated. It kept

getting interrupted. Like, I got to answer all these requests. When he had his week away from email, those were little small requests basically disappeared. And what made it a really interesting story is that his boss's office was two doors down the hall. Yeah. Just that friction shift. I'm hitting send versus I have to walk 10 feet and see your face. Like dramatically reduced the amount of things on his plate. So anyways, I think there's a the social capital cost went away once we went remote.

But this is probably one of the more this and fixing the email. So getting rid of hyperactive hive mind. The other thing I keep coming back to is a reasonable system for managing workload that works better than simply I'm so stressed now that I feel like it's socially acceptable to say no. I mean, that can't possibly be the right way to do this. It's not good to go buy the fire extinguisher after the house is on fire. Well, I can't wait to read that book. I think that'll be really helpful to a lot of people, myself included. And Cal, you just keep knocking them out. Totally unrelated, my daughter is at UCLA. And when she started, I bought your book about how to get straight A's in school. And

she was stuck home. It was the beginning of COVID. She's now a junior and she has straight A's in college. And she follows your advice religiously. So if you, if you're listening and there's someone young in your life, Cal has a great book for that person too. And again, it's just the biggest low hanging fruit in the world is undergraduate study skills. I mean, it's the, this book, which I wrote in 2006, it's just the simplest idea. I sat down with 50 students who had straight A's and didn't seem stressed out and just said, how do you take notes? How do you work on problem sets? How do you study for technical classes? How do you study for non-technical classes? How do you write papers?

I just gathered, here's what the good students do. And I wrote it down in the book and that's it. That thing sold like a quarter million copies. Like no one else has ever thought to do this. And I keep getting the same feedback again and again, college students take that and they just dominate their classes because look, it's not that you have to be brilliant. It's that everyone around you is studying so terribly and they're so bad at it that if you're just like a little bit good at it, you're, you're suddenly, uh, you're the best. Like the metaphor I used to give, it would be like if you were playing professional basketball and everyone was still throwing the ball underhand granny style, and you figured out how jump shots work until they also figured out jump shots. You're going to be, you know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

You're like, I'm just going to out shoot everybody. Right. It's like, you just have to be a little bit better than the people around you. And in undergraduate life right now, everyone's terrible. So I hear the story like your daughter had is so common. It's just, I just am a little bit more reasonable how I study. And you know, you're Einstein. People are just amazed. It's funny for her because she got in, she's in the theater school. She got in because of her talent as a playwright. And so she was a little intimidated because UCLA is a very difficult school to get into.

And she's like, I'm going to be with all these high flyers. And she comes home and she says, I can't believe these people got in this school. You know, she sees what they're doing. And I really think it's just getting the right habits and, and, and following these procedures. I'm hoping she can carry that into the rest of her life as well. But we have you to thank for that. And we're going to put a link to that book as well in the show notes so people can check that out. So happy to have you on the show today, Cal. Really appreciate it. We had a far-ranging discussion about things interesting to folks.

And I hope if you're listening, it helped you on your own journey to focus and less widget cranking. And just thanks so much for coming in today. Well, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. All right. That wraps it up for today. We want to thank Cal for coming on the show today we also want to thank our sponsors express vpn and zocdoc we are the focus podcast you can find us at relay.fm focused and we'll see you next time