Ep. 257: Refusing Overwork  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 257: Refusing Overwork - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8b0d57dc-d8c8-4199-b91a-9ef6f603126b ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **FSP and Workload Management** - Fixed Schedule Productivity is effective because it provides workload management. - Modern knowledge work lacks clear workload management, leading to stress and anxiety. Transcript: Cal Newport Yes, that is something else I do as well. So a lot about this article holds up. But I did want to look back and say, what is it that's new? So what's my new take, or my new additions to this thinking? Well, the first thing I want to add to it, 2023 Cal wants to add to this article, is I don't think I fully understood back then why fixed schedule productivity was so effective. The way I talk about it in that article is that, oh, it is just a source of innovation. If you have a simple goal that you can commit to, I don't want to work past five, that will lead you to innovate lots of smaller productivity habits. You're going to track your time better. You're going to be more careful about managing your project queues. You're going to have systems to automate certain things that can be automated. So I saw it back in 2008. This strategy was really about innovation. I used to call it a meta productivity strategy because it induced many different concrete productivity innovations. 2023 Cal sees, okay, part of why this is so effective is actually not just that it induces you to come up with good ideas, but because it is substituting for something that is missing in Modern knowledge work, which is workload management. Modern knowledge work, and this is an idea I've been writing about, let's say, in the New Yorker in recent years, one of the big issues is that we don't have clear ways to actually manage Individual workloads. We allow workloads to be distributed in an ad hoc fashion. People send you emails, grab you on Slack or in the hallway, hey, what about this? Can you help me with this? Can you join this? It is up to you to figure out how much to bring on your plate. It's up to you to figure out when to push back. This is a very difficult burden to place onto an individual knowledge worker. So what do we tend to do? We fall back on what I talk about all the time on the show as the 20% rule. We wait until we have about 20% too much work on our plate. At that point, we are so stressed out and anxious about our work that our psychological distress gives us emotional cover to say no. We're feeling so bad that we finally feel justified to start limiting new stuff on our schedule. And what this really looks like in practice is oscillation. Things get way out of control. From a place of anxiety and burnout, we begin pushing back on new work. Eventually, we crest the other direction. Now we have too little on our plate. We've been saying no for a while. We've finished the things that were stressing us out. Now we have too little on our plate. So we start saying yes again. Then we go right up to the peak again before we fall back down to the valley. Fixed skill of productivity, though I did not know it at the time when I introduced it, is a workload management strategy. By saying my work has to fit into these hours, you have a better metric to use to control your workload than stress and anxiety. Your metric is, I'm not going to be able to easily fit this within nine to five, so now I have too much on my plate. I have to say no or improve how I'm working on what's already there. That is a much more reasonable metric than waiting until you're 20% more stressed. Trying to fit your work into nine to five, that's actually a reasonable amount of work. So what you're implicitly doing with fixed schedule productivity is saying, here is a reasonable workload. I can do a lot of good work with this workload, but it is sustainable and it can fit into a broader, deeper life that has other concerns than just work. And I'm going to work backwards now and make sure what do I need to do to keep my workload to fit within those limits. So it's replacing the 20% rule with something much more humane and sustainable. I did not have that vocabulary in 2008, in part because life as a grad student and a writer is very autonomous. Most of the work you do, you bring on into your own life. So workload management, it just wasn't something I was thinking about. I had full control over my workload. 2023 Cal sees that's really one of the key elements for why fixed productivity, I think, has persevered. ([Time 0:11:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9c5b685a-38e3-4c47-b526-9a1af108b739)) - **Implementation Details of FSP** - Time block planning and task management are crucial for making fixed schedule productivity work. - Process-centric communication helps manage collaboration and minimize context shifts. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So what about the details? What has changed since 2008 in terms of how I actually implement fixed productivity? Because I still do. That's still roughly, I talk about all the time on the show, Work hours, nine to five-ish, usually a focus block on Sunday morning. So what has changed? A lot of the things I talk about in the article I still do, but what else has changed? A couple things. First of all, as you know, I now have a much more sophisticated, multi-scale planning philosophy to organize my obligations and find time to actually execute them. My time management was not so sophisticated as a grad student because it didn't need to be. As someone who today has seven jobs, and yet still is trying to satisfy fixed-fielder productivity, strategic planning, weekly planning, daily time block planning, all working Together and coordinating with a good task management capture system is critical. I have to have that type of control today in a way that maybe I didn't back then. So my time management to make my nine to five goal work is much more complicated. Process centric communication has also become more complicated in my life. This is what I talk about in a world without email, really thinking through collaboration, really thinking through how are we going to communicate to get something done. This wasn't very relevant in 2008 for me. In 2023, this very much matters that I cannot just be going back and forth, ad hoc, unscheduled communication and Slack and email for all of my different ongoing projects. That would require me to check my inbox all the time. The cost of the resulting context shifts would in turn really make it difficult for me to keep my same workload within nine to five. So that's another thing I think a lot about today that I did not back then. Do I communicate and collaborate in a way that minimizes context shifts, that moves away from the hyperactive hive mind and towards something that's much more psychologically and Neurologically sustainable? It takes on time and attention, but that has allowed me to really increase the number of things I am still juggling within that same window of time that I set back when I was whatever this Would have been, 25 or 26. An interesting aside I want to add here before we wrap this up is I recognized, I was remembering this the other day, I recognized as I was finishing up grad school that I had things easy From a workload management perspective, that fixed schedule productivity wasn't too hard to implement and that it would get harder. And that if I became a professor and I kept writing books, I was looking ahead to my life today and I knew that would be much harder. And I actually did during my postdoc years. I spent two years as a postdoc after grad school to train for my life right now, to train specifically for satisfying fixed schedule productivity with a busier professional demands. I added artificial constraints to my schedule as a postdoc. I took two hours out of every day in the middle of the day that I took away from work. It's where I would bring my dog to the office. And then midday, we would go for a run. Didn't matter how cold it was. I had all the gear to run in Boston, even when it was really cold. We'd go for a run. I would do a Navy SEAL-style calisthenics workout on a floating dock out there in the Charles River off the Esplanade, and I would just swipe away, shovel away the snow to make room for Sit-ups. Then I would go home, bring the dog home. I would eat lunch. I'd watch a show. I'd take a shower. I'd go down, maybe get a coffee at the Starbucks on Charles Street and take the tea one stop, the Kindle MIT. That ate up two hours every day. I'd relax. Jesse I was going to ask you about that, actually. Yeah. So you probably remember me talking about that. Oh, 100%. I was going to one of the questions I was going to ask you about because I was like thinking really nine to five, you're going to have like six. Cal Newport Well, and that was the point. I did that on purpose because work was too easy. And I said, okay, let me take two hours away because now if I take two hours away to fit my work as a postdoc into nine to five, it's going to be harder. I'll innovate more rules because when I become a professor, I'm going to have a lot more work to do. And so I want to be used to being much more efficient. I actually just worried I was out of shape from a productivity standpoint. My life was too easy. So I took two hours out of every day as a postdoc, just to make my life from an organizational perspective harder, so that when I became a professor, I would be ready. And I think it worked. And I was ready for the initial obligations as a professor. It was fine. Kids were much more, I would say, of a bigger challenge than becoming a professor. But this was all training. So anyways, fixed-out productivity, that's sort of the story. That's where it came from. That's how I used to think about it. This is what I added to it over the years. This is where it is in my life right now. So my summary here is I think it is very effective. If you have a normal knowledge work job, you need some way of managing your workload. This is much better than the default of just waiting until you're too stressed out. I know it's scary. I know you worry, like what if I say no to people? Yeah, you have to figure out how to do it well. It takes experimentation, but I do not give up. Do not say, look, my work just requires me to work all the time. Do the effort required to try to make this work. Get organized. Get systematic about your collaboration. Get clear about your workload cues so that you can be much more clear when you say no and say, well, I would love to say yes, but I have too many things on here right now. And my cue is full and I keep track of this really carefully. Earn people's respect that you're an organized person that does what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it. So they will grant you the ability to have more flexibility in your workload management because they trust that you know what you're doing. They trust that you're on top of things. All this is hard work. But this single commitment, these are the hours I work and I will do whatever I can to make this happen. That will drive all of that effort. That will drive all of that improvement. And if after all of that, your job still makes it impossible, then it's a very good signal to say maybe it's not the right job. If your lifestyle vision is not completely centered on your professional aspirations and you can't make fixed schedule productivity work, even when you're on top of all the different Things that might work here, then I think that's just a big red flag. This life is not compatible with the deep life writ large. It's a perfectly useful signal to say, maybe I need to make a change. So I continue to embrace this, and I continue to want to spread the word. So I would say my final assessment, I think the article holds up. I would write it differently today. I would add a much more sophistication to ([Time 0:15:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eefe0bbf-d233-4560-9da4-1346c33c72a1)) - **Postdoc Training** - Cal Newport intentionally added constraints during his postdoc to train for a busier future. - He removed two hours from his workday to improve efficiency and prepare for increased demands. Transcript: Cal Newport An interesting aside I want to add here before we wrap this up is I recognized, I was remembering this the other day, I recognized as I was finishing up grad school that I had things easy From a workload management perspective, that fixed schedule productivity wasn't too hard to implement and that it would get harder. And that if I became a professor and I kept writing books, I was looking ahead to my life today and I knew that would be much harder. And I actually did during my postdoc years. I spent two years as a postdoc after grad school to train for my life right now, to train specifically for satisfying fixed schedule productivity with a busier professional demands. I added artificial constraints to my schedule as a postdoc. I took two hours out of every day in the middle of the day that I took away from work. It's where I would bring my dog to the office. And then midday, we would go for a run. Didn't matter how cold it was. I had all the gear to run in Boston, even when it was really cold. We'd go for a run. I would do a Navy SEAL-style calisthenics workout on a floating dock out there in the Charles River off the Esplanade, and I would just swipe away, shovel away the snow to make room for Sit-ups. Then I would go home, bring the dog home. I would eat lunch. I'd watch a show. I'd take a shower. I'd go down, maybe get a coffee at the Starbucks on Charles Street and take the tea one stop, the Kindle MIT. That ate up two hours every day. I'd relax. Jesse I was going to ask you about that, actually. Yeah. So you probably remember me talking about that. Oh, 100%. I was going to one of the questions I was going to ask you about because I was like thinking really nine to five, you're going to have like six. Cal Newport Well, and that was the point. I did that on purpose because work was too easy. And I said, okay, let me take two hours away because now if I take two hours away to fit my work as a postdoc into nine to five, it's going to be harder. I'll innovate more rules because when I become a professor, I'm going to have a lot more work to do. And so I want to be used to being much more efficient. I actually just worried I was out of shape from a productivity standpoint. My life was too easy. So I took two hours out of every day as a postdoc, just to make my life from an organizational perspective harder, so that when I became a professor, I would be ready. And I think it worked. And I was ready for the initial obligations as a professor. It was fine. Kids were much more, I would say, of a bigger challenge than becoming a professor. ([Time 0:17:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/513a6bb6-ca40-4801-97c5-9da160fb1d79)) - **Scheduling Activities Within FSP** - Include non-professional activities within or outside your fixed schedule as needed. - Incorporate "autopiloted exceptions" for focused professional work outside fixed hours. Transcript: Cal Newport You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right. Let's move on to some questions, Jesse. What do we got here today? Jesse Sounds good. First question is from Alex. Limiting your workload to a fixed amount of time each day makes sense to me, but how do you decide what kinds of activities fall within your fixed schedule? For example, does reading have to happen inside your fixed schedule deadline? That is a good question, Alex. Cal Newport What needs to be within the nine to five if you're an FSP or fixed schedule productivity aficionado? What doesn't? A couple points I want to make here. Personal and leisure activities, community activities, family activities, so basically anything that's non-professional does not have to, of course, fall within your fixed schedule. However, it can. So I think this is an important point I want to make. You can put non-work activities during your fixed schedule. In fact, that's often a kind of a nice way to do it. I go out to the gym during my lunch hour. It might actually be the right way to do that, especially if you have kids coming home after work. So non-professional activities do not have to be within the fixed schedule, but they can be in there. All right. So they can be in there if you want them to be. It's okay to also have some exceptions to the fixed schedule. So I want to be clear about this. I call them autopilot exceptions. A small number of things that happen outside your fixed schedule that are professional, but they happen at the same times, on the same days, in the same place, in a heavily ritualized Fashion, right? So it's not haphazard. It's not, I just need to spend more time on email. I'm working and I didn't get as much done today as I wanted to. So I'm just going to work some more after my fixed schedule is over. It is not that. It is autopiloted exceptions, the same work, same place, same time, same ritual every week. So, for example, for a long time, I would write my weekly blog post in the evening. And I had a ritual around where I would do it and I would write it in the big leather chair, which old time Cal Newport fans know about. And I put on a record on the record player as a whole particular ritual. I also have this Sunday morning riding ritual. Now I was actually surprised to see in my 2008 post, I just said Sunday morning is part of the fixed schedule, but I often think about that as just an exception, but I only do riding during That time. And so the key for these autopiloted exceptions to your fixed schedule is that it has to be a specific work. It has to be a focused work and it cannot be general purpose. You cannot just say, yeah, on Sunday morning, I just do more email and just generic work. On a weekday night, I just do email and generic work. That's going to throw you out of your leisure mode. It's going to ruin your shutdown. It's going to open up a lot of loops, and then it's going to be pretty dangerous. So you can have these exceptions that happen at the same time on the same days, but it should be for the same work, and that work should be focused, and it should not be general purpose. It should not induce generic, highly varied context shifts as well. All right, what do we got next? ([Time 0:30:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dd850e86-d2e4-46b0-a50a-8adc771ad5b0)) - **Saying "No" Effectively** - Implement workload management systems, like quotas or pre-planning work, to justify saying "no". - Build a reputation for being organized and reliable to gain flexibility in workload management. Transcript: Jesse Next question is from Catherine. How do you keep your work hours reasonable when people are constantly asking to do things and it's hard to say no without creating negative impacts on your career? Cal Newport I mean, this is often the big issue I hear, the most common issue I hear about fixed skill to productivity is I'm going to have to say no to things. The amount of things coming onto my plate is so furious that to fit nine to five, I'm going to have to say no to more things than I currently do today. Now, I have a couple of points I want to make about this because I think no as a skill is something we don't discuss with enough nuance. First, I want to make the point, was this Catherine, right? Yeah. So Catherine, first, I want to make the point, you're already saying no. You're already saying no. It is highly unlikely that if you're like the standard knowledge worker who is roughly nine to five or nine to six, but kind of does second shifts a lot of night as well for an hour or two Extra to try to keep up with things. So maybe you're working, you have sort of 55 hours a week, 55 to 60 hours a week that you're actually working. It's highly unlikely that the incoming volume of work towards you, all the requests and emails and Slack and meetings exactly requires 55 to 60 hours a week. Highly unlikely. What's really happening is, again, you're following the 20% rule. Once you get the intuition that your workload is no longer going to fit into this like 55 to 60 hours stretch week, you are saying no. Whether it's explicit or not, you're pulling back from things, you're pushing things off your plate. You're already saying no. It's just you fixed where you're saying no at a place that I guess generates enough psychic pain that feels like you're justifying it. So all we're talking about is fixed schedule productivity. You're still saying no. You're just saying it a little bit earlier in your workload. So really, this is the fundamental psychological Rubicon people have to pass. What is the reasonable amount of work to have on my plate before I say no? Most knowledge workers set that to be too big. 60 hours, right? Which again is 50 to 60 hours, about 20 to 30% more than a 40-hour work week. It's too much for most people. But for most people, they feel like it's hard enough that they're justified still saying no. You pull that back to something like 40 hours, it becomes much more sustainable for you. From the perspective of the outside world, the difference is small. You're doing a lot of work. You're saying no to a lot of work. They don't know the difference. They don't know if it's 40 hours or if it's 60 hours. That difference can be small. So that's the first point I want to make, Catherine. You're already saying no. We're just talking about exactly where that boundary, that phase transition from acceptance to rejection happens in your career. The second thing I'm going to say, and let's get tactical here, is how do you say no? This really matters. So people often struggle with what I call the naked no, where technically you do have more time and you just say, no, I don't want to do that. Silence. That is very difficult. People have a hard time with that. That can be interpreted as aggressive or it can be interpreted as you are non-cooperative or not a team player. It is very difficult to give the naked no. So what's much more effective is to have workload systems that help dictate when you say no so that you can fall back on the logic of those systems to help justify your answers. So one thing you could do, I'm going to give you two ideas here. One thing you could do is quotas. This is something I talked about briefly in my 2008 article. It's a common strategy among professors. For certain types of work that you know you're going to have a lot of incoming, you set your quotas per whatever, quarter, per month, per year, whatever the scale that makes sense to say, This is how much I do during each time period. This is a reasonable amount. It allows me very useful to other people in my community, but allows us from prevents this from getting out of control. When you have filled your quota for that time period, you then say no to new work and you justify it by saying, I have a quota where I do this many types of projects, this type, this many journal Reviews, travel to this many conferences, do this many client meetings per week. I have this quota about what's optimal. I do three of those, four of those, 20 of those. I've already filled it for this time period. So I'm going to have to say no now. But keep me in mind for future time periods because I do a lot of this. Quotas work well because they're hard to say push back against. If I push back against you having a quota, what I'm pushing back against is your quota size. And that makes me feel like a jerk. If you say, I can't do this review, look, I have a quota of five per semester, sort of the right balance, and I already have five on my plate. I'm not going to say, no, six is the right answer. You're dumb. Should be six. Take this on. Because that's weird and specific and sort of aggressive. So quotas, they're very useful because it has a very specific workload management system that you can cite hard to argue with. The other thing you can try is pre-planning non-trivial work on your calendar. This is, again, something I get into more detail in my new book coming out of March, Slow Productivity. I get into this idea. I've been thinking more about it. But when a project comes in, you say, I'm actually going to find time on my calendar for when I'm going to do this project. And, you know, maybe it's five different long sessions I'm going to have to find. And you go and you have to find it and block off that time before you accept it. Now, the reason why this is a really useful strategy is that it actually gives you a concrete understanding of how much available time you have outside of just the immediate future. So if you struggle to find time, okay, I need five two-hour sessions to write this report. I can't find five two-hour sessions I can fit on the schedule for another three months. That is really useful feedback. That then allows you to say to the person, basically, I'm looking for this time. I track my time very carefully. I don't really have time. I'm estimating this to be about 10 hours. I can't see myself really doing that until March. And they might say, well, okay, whatever. That's too late. I'll have someone else to do it. Or they'll say, yeah, great, do it then. But what you're getting here is a concrete feedback signal about how much time you actually have. This is much better than just saying in the moment, could I imagine myself in the abstract writing this report? Yeah, I've written these before. I don't want to disappoint this guy. Yeah, I'll do it. And then you don't really have time. So now it's going to have to happen at night. Now it's going to have to happen early in the morning or on the weekends. So by actually planning non-trivial work on your calendar, it's a pain, but it gives you a really concrete feedback signal about how much time you actually have available. Then you can make much more reasonable decisions about what you say yes or no to, citing this careful tracking when you say no. So again, what's the pushback here? You did it wrong. You do have time. You're dumb, right? They're not going to say that. Or they'll say you should just make more time available. You should work late at night or in the morning. People want you to do that, but they're not going to specifically ask you to do that in most jobs. So again, ([Time 0:33:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/632cf5e0-46a7-4510-a55c-9530f9e2abf9)) - **Weekly Planning Strategies** - Adapt weekly planning methods; use calendars for busy periods, written plans for deep work. - Weekly plans can include reminders, detailed task descriptions, and heuristics beyond time blocks. Transcript: Jesse Right, next question's from Andy. Why don't you put your weekly plan in your calendar? In my workplace, we use Outlook calendars heavily. So if I plan to use two hours on Thursday to write a memo, I need to block that time anyway. And a calendar is a very visual way of planning your week. So why don't you write your plan out instead of blocking it on your calendar? So why do you write your plan out instead of blocking it on your calendar? Cal Newport Well, my calendar does get heavy use as I go through my weekly planning discipline. So I will lay this as the foundation for my answer. Weekly planning itself is, think about it as the discipline of reviewing everything that's on your plate, reviewing your quarterly or strategic plans. What am I working on? Reviewing calendar, reviewing your task systems, and trying to pull that all together to figure out a reasonable plan for what you want to do for the week ahead. That's the core of weekly planning. What you then do with that information can vary. It can vary between individuals. It can vary different periods for the same individual. So that's what I want to talk about is my own weekly planning approach. There are periods of my year in which I will translate a lot of the results of my weekly planning session to calendar events. This is particularly the case in busy periods, academic busy periods. I'm teaching, I'm on some committees, there's some deadline coming up, and there's a lot of moving pieces that I have to find time for. In those periods, I will often put quite a lot of things that I identify I need to do during my weekly planning session onto my calendar. There are other periods, however, let's say during the summer, a typical summer when I'm not teaching or anything, where my schedule is much more deep work focused. And in those situations, I'm not going to load up everything I'm going to work on, all the thinking or writing I'm going to do. I'm not going to put that on my calendar. I'm going to leave my calendar to just have appointments and meetings. I got to call this person. I have to go to this doctor's appointment. And the rest, I'm going to just time block each day based off of a fully written weekly plan. Hey, this week I'm working on this book chapter. Work on it most days. This is a very common weekly plan for me, by the way, in the summer. Work on this book chapter every day. Try to get like a good 30-minute admin block in there somewhere just to sort of keep track of small things. Here's a couple admin things to make sure you get done. That's like a very typical weekly plan for me in July. And then when I time block plan, I look at that, I look at my calendar. My calendar might have one meeting on it I have to do that day. And I time block out a plan based off of that. If you look at my weekly plan in October, it might be very different. It might actually be most of the stuff I need to get done. It's so complicated how it's all going to fit together. I've worked it all out on my calendar, just like Andy actually does during his work. So you'll see it both ways. The other thing I want to point out, however, is that a weekly plan can contain information beyond simply what you're going to work on and when you are going to work on it. I have a list here of other things that will sometimes make it onto my written weekly plan. Reminders about disciplines or behaviors will go on there. Remember, we're doing this thing with our diet this week. Remember, we're trying to do a really clean shutout every day because you look at your weekly plan every morning. It's useful for more than simply pointing out or allocating time for what you want to get done. Sometimes I have more elaborated descriptions of work. Even if that work has an appointment on my calendar, I might have a more detailed description of what that means in my weekly plan. So the calendar might just say mega conference task block. And then my weekly plan is where I unfold what that means in a way that wouldn't fit just into my calendar description. Okay, well, I got to get on top of all the planning for this conference that I'm organizing. And so what I really want to get done in these three hours are like these things. And so the weekly plan might contain an elaboration for an event that does also show up on your calendar. Heuristics show up. So a lot of times weekly plans are good for heuristics. You know, every day at lunch, go for a 20 minute walk. I don't necessarily want to write that on my calendar every day. I might just say, do a 20 minute walk or in my summer where I say, do 30 minutes of tasks, look in your inbox, do three or four things in your task list. Just do this every weekday. That's a really useful heuristic. I look at that every day. When I time block plan, I'll add a block for it. I might not want to actually figure out all those times in advance because maybe I don't know how long my deep work is going to take that day. I just want to make sure I remember to do it every day. And also highlighting tasks for admin blocks. This is really common. So in a busy period, I might actually block out time for admin, email tasks, making sure that I preserve that time every day so I don't start drowning or don't start having to break my fixed Schedule and try to do small things at the night, late at night or in the morning. What I'll often do is maybe even have admin on my calendar. But in my weekly plan, I said, look, here's six things I saw when I was looking through my task list. These really have to get done this week. So really prioritize these whenever you get to an admin block in your daily plan. Make sure we're taking a few things from this list. So a weekly plan really can capture a lot of information beyond just the raw things you're going to work on and what times you're going to work on it. So there you go. If you have a really busy schedule, if you want to work out a lot of pieces on your calendar, go for it. If you don't have a busy schedule and you want to leave your calendar just for appointments or meetings, go for that as well. If you want to do something in between, go for that as well. The key is to sit down each week and confront what you have to do and make sure you have captured somewhere some sort of plan you can reference every day. There's got to be some written component to that. Even if most of it's on your calendar, there's going to be some written component. Sometimes that'll be longer, larger. Whoops. Sometimes that'll be larger than others. I will say in the new time block planner that's coming out in August, and I'm getting my advanced copy soon, I have a blank version of the calendar from, you know, the planner where you Have to exactly approve all of the materials and exactly the spiral. And so I know exactly what it's going to look like, but a full featured version of my new time block planners is coming to me up here in New Hampshire soon. I'm excited for that. I've actually condensed the weekly planning pages in the new time block planner. There's a two page spread. One page is notes for the weekend. The other page is one page for written notes on the weekly plan for the week ahead. So I've actually reduced the space recognizing in part, you know, a lot of stuff will go on your calendar, but there is a place there in the planner. They have some notes for your week every time. So anyways, weekly planning to man, what an art. There's so many different ways to do this. So I always appreciate a chance to, to actually talk about it. Jesse, I'm excited for that planner, by the way. I actually, I have a list of disciplines. Like I'm, I'm temporarily not tracking my daily disciplines because I'm waiting for the new planner to arrive. So I think I get, I get it next week ([Time 0:43:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/63e3e908-0b06-4078-aa73-cec3739597d4)) - **Managing Work Overload** - When overwhelmed, quit some tasks, even if it upsets people, to regain breathing room. - Focus on implementing systems to prevent future overload, prioritizing a reasonable workload. Transcript: Jesse Sounds good. Next question is from Benjamin. Cal Newport What immediate actions would you suggest to do when too much work has been piling up um all right that's a good question so you you're at the peak of you know you pile up too much work and Now you need to pull back um short term quit back out upset people. If you're overloaded and it's impossible to get this work done, even with using the time that's available, you have to actually feel the pain of needing to say, I'm sorry, I need to back Out of this. I know I said I could help with this, but I have too much on my plate. That's better than just doing all these things bad. I think people are more upset that you were on the team and didn't do anything than they are that you said, look, when I do something, I want to do it well. I miscalibrated my schedule. I have too much on my plate. Once you gain back that breathing room, then I think your focus has to be, how do I prevent this from happening again? We do not want the oscillations. There's only so many times you can go to this. I'm in over my head, I need to pull back well, before people think of the boy who cried productivity wolf. So you're gonna have to do some drastic stuff now if you're completely drowning. But that has to motivate you to put the systems in place to prevent that from happening again. And this is where everything we've talked about on the show and in the deep dive today, the fixed schedule productivity and all of these small habits and innovation this induces, this Would be the time to do it. You pull back, you make your new commitment to a reasonable workload, and you begin using all the different things we talked about to manage your workload, to get away from the naked Nose, to be much more organized with your time and your weekly plan. All of that, this has to be your motivation to get all of that up and running properly so that you do not end up in this place again and again. All right. ([Time 0:51:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/414955d4-f376-4c81-bb25-6c8ab17e0d3d)) - **Case Study: Department Head** - A humanities department head improved performance and reduced stress by implementing FSP. - Using autopilot appointments and daily office hours, he leaves work at 4 p.m. most days. Transcript: Cal Newport So I have a short but relevant case study to share here about someone who has succeeded with getting these FSP-inspired strategies and systems in place. All right, so here I'm reading this now. This was sent to us. I am head of a large humanities department, and it is busy. Reading your book, A World Without Email, and listening to your podcast has revolutionized my performance. My calendar is half- with autopilot appointments and I have office hours every day after lunch. With this, my performance is much better. I feel less stressed and I leave my office at 4 p.m. Most every day. All of the academics in the audience are very impressed by this idea of a department chair leaving the office at 4 every day. I think this helps emphasize the power of fixed schedule productivity because he has this, I want to leave work at a reasonable hour. And he's working backwards from that and willing to be innovative and aggressive in how he builds his work around that goal. He was able to accomplish something pretty cool. So let me just pull out the two things he mentioned in particular. One is autopilot appointments. So what that means is work he knows he has to do on a regular basis. So as a department chair, things he has to do every week or every month or every semester, he finds the time to do them, gets it on his calendar. That time, that day is every week, every month, every semester, so he doesn't have to think about it. So he's protecting the time for the things he knows he has to do in advance. And that really makes a difference. It means that work will get done within his work hours, and it will be properly taken into account when he's trying to schedule other optional things. If Friday is time has been put aside for whatever he has to do for the budgeting process, when he sees that he won't schedule two long meetings for that day, because that time has already Been put aside, he'll defer those meetings, or push them to a later date or take them off of his plate, right? So autopilot appointments, not only relieves you from having to think on the fly, what do I want to work on today? It also makes sure that you properly respect and account for the time that this work is going to take. So in advance, it gets protected and you don't overfill those days. The other thing mentioned here is everyday office hours. Oh, how critical that is for a managerial position like department chair. That means every day there is a set time where you could call him, come to his office, or I would assume load on Zoom or Slack or whatever tools they use, and you know he'll be there for synchronous Interaction. And I can tell you as a chair, he could probably defer 90% of the emails that are coming in from the administration and his faculty to those office hours. We're talking dozens and dozens of emails each week that would normally require an ad hoc back and forth conversation, seven messages over two days, each of which that requires 10 inbox Checks. So 70 inbox checks per interaction, multiplied by 10 interactions, that's 700 inbox checks that, you know, huge amounts of context switching and pain that all can get erased with daily Office hours. All those interactions, they can say, great, just grab me at my office hours, call me, jump on Zoom, we'll talk about it. And in two minutes back and forth, we figure out a plan, no ad hoc messaging required. So those two simple strategies, scheduling in advance, all regular work, and then deferring as much interaction as possible to in-person office hours. Those two strategies gave us a chair of a humanities department, a large humanities department working only till four. I think that just emphasizes the potential of fixed field of productivity. When you fix a limit and are serious about it, you can get seriously inventive about how you satisfy it and much sustainable work can come out of it. So I appreciate that. I appreciate that case study. That's one of my goals, Jesse, is I want at some point office hours to be just a common thing in most companies. Come to my office hours. Ask me then. We'll talk about it then. Or I'll come to your next office hours. I just don't think people realize how much pain that's actually alleviating. Jesse And even today when a lot of work has gone remote, it's pretty easy to do just on Zoom or whatever. Cal Newport Yeah, you have Zoom with waiting rooms. Professors figured this out two days into the pandemic. You have a Zoom room open because we did all of our actual academic office hours on Zoom during the early pandemic. You create a Zoom room that has a waiting room. And so people can just stop by whenever they log in and they sit in the waiting room until you're ready to talk to them. And you click the button, you bring them in. So you're not overhearing, you know, conversations people are having with other people. ([Time 0:53:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/994823cb-926f-450e-8afb-c6190175e86a))