Ep. 348: Manage Your Time in 5 Minutes a Day  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 348: Manage Your Time in 5 Minutes a Day - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/c27b4cf2-323c-45a1-8256-adb700bc99e0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Early Time Management System** - Cal Newport revisits his time management system from his book "How to Become a Straight-A Student". - The system, designed for college students, involves a calendar, a daily list, and five minutes of planning per day. Transcript: Cal Newport So I've been writing about time management for a long time now. When I was 22 years old, I wrote a book called How to Become a Straight-A Student. Here it is for people who are watching instead of just listening. That was supposed to be a book of no-nonsense advice about how to get good grades in college. Had a quiet start. This book's actually quietly done well in the background. I think it sold like over 300,000 copies quietly since it came out in 2006. Anyways, this book includes a chapter. I'd forgotten this, but I saw the other day this book includes a chapter where I describe a time management system for students. And the title of that chapter is how to manage your time in five minutes a day. This was written back 20 years ago. So I thought what would be interesting would be for me to go back and reread that chapter. Let's go back and revisit my ideas from 20 years ago about how to manage your time. Because what I'm really curious about is to see where was I on the something that remains true today and where are there where is there advice from 20 years ago that no longer holds to today? So what works from before and what doesn't? ([Time 0:03:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8156da44-09c0-42a6-80eb-6ecdf5c987d0)) - **5-Minute Time Management** - Record all to-dos and deadlines on your calendar as a master schedule. - Update this calendar daily, transferring new tasks from a daily list and planning your day. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, let's get into the details of this system from 20 years ago. Record all of your to-dos and deadlines on your calendar. This becomes your master schedule. The one place that stores everything you need to do. The key to our system, however, is that you need to deal with your calendar once every 24 hours. Each morning, you look at it to figure out what you should try to finish that day. Then throughout the day, whenever you encounter a new to-do or deadline, simply jot it down on your list. The next morning, you can transfer this new stuff from your list onto your calendar where it's safe. And we're back where we started. The whole system can be summarized in three easy steps. Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day. Next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar. And three, take a couple minutes to plan your day. All right. I then give an example schedule for a day. So I guess you look at your calendar each morning, you write down on your sheet of paper your schedule for the day. And so the example I had in here was on one side, a list of appointments. So it was like 10 to 12 econ, 12 to one lunch with Rob, one to 145 government reading, two to four government class, four to 530 finished government reading, 530 to 6, start French essay. And then I had a list called things to remember. And I guess these are the things that you would jot down during the day. Econ study group moved, French quiz, laundry, start researching summer internship opportunities. So this is interesting, Jesse. It looks like the plan you write down includes basically rudimentary time blocking. Oh, it was. Okay, here we go. So let me look at this a little bit closer. Contain a handful of appointments and to-dos. Your goal is to figure out how much of this work you can realistically accomplish. You might be tempted to simply copy all of these tasks into your today's schedule column and then treat it as a simple to-do list for the day. Don't do this. If you want to avoid getting overwhelmed by your work, you need to be smarter about your time. Here's what you should do instead. I bolded this. Try to label each of your to-dos for the day with the specific time during which you are going to complete it. Be honest. Don't record that you're going to study for three hours starting at three if you know you have a meeting at five. And be reasonable about how long things really take. I also say you can batch together little errands and you should try to end your day at an appropriate time. The only other thing that's important here is when you update your calendar each day, you move the stuff that you didn't get done on to other days. So let me look at this example here. This was the kind of tricky part back then. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Okay. So not everything done. The things that doesn't get done have to exist somewhere. And so you move them onto another day when you think you're going to get it done. Interesting. I'm interested by myself. ([Time 0:06:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9e878bfc-bfe8-4190-a824-7c70f037df0a)) - **Key Principles** - Cal Newport's early system emphasized full capture, ensuring all tasks are written down. - He prioritized low-friction task capture and intentional time planning. Transcript: Cal Newport All of your tasks need to have a place to live. And back then I said, why don't you have them live on your calendar? So obviously like appointments and stuff exist on the specific days and specific times when it happens, but to do's, you put them on the day you think you're going to do them. And then when you get to a current day, you have some stuff on your calendar that's timed like classes and meetings, but you also are going to have this list of things to do's that happen To be assigned to that day. Then you make roughly a time block plan. That's what I was talking about way back then, 20 years ago. Make a plan for your hours of your day, like when you're going to do what, when your appointments are. See if you can fit the things, the to-dos you had on your list. Can you fit them in there? You might not fit everything or you might try to fit everything and not everything gets done. That's fine because what you do is the next day when you create your new plan, you're going to take everything from your list from the day before that was added new, this capture stuff And put it places on your calendar. This is also when you'll take the stuff you didn't get done and make sure those show up for a new day. And maybe you move them to the current day or you look into the future to find a day that's less crowded. And so in this plan, you make a plan, you do your best, you capture stuff on your sheet of paper throughout the day. The next day, the new stuff and the stuff you didn't get done goes back to your calendar, and then you make a new plan for the day ahead. So what I like about this plan, and then I'll get into what I think is missing. I like the full capture methodology. Now, I can tell you, I had just read Getting Things Done, David Allen's book not long before this. That book came out I think in 2004, maybe 2003. I wrote this book largely in 2005. So I had just read that. And so clearly that full capture idea of everything you need to do needs to be written down somewhere. There's nothing that you only are keeping track of in your head. That suffuses the system. And so I like that. I still think that's a very good idea. Things you're only keeping track of in your head either cause stress or will be forgotten. ([Time 0:10:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2961667-c9fc-4d9e-910b-e81cd245dbb5)) - **Missing Element** - Cal Newport's original system lacked a focus on training the mind, crucial today due to modern-day distractions. - The system works best with controlled task volumes and autonomous schedules. Transcript: Cal Newport Okay. So what's missing here? Well, obviously the task volume is very low, which would make sense for a college student in the early 2000s. If you were, let's say, a standard 2026, 2025 knowledge worker, your task volume is going to be much, much higher because of tools like email and Slack. That's not even dealt with in here. The task are things like do your laundry or pay your cell phone bill. You had a sort of very reasonable amount of tasks. So of course they could live on your calendar. In the modern professional context, you might have many hundreds of different things to do. So to try to like assign everything to what day you think you're going to do it, that does not make sense with modern task volumes that you would see with sort of modern jobs. I'm time blocking, but I'm doing it roughly. Whereas by the time I got 10 years after this book was deep work, I was like, no, no, just time block specifically. Draw the blocks. Block out all your working hours. Here I was kind of roughly doing it. I was like, write down what to do as you want to do and maybe like mark with the time you think you're going to do them. That evolved into, you might as well just block your hours of your working day. This is also missing shutdown rituals, which is very important. Have a way of making a transition from I'm working to not working. That's very clear. I think that's particularly important in college context. You'll just work forever, but it's important in other work context as well. But all in all, I think this is actually, I am seeing seeds of lots of my ideas in this system and I like its simplicity. ([Time 0:14:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ac8a641a-2b30-4e51-990a-9d0c2e75c2af)) - **Manga vs. Traditional Reading** - Reading manga is beneficial for visual literacy and linguistic proficiency. - Encourage a balance with traditional text reading for enhanced cognitive benefits. Transcript: Speaker 2 We got next? Next is Andy from Vienna. My son, 10 years old, reads mangas for hours. Does reading mangas count as reading? I think it's manga. Mangas. Or is it manga? I think it's manga. Mangas. This is like Japanese graphic novels. I asked somebody about it. So they're like, yeah, I'm a little concerned on, but I love seeing him reading books, having books in his hands. Cal Newport This is actually like a longstanding debate. I was looking this up before. Does manga, I hope it is manga now that I'm saying it that way. We're going to get a lot of hate mail. Very popular. Does manga count as reading books in some sort of way? Here's the thing. It's good. Reading analog things is good, right? You're holding something in your hand that's not electronic. You're engaging in a story. There's a sort of visual literacy that you build up reading manga trying to understand, like, what's happening graphically. And there's a linguistic proficiency growing as well because, dialogue and the words and you're seeing different people communicate. Some of the other things you get in novel reading is there to some degree. You're simulating the other minds of the characters in your own minds. There's some world building happening in your head. You have the visuals in front of you, but there's still a sort of like 3D version of that world that you're building in your head. There's complicated emotions that you're following. There's logic. Like, it's good. I think reading analog things is good. It brings you into a world that takes time. There's no algorithm flipping to random manga panels. You actually have to read it sequentially. So no, it's not a bad thing. Would you be, like, should you be content with that being the only thing your son reads? I would say no. ([Time 0:29:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c58833dc-c6ff-4d9a-9a68-d8266b1f9a58)) - **Information Management** - For task-specific information, attach relevant files or copy information directly onto Trello cards. - For research or complex information, store it in the tool you'll use for the final output. Transcript: Speaker 2 Well, Yolanda, my general approach is if what we're talking about is there's some information you need specifically to complete a task, like you're summarizing a report. Cal Newport And so like what mattered, the task is to summarize a report. So like the relevant information is that report. Or you're trying to schedule something and the relevant information is like what people told you about their availability. I just move that in the Trello onto the card corresponding to those tasks. If I could attach the relevant files to the card for the task that needs those files, I'll do it. If I can copy information from an email to a back of a card, and now I have the information there that I need, I'll just do that. Sometimes if there's like a really detailed email thread, right, and I have a task based on that, what I'll do is I'll copy, because I use Gmail, the subject line of that thread into the Task card. I'll say, just search for this. So I'll know what to search for in the archive to pull up exactly that thread. So I won't, you know, it's not being copied in, but I say, here's what to do. I do that with book. Sometimes when I have a, like a book blurb, I need to get started on and they've sent me an electronic copy. Sometimes I'll attach the file to the card, or sometimes I'll just put the title of the email in which that file is attached and I'll just search and find it and print it or load it onto a Reader you know when the time comes. For information it's more complicated like you're working on an article or something and there's going to be a lot of different sources right where you don't want three dozen sources Attached to a Trello card. My general rule is when possible store research information in the tool you're going to use when you need it, right? So I write books and articles using Scrivener. I move relevant notes and links and resources and files that are relevant to projects, like to a Scrivener project for that article or for that book chapter. So I just move the information straight in the Scrivener. When I'm writing an academic article, I use LaTeX, markup language that mathematicians use, right? I'll just move stuff I need right into the LaTeX file in which I'm working on. I have an idea. I'll just start building a LaTeX file, basically like I'm writing a technical article. And I'll just add citations and notes right into that document and it grows and grows. And then eventually what happens is the actual paper starts getting written at the front of this and the notes get pushed to the back. And then eventually they get moved out and you have the final paper. But I just put the information straight like proofs and links and citations and summaries like right into the same tool I'm going to use to write the final paper. ([Time 0:34:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ec048202-f693-4b58-ba4f-b9c0438a7373)) - **Improving Workplace Conversations** - Improve spontaneous speaking by practicing regularly in lower-stakes situations, like with family. - Use the setup-point-contrast-implication heuristic to structure thoughts effectively. Transcript: Speaker 2 I speak well for planned presentations, but not as well in off the cuff scenarios. Cal Newport Well, Diana, I think a good rule of thumb, and Jesse will agree, is you want to break the ice. The thing is you want to find some sort of characteristic of the person you're talking to, preferably like an immutable characteristic. They have no control over it. Make fun of them and then say, you burned. Is like it kind of breaks the ice and then you're not going to be you're not going to be uh you're not going to be so nervous right like you so bald you gotta talk like that you so bald i'm blinded By light off your head you burned right and then the boss is like all right well, well, I mean, you're clearly fired. No, it's a good question. Speaking is a practiced art. I think people don't recognize this. Younger people supposedly are worse at this because there's actually less in-person spontaneous interaction than before because more things are done on phones and more things are Done digitally, like through text messaging. So there's this, this idea out there that I think Sherry Turkle wrote about this. Like there's this idea out here that younger people who are coming up with smartphones are particularly bad at in-person conversation. They don't want to sit down and talk to their bosses. They certainly don't want to call someone that's really fraught. When Jesse and I were growing up, that was a big part of our childhood, right? Was calling someone and you would say the person's name, Mr. Or Mrs. You'd be like, you know, hi, Mr. Miller, this is Cal Newport, it's like Jesse there. And you had to learn how to do that and like how to interact. Interestingly, and maybe just because I'm in like elite institutions, I haven't seen this issue. Like my Georgetown students, they're super articulate, but that might be self-selecting. When I was up at Dartmouth teaching a couple of years ago, kids are super articulate, but that might not be a representative sample. That being said, speaking is hard. Speaking is hard. Like I make a living speaking. I've been working at it for a really long time. Podcast that I'm having to rely on essentially cognitive muscle memory training, not to say, um, not to say like, to get the right pauses, to keep things moving. Like that's very practiced to have an idea that you're pursuing to pursue it clearly, not to get caught in a cul-de you know, that takes practice. So what I'm trying to tell you, Diana, is it's not a problem that you're struggling right now. It's, you haven't practiced it yet. It's no different than you say, look, I picked up a banjo the other day. It's not going well. It doesn't sound good. It's like, yeah, of course, you got to practice. But if you practice, you get better. And that's the way you want to think about speaking off the cuff. Writing and reading actually helps people who read a lot and write a lot. They're just being exposed so much to structured formal language that you build those structures, those predictive structures in your head. It's like you're a language model and you get better at reproducing it. So reading will help. Trying to write very clearly will also help. Practicing is ultimately a thing that's going to help best. You can practice in situations where it's lower stakes. So like with your friends or family, you're having conversations over dinner. Say, hey, I'm going to try a little harder in this interaction here. I'm going to be a little bit more formal. Just straight up practice is going to make you better. There are heuristics that can help as well. So, for example, if you're talking to someone at a business meeting or at a conference or you're standing up to make a point, sometimes it's useful to think about the following structure. Set up point contrast implication. Let me clearly set up what I'm going to say. So here's the context or the stakes. Hey, I know that we've been talking recently about making our meetings more efficient. I have an idea there to share. That's set up. So make it very clear what you're going to talk about. Point, deliver clearly. Here's my point. So here's the original information I'm offering. So in this sample, this is where you might say something like, we have too many meetings that could probably be consolidated into fewer. We should think about ways of combining meetings. You've set up what you're going to talk about. You've made your point. Then you contrast, right? This is the dialectical approach. Opposed to what we have been doing, which is if anyone has something they want to discuss in a group, they send out a separate invite for it. So you've made your point and what you want to deliver. You contrast it to existing points, and then you give details and implications. So the way we might do this, for example, would be instead to have a standing meeting block every afternoon that can be used for multiple purposes. The implications of that details would be some stuff might have to wait or that meeting might get rushed, but I think it's probably worth it. So if you hear someone follow that pattern, you don't recognize that they're following that pattern, but it seems very persuasive. Let me cue you in, set up, let me cue you into what I want to tell you about. Let me give you very clearly, here's my point. Let me me contrast it to other ways you might do this to clarify the contours, give you some details and the implications of it. Report and I'm out. You talk that way in a business setting and they're gonna say, Diana's sharp, really clear, interesting ideas. They're really on the ball. So there are heuristics like that you can do, but practice is the best. If you listen to, this is a canard, but it's true This is like one of these cliches that true screenwriters will tell you, like Hollywood screenwriters. I know some Hollywood screenwriters. They'll tell you that you want your dialogue to sound quote unquote natural, right? You don't want people to sound like they're reading a script, but what'll happen is most screenwriters early on in their career will go through this point where they're like, let's Just listen to real conversation. I'm going to take notes on real conversation so I can make it very natural. And what they realize is real conversation is barely comprehensible. If you just sit and listen over, listen to people casually talking, and then you transcribe that and try to put it into a movie, people are going to think that the point was like that character Had a traumatic brain injury recently. Like this is so incoherent. Like what's going on? Because the way most people talk when the stakes are low and it's casual and it's with a friend or whatever, it's weird and back and forth and interruptive, very digressive, all sorts Of verbal tics and returns and ums and likes. And yeah, I don't know't know man what's going on and it's fine in that informal context but you know it's not at all the way people actually it's not formal at all and so in Hollywood naturalistic Dialogue writing is its own thing it sounds naturalistic but it's actually way more structured and clear and directed than the normal people actually really talk and it's really in The delivery of the actor that makes it sound naturalistic, which is all to say to practice this, you have to think I'm having a conversation with someone where I could be super casual And doesn't matter. Let me try to be clear. The other thing people always suggest is Toastmasters. I don't know if these still exist, but yeah, you can also go to a speaking club like Toastmasters where you practice getting up and giving speeches. But practice is the key here and have some heuristics like setup, point, contrast, details, implication. It's a cool skill to master because the clearer you communicate, the smarter people think you are, which is going to be a big boost. ([Time 0:38:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4bba4008-81eb-425f-9cae-aa44bbde4292)) - **Two Time Zones, Two Calendars** - Manage schedules across time zones with two separate calendars, one for each location. - Use electronic calendars for features like email reminders. Transcript: Speaker 2 Right, what do we got next? Next question is from Flying Professor. My life and work are divided between two different countries with a seven-hour time difference. Google calendar just couldn't handle that. So I've gone back to paper and pencil calendars. Is this okay? Or have I missed something? That's a good question. A quick follow-up on me. I was just thinking about this, Jesse, though. Quick follow-up on Diana. Cal Newport I was a very good speaker as a kid and I got a lot of like unfair advantages out of that. I think because I read a lot, i remember doing uh an oration at i guess was that like a va and i had to give a speech in front of everyone about flag burning and whether it should be a constitutional Amendment and i remember just ad-libbing it i didn't realize i was supposed to prepare something anyways they selected me i got to go to boy state have you heard about boy state i think You might have mentioned it before. Yeah. So like that was all oration. So I was considering I was good at Model UN as well. And I would do very little work, but I could speak well. And I think it was largely because I read a lot. There you go. That's my secret power. All right. Flying professor, two time zones. Yeah, you need two calendars. You need two calendars. You can use electronic calendars. You just need two of them. So you could have an electronic calendar for one time zone and another electronic calendar for the other time zone. The problem is you can't use the same Google account as far as I know. I think the time zone is going to be consistent across your various calendars. So you have to create, it's fine, just create a different Google account just for this calendar. And then you can share, you know, whatever. Actually, you don't want to share them. You don't want the one time zone calendar to share onto your current time zone calendar because it's going to be the wrong time zone. Let me think about this for a second. So have one calendar for your time zone here. Have another calendar with another account for the time zone for the place you go. So those are both now local calendars. So when you're in the one place, you look at the local calendar for that place, correct times. When you're in this place, look at the calendar for that place. You're seeing the correct times for that place. You can then share between these different time zone calendars if you want to, and you'll see where these things fall on each other's time zone. So seven hours, I'm assuming you're talking like Europe and East Coast, let's just say. When you look at your East Coast calendar, you can share your Europe calendar onto your East Coast calendar, and it will show it like the East Coast times, but you probably don't care About that. But it'll show it like, yeah, this thing's happening at 2 in the morning or whatever. But I guess you wouldn't want to share them. Just have two separate calendars. So you can use paper calendars. Fine. I like electronic calendars because I want to do email reminders. I want to add information like here's my here's the Zoom link for this particular Zoom meeting that's going on my calendar. I want to move things around easier. I want to do repeats. So I would create two Google calendars if I was you. Completely different accounts, completely different time zones. And you can just switch between them depending on where you are. And you're right. Don't share between the two. That will confuse you with the time zones. The time zone issue that's the worst, Jesse, speaking of Europe, is there's a month. ([Time 0:45:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d437dad-1cc4-46db-a2a4-d9d935b3f0d4)) - **Boredom Training** - Embrace boredom daily with short, input-free periods and weekly with longer walks, sans devices. - Avoid dopamine stacking by not combining screen activities. Transcript: Speaker 2 Hi, Cal. On a recent episode, you talked about scheduling a time in your day to embrace boredom so that the rest of your day, you don't have to worry about feeling bad about listening to a podcast, Et cetera, et cetera. If I were to schedule boredom, how would that look? Could you elaborate? Do you just sit in a room for 20 minutes or the next time you're in traffic, you just deal with it? Am I allowed to just let my mind wander? Please explain how this works for you. Thank you. Cal Newport Okay, so embrace boredom. That phrase comes from deep work. So it's a chapter in deep work. And I think what's important about it is boredom is not something that I think has a moral valence. So unlike some commentators, I don't think boredom is somehow good and non-boredom is bad. And therefore, by having more boredom, that somehow like that act itself of being bored is virtuous. I see this way more technically. So when I say embrace boredom, what I'm hoping that you accomplish is that your brain gets used to craving novel stimuli and not getting novel stimuli in response. So it's really just working on the dopamine-mediated short-term reward circuits. So if your brain learns every time it feels boredom, it gets a treat from a phone, right? Something comes out and it gets a novel stimuli. You build up these reward circuits that says, ooh, as soon as I feel that sort of discomfort of lack of novel stimuli, which is natural to people and we've felt it throughout all of our Species history, as soon as I feel that there's this shiny treat reward I'm going to get, it really floods the zone with dopamine and makes it really hard not to look at your phone. Why do I worry about that? It's because sometimes you don't want to look at your phone when it becomes important that you actually do focus on something like you're working on a really important paper or a breakthrough Or a meaningful conversation or trying to figure out something hard, there's no novel stimuli when you're doing that. But if your brain has learned, I always get a shiny treat when I feel that lack of stimuli that we commonly describe as boredom, you're not going to be able to focus and you're going to have To look at your phone. So the way you break that is you make sure that you get consistent practice feeling boredom and not getting the reward and things being okay. And then your brain's, the strength of that Pavlovian response weakens. And now when it comes time to do something like deep work on something important, you'll do better at it. So I see embracing boredom, that's why it came in my book, Deep Work, is just training your brain to be better at deep work down the line. All right, how do you actually do this? There's two scales at which you need to embrace boredom. Every day, do something short where you're free from input from other minds. So you're welcome to think as much as you want inside your own head. You're welcome to observe the world around you as much as you want and make observations and be interested by it. But you're not inputting input that was generated by another mind. You're not reading something or listening to something. Every day, do some sort of short exposure to that, like once or twice. And by short, I mean, you know, you do an errand, you don't take out your phone, you take the AirPods out. Like I'm going in the pharmacy to grab something. I'll just go and do that and come back. It takes 10 minutes, but I'm going to do it without my phone. Or I'm doing a short drive, you know, to a friend's house. It's 10 minutes away. I'll just do that drive, nothing on the radio, right? So that's like a short one or two exposures, you know, once a day. Then once a week, if possible, try to have a longer exposure, which really I typically think of as being a long walk is probably the best. Go for a long walk or a hike or something like this without anything in your ear or anything in your hand and just be alone with your thoughts. And this gives you time to do some more structured thinking and introspection. And this just gets your mind used to this idea of our brain can function just fine without shiny tree stimuli. I've been adding, however, if I was to rewrite that chapter, I would add a third type of boredom training that wasn't as relevant back when I wrote deep work, but I'm caring more about Now. I would say be very wary about dopamine stacking. So if you're watching something, don't look at your phone, have your phone plugged in somewhere else, right? Don't get in this idea of, because that really gets those reward circuits going that even if I'm watching something that's pretty interesting, I might want to stack on something that's Even more interesting. That really is going to short circuit those, those reward circuits and make it really hard. So be very wary about dopamine stacking. If you're going to do something, look at a screen, only look at one screen at a time. So I would add that in as well. You do those things, you're not bored all the time. We're not lauding boredom, but you'll get more attraction to thinking and being with your own thoughts. That'll become more appealing as you get practice. But it makes sure your brain does not develop this knee-jerk reaction. When I feel boredom, ([Time 0:57:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33ce7d02-cd76-4bae-8984-45fe7e447d43))