Ep. 379: The Flexibility Myth  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 379: The Flexibility Myth - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2ac206d8-da14-4664-a3f0-a5df7ad642ee ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Predictability Beats Flexible Hours** - Workers strongly prefer predictability over vague flexibility and will forgo pay to avoid employer-controlled hours. - That dislike explains why return-to-office mandates pushed many women out more than simple location preferences did. Transcript: Cal Newport Lowe points to a 2017 study. It's written by a pair of economists, one from Princeton, one from Harvard, that tries to measure how much people are willing to pay to gain or avoid certain features in their job. I read this paper. It's a really interesting methodology. What they did is they actually got a large group of employees. I think they're using call center employees who had similar jobs and they exposed them to job ads and they used the same wording in this job ad and would only change it for the particular Feature they were measuring. And then they had different hourly wages. And so they could measure the, you know, for each description of this job, each of them featuring different aspects, how much they have to make the hourly wage before they got sort of Substantial interest. I'm simplifying it here, but that's roughly how they did it because they're economists. They could then crunch this through numbers and actually calculate on average how much people would pay for certain features or pay to avoid certain features. All right, let me now summarize. This is low summary, actually. Let me read you low summary of the key findings or one of the key findings of this paper. The results showed that working mothers with children under four would be willing to give up barely any pay for a flexible schedule and would give up an average of just 15% of their pay To work from home, but they would forego almost 40% of their income to avoid an employer discretion job in which their boss sets their hours at will. The problem may be more pronounced among mothers, but it isn't unique to them. All workers in the study, men, women, parents, and non-parents alike, disliked employer discretion jobs and were willing to take hefty pay cuts to avoid them. In the study, they were looking at hourly workers. Employer discretion is a very specific nomenclature, which means your shift can be changed sort of on the whim of the employers. It's not fixed in advance what hours you're going to work. But Lowe makes the argument the psychology there is a similar psychology to a lot of higher paid salary knowledge work jobs where you feel like work extends beyond the normal workday. These are the jobs where return to office policies were relevant. This idea that there is no predictability of when I might have to like answer a key email or suddenly have to put everything aside to try to get something done that showed up in a Slack message Right before my kid's game or something like this. She's arguing we really hate that unpredictability. Based on that, the Times gave Lowe's op-ed a title that kind of got to the core of that issue. Here's what they called it. What women really want to not answer work emails at 10 p.m. Brings us back to that original observation that women left work disproportionately as companies returned to the office after the pandemic. Based on those analysis, here's what actually seemed to have happened. Okay. During the pandemic, work got even more unpredictable. We know this, the sort of amount of stuff that just moved over to like ad hoc back and forth, emails and meetings and Zooms and calls. There was no real office. So everything mixed together. Who cared about work hours when there was no commuting and there was no office? That unpredictability got worse. This made jobs worse. It made them worse for everybody. I catalog this in my book, Slow Productivity, as well. It got particularly worse if you were a woman, especially if you had a family, because again, the research Lowe talks about in this article is pretty clear. They're doing a disproportionate amount of housework. They're doing a disproportionate amount of childcare. So you add more unpredictability on top of that, your job gets really, really bad. And then when employers said, okay, things are stable enough now that we can return to an office, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. So it's not that, oh, we were so happy at home. We just don't want to go back to the office. We don't like that working environment. It was, we were miserable. Work got worse during the pandemic. I can't take it anymore. You take this final straw that breaks the camel back of like now these like little conveniences of flexibilities, we're going to take those away too. You're like, that's too much. Another thing that probably happened here as well is that the return to work policies also corresponded with the return of economic stability. So no one was going to leave their job in early 2021 because you didn't know if whole industries were going to disappear. Everyone was like, if you're lucky enough to have a knowledge work job and you're still getting a paycheck, like keep it. By the time we were returning to office, people weren't so worried anymore. Like, okay, I think we're okay. I think industries aren't disappearing. And a lot of people were like enough is enough of this unpredictable knowledge work. Like I will leave if I can. And it was disproportionately going to be women because they have the extra burdens that men don't have. But again, this is pointing to a problem that affects all the people who left behind as well. ([Time 0:03:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3ec3c6e9-25d3-4a33-a13f-a082d8abce85)) - **Apply The One-Message Rule** - Enforce a one-message rule: if a topic needs more than one reply, move it to a synchronous conversation. - Use email for single-answer info and avoid prolonged asynchronous volleys that fracture attention. Transcript: Cal Newport I call this the one message rule. Here's how I'm going to draw this, Jesse. I think this is very intuitive. So you can see here, I have two messages and then I have two arrows. All right, so let me explain what I mean by that. Here's the one message rule. If an email or instant message cannot be answered with a single message in reply, then it's not meant for email or messaging. It's not meant for digital communication and it should be dealt with in real time in an actual conversation. That's why I draw here one message. As you can see, it gets received and it generates another message in response. I guess that makes sense. I don't know if those arrows actually make sense, Jesse, but whatever. I'm trying to find a picture for it. So that means you're using something like email in instances where it's incredibly well-suited, which is the asynchronous providing of simple information. So for example, you know, I often will write Jesse, Jesse, you'll attest to this, like a constant, a message I might have will be like, remind me what time are we recording again? Like next week. That's a great use of asynchronous communication because Jesse can just answer when he gets around to it, um, you know, 4am because that's when he prefers to record. But it's, it's, that's a good use of asynchrony. Um, I don't need an answer right away. You can answer when it's convenient and answering that message is easy. You're like, I know this information. I could just type in and press send. But if I send a message that requires more than one response, so if I say, Jesse, why do you insist that we record at 4am? Well, that's a much longer discussion and that's not suitable. I don't want to have back and forth with email. Because once we have to have a longer back and forth conversation, now I have to start monitoring for responses so I can volley it back to you. We get in that whole problem of the volley problem that requires us to check inboxes all the time. There's a simple rule, one message rule. I can't respond to this with one message. Let's move it out of email. All right, so then where does that, where do these things do, where do we deal with them? Well, that brings us to my second suggestion. I have an ambitious drawing for this one, Jesse. I was going to try to draw something in 3D perspective. Try it. All right, here we go. That is a 3D table, which I think is very well done. And I'm drawing, there's multiple, this is good. Actually, I'm actually pretty pleased with this. Multiple people sitting at a table looking at a screen. I'm impressed by that. I am too, actually. There we go. All right. So I got multiple people sitting around a table looking at a screen. All right. So what is this representing? That's representing docket clearing meeting. So if you have a team, right? So if we're in a team situation, you should have on a regular basis, something I call a docket clearing meeting. It works as follows. Throughout the normal week, as issues come up that require a discussion that goes beyond what a single message can capture, you add it to your docket for that team. The docket is just a shared document, right? So I put in like the docket that Jesse and I have, why the hell are we recording at 4 a.m.? So you have a place to put it so you don't have to remember it. Remember, the other reason why people want to get discussions started on email is because they don't have another system to keep track of things and they don't want to forget them. But if I send an email, I haven't forgot it. It's on your plate. And when you're done, you'll send it back and then I'll see it in my inbox and I'll remember it again and then I'll send it back to you. And what we're doing is trying to collectively remember something without anyone having to write it down by just bouncing messages back and forth. But this is destroying your brain and making work unpredictable and terrible. With a docket clearing meeting, you have another place to put these issues into a shared document. Now you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about forgetting it. On a regular basis, I would say two to three times a week, you have these meetings with your team and you all come together, either in person or virtually, where you go through the docket Together, one thing after another, and either dismiss it, discuss make a plan for it. You figure it out there. And so now the actual nuanced back and forth conversations happen in real time, which is way more efficient. And because we consolidate these discussions to a small number of set meetings with a lot of things discussed, you lose the inefficiency of like, well, I don't want to just call you for Everything that comes up or find you for every little issue. Now we can go through them efficiently one after another. Now for individuals, the equivalent to a docker clearing meeting is office hours, which I think all professionals should have three to five times a week, a set time every day when you're Available for non-scheduled discussions on the phone or in person. And you can also have like a zoom with a waiting room turned on as well. If you're a more virtual organization, now this is like the individual docker clearing meeting. So if you're putting the responsibility on the initiator. So now if someone sends me an email that violates the one message rule, okay, I'm going to have to get into it with you. Like I can't just give you an answer. We have to discuss it. I can say, yeah, this is important. We should get into it. Whenever you can. The next office hours that works for you, show up or call me and we'll figure it out. And again, you're batching the synchronous conversation. So they're not just happening all day long at any time. But now when it comes time to deal with that issue, five minutes of conversation, that could be 15 emails, which could be equivalent to like 50 checks, which means 50 contact shifts and Like multiple days worth of reduced cognitive performance. All gets captured in a five-minute conversation. I really want to hammer home this one-two punch of messages or for, you know, emails for one-message responses or broadcasting information that requires no responses. Zero or one-message response counts, put that in my email all day. Great technology. More messages are required to respond at office hours or Docker clearing. I do not want to have a conversation where I have to wait for your next email and then send you another one. And any sort of back and forth I want to avoid, like the plague. ([Time 0:26:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f5e4e39e-1825-456d-8836-6b7bc2f74ea9)) - **Batch Discussions With Docket Meetings** - Batch discussions into regular docket-clearing meetings where the team reviews queued issues together. - Individuals should publish regular office hours for non-scheduled conversations to avoid constant inbox monitoring. Transcript: Cal Newport So if we're in a team situation, you should have on a regular basis, something I call a docket clearing meeting. It works as follows. Throughout the normal week, as issues come up that require a discussion that goes beyond what a single message can capture, you add it to your docket for that team. The docket is just a shared document, right? So I put in like the docket that Jesse and I have, why the hell are we recording at 4 a.m.? So you have a place to put it so you don't have to remember it. Remember, the other reason why people want to get discussions started on email is because they don't have another system to keep track of things and they don't want to forget them. But if I send an email, I haven't forgot it. It's on your plate. And when you're done, you'll send it back and then I'll see it in my inbox and I'll remember it again and then I'll send it back to you. And what we're doing is trying to collectively remember something without anyone having to write it down by just bouncing messages back and forth. But this is destroying your brain and making work unpredictable and terrible. With a docket clearing meeting, you have another place to put these issues into a shared document. Now you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about forgetting it. On a regular basis, I would say two to three times a week, you have these meetings with your team and you all come together, either in person or virtually, where you go through the docket Together, one thing after another, and either dismiss it, discuss make a plan for it. You figure it out there. And so now the actual nuanced back and forth conversations happen in real time, which is way more efficient. And because we consolidate these discussions to a small number of set meetings with a lot of things discussed, you lose the inefficiency of like, well, I don't want to just call you for Everything that comes up or find you for every little issue. Now we can go through them efficiently one after another. Now for individuals, the equivalent to a docker clearing meeting is office hours, which I think all professionals should have three to five times a week, a set time every day when you're Available for non-scheduled discussions on the phone or in person. And you can also have like a zoom with a waiting room turned on as well. If you're a more virtual organization, now this is like the individual docker clearing meeting. So if you're putting the responsibility on the initiator. So now if someone sends me an email that violates the one message rule, okay, I'm going to have to get into it with you. Like I can't just give you an answer. We have to discuss it. I can say, yeah, this is important. We should get into it. Whenever you can. The next office hours that works for you, show up or call me and we'll figure it out. And again, you're batching the synchronous conversation. So they're not just happening all day long at any time. But now when it comes time to deal with that issue, five minutes of conversation, that could be 15 emails, which could be equivalent to like 50 checks, which means 50 contact shifts and Like multiple days worth of reduced cognitive performance. All gets captured in a five-minute conversation. ([Time 0:29:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6a559739-12a5-409c-80e7-6f2e8356583a)) - **Create Fixed Collaboration Processes** - Define collaboration processes for recurring tasks with explicit rules and timelines. - Use shared folders, deadlines, and office hours to remove ad hoc back-and-forth and keep work predictable. Transcript: Cal Newport Regularly occurring collaboration, so it's collaboration you have to do with other people that happens again and again. It's not one-off. It should be handled with a collaboration process, which is a predetermined agreed upon set of rules for when, where, and how the relevant information is gathered and transferred And commented upon to complete the goal. You're trying to take all of the unscheduled ad hoc-ness out of these collaboration processes, where it's just I'll get a message at some point and then I'll send it back to you at some Point. Find a way to make it regular if it's something that occurs on a regular basis. Like for example, if there's some sort of report that we have to send to a client every week, let's not just start emailing stuff back and forth on Monday till it's done. Let's have a process for it. And all you need for a process is a set of rules that you agree upon in advance. There's no magic technology here. I don't care what technology you use. So maybe your process is, I will always write the first draft and I will have it in this shared folder by the close of business on Monday. Tuesday morning, go in and make any comments that you want. I have office hours on Tuesday afternoon. So if there's anything that's too subtle, but you're not quite sure, it's not just like, hey, fix this or add this, come to my office hours. That's the office hours where we can talk for 10 or 15 minutes and figure things out if we need to. I will then act on those comments Tuesday afternoon. Whatever's in the shared business, that shared folder at the start of the day, Wednesday, is my final version. You now have till noon to do any final tweaks on that. There's emergencies like, oh, no, there's something really wrong. Call me. At noon on Wednesday, they can take and do the final version of it, and they can send it directly to the client. Right? This is not about saving time. It's not about reducing friction. It's kind of annoying. There's these rules you have to follow. But that report just got produced without a single unscheduled message being sent that someone has to receive and promptly respond to. The communication processes that prevent ad hoc back and forth communication should be in place for every collaboration that happens on a regular basis. ([Time 0:33:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/21708603-0eab-4991-b3b2-40c2e844c92f)) - **Use A Phone As An Emergency Valve** - Use a phone number as an emergency safety valve, whitelisted through Do Not Disturb. - This preserves calm by ensuring real emergencies use high-friction channels, preventing email creep. Transcript: Cal Newport You should use your phone as your safety valve. That's a safety valve I drew next to the phone there. All right, so here's the idea. Something that really deep sixes all of these types of suggestions is the anxiety that some people have. Typically people, I won't say who, but it rhymes with banagers. It's this anxiety that they have that what if something urgent happens and a client needs something at the last minute, or I noticed that this report that's about to go out is missing Something critical. How do I get in touch with you? Because what if this is before your next office hours and we don't have a docket clearing meeting today and we don't have the process we have in place for this, didn't have an element for Checking this thing. I want you then to be an email, right? So that I can, if there is an emergency, I can grab you. But this defeats the purpose of everything because now you have to keep checking these inboxes. And that's the whole thing that begins to create all the unpredictability and all the issues that we were talking about. And also you're going to get creep. Well, once I can use an email for an emergency, guess what's going to shift my definition of an emergency? It's going to creep and creep and creep until everything is back there because it's easier for me in the moment. So you need a safety valve, a way that you can convince someone who's anxious about not being able to reach you. There is no emergency that can deep six us. You always have a way of reaching me if there's a problem. The key is to make that way a phone. Here is a number. It's my office phone or it's my phone number on my work phone. Or honestly, set up a special number that forwards to your work phone, I mean to your normal phone, and say this number is just for work emergencies. And I have set up all of my do not disturb mode so that this number still rings. It's whitelisted. This is my emergency number. If there's something that is urgent, call me. Now the anxiety is gone because all these scenarios that you come up with about, oh my God, I need you and you're not there. All of those scenarios you have a solution to. Well, I could always call you and you would answer. But the thing is, they're not going to call you because that's friction and we've lost our taste for friction. I'll send you an email all day long. I don't care. I will, I can be in the middle of like knee surgery and I'll send you like emails about things, you know, like why not? Right. But a call is a pain and the social capital cost is clear and it, there's a lot of friction involved in it. So I really am only going to call you if there's an emergency. And so in the moment I'm like, I don't want to deal with this. I'm worried about this. I want you to deal with it. Like, oh, I got to call them. All right, I'll write in the docket or I'll write it down and I'll come to the office hour. So you cure the anxiety without letting that cure get rid of all of your solutions. ([Time 0:36:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6ed6df04-fc10-443f-8d17-08fa816d58b2)) - **Make Work Visible With Shared Backlogs** - Adopt transparent task management so tasks live in a shared backlog before assignment. - Make workloads visible, use WIP limits, and decide assignments in team meetings to prevent overload and unpredictability. Transcript: Cal Newport Teams have to have transparent task management. Here's how this works. When a new task is identified that is relevant to a given team, it does not automatically attach to a person. That's the way we do this by default. Whoever thinks up the thing or whoever gets the email from the client asking about the thing, they now own that task until they give it to someone else. So all tasks are born in the default system attached to an individual who then has to, theirs until they pass it off to someone else. And then we just sort of pass these things around and it's sort of a fluid exchange market where all of the gradients are towards the better people and we get these big workloads. In transparent task management, that's not the way it works. When a task comes in, we have a place for the team to put stuff that the team needs to do. They do not belong to a person yet. Things we need to do, and they're listed there. And you can use a Kanban style tool where you have cards and columns like Trello or Flow, or there's lots of other things to do this. It could be a Google doc that the team uses. Here's just a doc. Here's a header, like stuff we need to do. We just put it below it in bullet points. In productivity. I talk about a team that was working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge where they were, they put the things the team needed to do on index cards and actually put them on the wall. They divided the wall into columns with tape and they would just stick them on the wall with pins. So nothing's being forgotten, but they don't start by default on people's plates. Next, you have a clear, transparent, accessible to everyone in the team place where you keep track of what each individual is currently working on. So if we want to use this column metaphor, we have a column where we stick things that need to be done. Then we have another column, one for each of the people on the team. Here's the Cal column, here's the Jesse column, et cetera. When we agree that someone on the team is going to work on one of these things in the to-do list, we move that card either physically or virtually to that person's column. Now they're officially working on it. And we have to have a set way we make these decisions. Is this like a DACA clearing meeting or a morning stand-up meeting where as a team, we come together and like, which things over here do we should we be working on that we're not and who's Going to work on them? Okay, we agree like this is Jesse should do this. Let's take that card and we're putting it in Jesse's column. Workload is now transparent. No one can avert their eyes or ignore or whistle past the reality of who's working on what and how much each person is working on. You have to confront it. And when you make workloads transparent, it is much harder to get asymmetric workloads or people that are severely overloaded because they can just say, it's clear as day. I've got a lot of cards here. This is clearly going to be too many cards for me to really be able to handle well. Let me finish some of these cards before we move something new to me. And suddenly that becomes really reasonable. Suddenly you can have policies like WIP limits, work in progress limits of like really no one should ever work on more than three things at a time. These type of things make no sense in a world of just email and back and forth where there's no actual transparency to workloads. We just pass stuff around and it's on you to say no, just like I don't want to do it. I'm busy, which is like, you can't say that everyone's busy, but in a transparent workload structure, you say, I have more stuff than anyone else. So no, you can't just give me twice as much. Or now that we can see, Hey, you know what? Whenever this count gets above three or four, uh, the, the shallow work and administrative overhead becomes so voluminous, it locks me up and everything slows down. So let me work on fewer things at a time. Now, here's the key thing about transparent workloads. And again, in my book, Slow Productivity, I really get into the details of this. It doesn't reduce output. It actually increases output. When you have to juggle too many things at the same time, the rate at which anything is finished reduces disproportionately to the number of things you're working on. It's not purely linear. It's not if I'm working on three things, it takes me three times as long for each thing. So when we add it up, it gets done in the same amount of times if I did one after another. It's not like that. Instead, there's these thresholds where if I'm working on two or three things, I can make good progress on each of those each day and they'll get done pretty quickly. But if you give me six things, now there's so much administrative overhead I'm j meetings and emails and discussions about these things, that my schedule gets into admin lock. And now I can barely make progress on anything. And now the average time to completion of each of these things plummets. In fact, if I just did three things at a time, finished them, and did three more, those six things would get done much faster than if you gave me all six at the same time. Now, this is only possible to recognize this and to address it and take advantage of this reality when you have transparent tax management. ([Time 0:39:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/742b3276-65d3-4442-86bf-70b3d4032d94)) - **Tame Startup Frenzy With Simple Rituals** - For startups, prioritize in-room collaboration and clear 'door-closed' signals for developers. - Use role-based inboxes, hourly check-ins, and central task tracking to tame startup-style frenzy. Transcript: Cal Newport We currently work long hours, but also consume all your content. Here's what's interesting about venture-backed startups. They have a unique work culture, and we'll get into this more in a second, but it's a unique work culture. When you're starting up a company, you have a small number of people that have to to play a lot of roles. It's very dynamic. It unfolds very unpredictably. Really the best way to run a startup, if at all possible, is to have the small group of people just like in a room together. And it's a lot of like, hey, what about this? Hey, come help me on this. Okay, look, I just got this code to the work and everyone's drinking Red Bull. And like, that's how venture backed startups work. And I have advice about like how to make that better. But here's the meta point I want to make. That reality has had a major negative impact on knowledge workers across the whole sector. Why? Because the digital productivity tools that now dictate the pace and structure of knowledge work, we talked about this in the deep dive, guess where those are, who creates those? Those are the products of venture-backed startups. So if I'm a venture-backed startup making a digital productivity tool, my internalized notion of productivity is like, what is important if you're a venture-backed startup, which Is not the way you want to work in almost any other job. And that's why we had this rush of tools like the Slacks of the world or project management tools that's built about like maximum information exposure, reducing friction between access To information, and having the most fully serviced rapid communication channels possible. You're trying to simulate three guys in a garage in Santa Rosa, putting stuff up on the bulletin board and trying to get their you know startup up and running and so now if you're like a Big company and you're like well wait a second like actually my job i'm writing white papers as a marketer or whatever and really what i should be doing is spending four or five hours a Day like trying to make these really good but all my communication tools are built for a startup where we're all like hyped up on you know it's all 26 year old stanford grads that are hyped Out of their mind on Mountain Dew and like typing so fast that the keyboard smokes. That's not what I need as a 42-year marketer who's trying to write white papers. I don't need everyone to access me all the time and have like automatic AI labeling of my information flows going back and forth through these like control panels. I need people to leave me alone so I can write. So I think there's been a real impact on what we think of as productivity and knowledge work writ large from what productivity means. If you're a venture-backed startup, they create all the tools. All right. So if you are in a venture-backed startup, A, I would say it's okay that it's a little bit more frenetic and interruptive. There's, you know, that's fine because that's kind of what those are like, but there's a few things I'd recommend. You have to have the, I call it like the Sam Seaborn office strategy. If you don't mind me making another West Wing reference, in the early seasons of the TV show, The West Wing, the speechwriter and deputy communication director, Sam Seaborn played By Rob Lowe, when he had an important speech to write, would close his door. They would talk about this. I'm going to close my door. Then everyone knew he was writing and they wouldn't bother him till he came out. Well, you got to do that for your developers. If you're a venture backed startup, Hey, you're coding something clear. We need some way of indicating your door is closed. We are not going to bother you till you're done coding or you come out. You got to have either a physical place or a virtual way of saying this. And if they're trying to, if they communicate, if they're, if they jump on Slack while they're in the closed door, be like, what are you doing? No, bad programmer. You need to go be doing, you know, GitHub commits. Focus on your code. So I think that's one thing that's very important. Another thing that's very important is have, if possible, right off the bat, email addresses associated with roles and tasks and not individuals. So right off the bat, don't just be, I'm now, I'm the person who was emailing like this vendor. I'm the person who happened to get this client inquiry. Have role-based email addresses that can be monitored by multiple people and you can pass off who's looking at it when. It also depersonalizes requests so you don't feel that sort of like frenetic pressure of like, I got to answer this right away because it was not an email to me. It was an email to, you know, vendor at startup.com. It was an email to incoming request at startup.com. Everyone's expectations slowed down quite a bit. Synchronous communication has to happen all the time. I would say do it every hour, have a quick 10 minute check-in because of that though, like kind hold on to your stuff until the next check-in. Try to make as much progress on stuff as you. So everyone can kind of do these mini sprints, these 50-minute sprints. Then we all coordinate for 10 minutes and 50-minute sprints. If you really interleave everything all the time, so I'm doing Slack, managing all multiple things on Slack while doing everything else. That's a real startup culture thing. It actually slows people down. I think things get done less often. Be in the same office as possible. Have a central place to task, track tasks and who's working on them and have a central place where all the information associated with a task can be attached. So it doesn't have to exist in email inboxes and you don't have to do Slack searches to find the files. Like this is now an issue. There's now a Trello card for it. It's in a status and anything about this can be attached to that card by anything. These are so much information you have to manage it. ([Time 0:51:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c55d2eac-bd91-423f-9f2b-4be55ca775dd)) - **Reply With Process, Not Promises** - Use process-centric (source-routed) emails that specify steps and timelines to avoid back-and-forth. - If your boss emails after hours, wait for normal hours to reply and escalate only if they insist on immediate responses. Transcript: Cal Newport My boss sends me emails to check in on issues or ask me for information at all hours. If I don't respond, he follows up. How do I get him to change? There's a couple of things you can do, right? There's something you can do differently. And there's something you can try to do to get him or her to behave differently. The thing you can do differently is more what I call in the book, deep work process centric emailing. But partially why they're maybe responding at all hours is because you have initiated the way you kicked off whatever thread of conversation is happening. Now you initiated that in a way that's going to require a lot of back and forth messages. And that boss has a lot of these that he or she is trying to get through. So they're not going to wait until the next day. They're like, I am after hours, I'm trying to get through all my volleys and I need the volley. I can't wait till the morning. Let me volley this back now because, you know, I have so many things I'm trying to get through. Process centric emailing means in your initial email, you lay out the details of the process by which the implicit goal that's being initiated by that email is going to be completed. And this allows you to get out of ad hoc messaging. So instead of just saying, hey, we need a plan for getting this, you know, whatever, independent study thing, the students proposing, you know, they propose this, you know, I don't Know, what do you think? What happens next? Or can you take a look at this or something like that? That's going to initiate a lot of back and forth A process centric email would lay out, you do a little, you do more work upfront. I'm going to lay out like how we're going to deal with this. All right. So we got this request and there's three questions here that are, you know, relevant. Okay. So we got to figure those three things out and I, you know, they're kind of connected. So here's what we're going to do. Here's the two questions that are relevant to you. If the answer is yes, you can just, when you get a chance, tell me that and I'll just take it on from there and we don't have to worry about it. If the answer is no, then there's like, here's the three things that have to happen. You can just go ahead and do those things. And then when you're done, just make sure the file is here. And I check that folder every Friday anyways, and I'll see it there and move forward with it or whatever. So you're laying out the process in the email about how the work is going to happen. This takes you more time up front, but it's minimizing the amount of unscheduled messaging required. And now you're much more likely to get those emails that just show up at random times at night. There's kind of a networking term for this called source routing. And it's where when you have a packet switch network, instead of sending a packet towards a destination, what happens in a normal network is, you know, to send the package towards a destination, I send it to the nearest router and it says, where is this going? Well, let me send this to the next router that's closer to that. And then that one sends it to the next router that's closer to that. So the path is kind of figured out on the fly. Everywhere that message arrives, the device it arrives at tries to pass it on the next device that's even closer. That's how like routing happens on the internet. In source routing, if I'm sending the message, I figure out the whole path in advance. I want to go from here to here to here to here to here to get to the destination. And I write the whole path in the message. And now as I send that out there into the world, the routers along the way, they just read like, where does this go next? Like it's been figured out in advance. You need to do more source route. And I call that process centric emailing. Now what you can do to kind of train the manager is just don't respond it. I just don't respond. 80% of the time, all this happening here is they have so many emails. They're involved in so much of this hyperactive high of my nonsense and meetings. This is when they clear out their emails. We have this social expectation of like, oh my God, they are sitting in like a Mr. Burns chair in a giant mansion. And the only thing they do, it's an empty inbox they just sent the message to me and they're sitting there with their arms crossed just like where is his response right and you know there Someone comes in like sir do you want your port and they throw something out i'm like where the hell is my response that's not what's really happening here's what's really happening They are typing as fast as they can trying to get through 50 messages they don't want you to write back right away. They're trying to get like some relief of getting through some messages. So just wait till the normal hours to respond. If they follow up, like, Hey, did you get this? Wait till normal hours to respond. Make them have to say, I want you to like answer my emails after hour. And then that puts you in a situation and be like, I can't guarantee I can do that because I have things in my life and a family and I don't work after hours, right? Like make them have to say that. The third thing you can do is be really good and really organized. Produce really good work. Never drop the ball. Do the things you're going to say. Be so good you can't be ignored. Be indispensable. Then you can really get away with saying that. Again, we imagine, this is the asymmetry that we have misplaced in our mind, is that we imagine that the way bosses think about us is like every morning they wake up, right? And the wife's like, how are you doing today? Like, oh, pretty good day. Like, it's sunny out. I just hope I can find a reason to fire Cal today. You know, I just want to fire him. So I'm just waiting for him to make a mistake and God, I hope he does it today because I'm looking for a reason to fire him. The opposite people. It's hard to hire people. If you're good, their real fear is they're going to lose you. And now you have leverage. You're like, I know I can't guarantee I'm going to answer email at eight o'clock. That's not, you know, I'm with my family then. They're like, yeah, but this guy's good. He gets stuff done. He's reliable. It gets done well. Like, okay, I'll work around it. All right. So those are your two, like two and a half options. ([Time 0:57:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb0b3db3-ab4f-474f-b12a-d06aaec52558)) - **Protect Deep Mornings, Batch Admin Afternoons** - For professors, prefer daily morning deep work and schedule administrative meetings after lunch. - Alternatively, block consecutive deep days or no-meeting Mondays to extend weekends and protect deep stretches. Transcript: Cal Newport Is it better to have those deep days consecutively, say Tuesday and Wednesday, or alternated with non-deep days in between, so like Tuesday and Friday? Well, okay, Em, first of all, there's a great situation you're going into for a professor, not for everyone, but for a professor, having more deep work time is often like a great joy. There's different philosophies of what to do here. I want to start with giving you a, throwing a curveball at you. So in the extended version of this message, you explained that on the days that you're doing your administrative work, it takes about six hours per day. That's 18 total hours of deep work. One thing you could do, I mean, of administrative work, one thing you might do is say, I do deep work till lunch every day. And I do administrative work, any meetings, I only schedule meetings after lunch. I do all my administrative work and bureaucratic work. All that happens after lunch, because what happens if after lunch, let's say you're doing like one, the one, the five do administrative work. That's four hours. You do that five days a week. That's 20 hours. That's more hours than you need to handle the administrative work. You might find that's better. It's a little bit less daunting than like, here's my deep work day. I better get so much done. It's hard to do eight hours of work. So to say I do deep work mornings every day, that can be much nicer. So I want you to consider that option as well. Another way to think about this is, you know, what I do during my summers. Now, it's a little bit different, and I'll tell you why in a second. But what I do in my summers is I like to have Mondays and Fridays be non-meeting days. No meetings, no podcast recordings, like nothing where there's something on my calendar, because it extends the weekend on either end. So you actually get like this nice rhythm, the seasonality rhythm of there's like four days in a row where I'm really not worried about my calendar. And then you get the three days where you are. And it just, there's a real, that to me, there's like a real relaxation to that. Now here's the caveat. I do deep work every, I do the deep work till lunchtime every day in the summer. So this is not really a fact. It's not like those are my only days I'm doing deep work. If they were, the issue might be those are pretty far separated. And sometimes when you're like going on something, you want to keep going. And so if like you really are doing no deep work on the other days, then maybe you want your deep work days. You might do consecutive Monday, Tuesday or Thursday, Friday is interesting, right? I like the idea of like Thursday, Friday, and then you're in a weekend. And then so you do all of your shallow work and then all your deep work. I think that could be interesting. Or keep them close like Monday, Wednesday, or Tuesday, Thursday. So like they're never that far away. Or you do Tuesday, Wednesday, and you put it around it. So you have different options there. But keep in mind weekend extension or this alternative of deep work every morning shallow work in the afternoon and maybe you i would look at that administrative work if you have a lot Of flexibility think about something like my summer schedule deep work in the morning shallow work in the afternoons no meetings monday fridays or no meeting mondays if you have to Choose one make it no meeting monday So the transition back to the work week is less anxiety producing because you have less things on your calendar. ([Time 1:02:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/970f4b57-675f-423f-aa19-6b286bb2e4a5)) - **Treat Interview Practice Like A Meeting** - Schedule LeetCode practice as recurring appointments and join a partner or group for regular sessions. - Treat practice like a protected meeting to avoid cramming late-night, tired sessions. Transcript: Cal Newport I've been prepping with deep work blocks at night, but I get tired. How can I better schedule these blocks? Well, first of all, get a partner or a group, right? Most computer science departments have groups of people that go and practice leak code together. LeetCode, Jesse, is like a software program that gives you programming challenges that's used by recruiters if you're hiring a programmer. But you can practice and you need the practice. So, you know, at Georgetown, we have this group of seniors and grad students who get together regularly to practice LeetCode. Sometimes these are associated with programming clubs or programming competition clubs. Like one of the things they do is just practice for these programming exams. So if you can practice with other people, that's going to be much better. Also, this will have a regular schedule. They're like, here's when we meet and it shows up on your calendar, like any other appointment or meeting, therefore it gets protected. I think the problem now is you're thinking about this as something that you do when everything else is done or when you have time. And so you're like, I only have time at night. And you're tired. And it probably isn't the best time to be doing this practice. So you want this on your calendar existing as a tier one meeting or appointment. So doing it with other people makes that happen. If you're doing it on your own, pretend like you're doing it with other people. Go ahead multiple weeks on your calendar. Find the time. Same time, same places every month. Put it on every week, put it on your calendar and protect that like a dentist appointment. That time is now spoken for. ([Time 1:10:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3ed68dfa-2b38-4d12-b795-a1237059bacc)) - **Build A Life Around Buckets, Not Just Career** - Lifestyle-centric planning starts by listing life buckets and desired/undesired properties for each. - Most people find their job already supports their ideal life once they assess across buckets, not just career metrics. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, I want you to lean into lifestyle centric planning, break your life up into the various buckets, the various areas that are important to your life, right? So craft will capture things like work, but you have community and constitution and contemplation and celebration or context or however you want to break up your buckets. But capturing everything, all the areas of your life that has an impact on your subjective daily experience. And then you want to figure out for each of these areas what are the properties you're looking for in your life, resonates? And also, what are the properties you don't want? What do you want to get rid of? That's what you're moving towards. And it might very well be the case. This job you have is like a very good vehicle that helps you move towards like most of these buckets, right? You have a lot of flexibility. You don't mind doing the work, not like unpleasant. And it allows all these other properties you have for other parts of your life to be satisfied. And so you might be like, great, I'm hitting this lifestyle. I'm very satisfied by it. Or it might be like, no, no, no, there's something about this work that's causing and it's preventing me from some property, key properties I'm not going to get as long as I have to do this Type of work, or it's creating in my life one of these properties that I really want to avoid. In that case, you'd say I want to change it. But that's the decision you want to make because here's what I'm worried about. I'm worried that you're in that first situation. This job's great. It's fine. You don't mind the work at all, and you can craft this fantastic lifestyle. I worry that you're in that first situation and you are focusing myopically on the job because we're trained to do this. We are trained. This has been the main way we've thought about sort of middle class and upper middle class satisfaction in life starting from about the 1990s on. We've been trained to say the job is the engine. That is the engine of all satisfactions is the cause of all problems. And what matters is you have to craft this job into a passion engine. This job has to be crafted into a source of all satisfactions in your life. So then you're going to analyze it. I don't think this is my favorite thing. There might be some other thing I could be doing in my job. I think I got to change this. Lifestyle-centric planning frees you from that. Here's my buckets. Here's the properties I want to amplify or reduce in each of these buckets. And I'm moving towards that. And really for, I would say, seven out of 10 people, the work component of that is like, this is not getting in the way of these other things. I like the people I work with. And the work doesn't cause any negative things. It's not like a source of like particular stresses. There's all these other things that are important in my life, including things I maybe push like a remarkable degree. You know, I've built these, you know, super elaborate, you know, animatronics that I'm working on. And each year it like gets crazier. And I have this like sports hobby that I'm doing and I'm deeply involved in coaching. I'm the commissioner of like my kids little league and have like a deep spiritual life. And I'm really connected with my community. And my job is set up so that like three out of five days, I actually can work from this like really cool home office I built in my shed. And the other two days is not that bad of a commute. And I like the people there and it's kind of cool to see them and like the work, it fits really well. And I, it's kind of flexible and I don't mind it. Like it doesn't stress me out. This is, I built a deep life. I built a life on my terms. Like seven out of 10 people, that's it, right? And then for the other three, it's either, no, no, no, there's pieces of this work that I hate or I don't mind the work when I'm doing it, but it's making these other things impossible. It's an obstacle to other things. So I need to change it. So just make sure, you know, I don't know if this is my favorite thing is I don't really care about that. What I care about is, are you moving towards your ideal properties and away from your anti-ideal properties in each bucket? That's what matters. ([Time 1:12:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a3ee30bf-0a3f-4947-8849-d9962976f354)) - **Thesis Completed With Slow Productivity** - Isaac applied slow productivity to a one-year thesis and avoided midnight sprints by time blocking and shutdown rituals. - His thesis won praise, publication interest, and preserved family life while producing higher-quality work. Transcript: Cal Newport Secretly, the reason we do this is so we can hear the official case study theme music. Today's Back in August last year, I began my one-year research thesis, centering the project around an ambitious research question, at least for the master's level. Earlier in 2024, I had read Cal's latest book, Slow Productivity. So heading into the thesis, I decided I would follow the principles outlined in the book, as well as other standard Newportonian ideas, time block planning, shutdown rituals, etc. I wanted to see if I could avoid the midnight sprints that I had seen several of my friends needing to finish their theses. I knew that the thesis would be such a unique privilege, one that I may never experience again, and I didn't want it to become a living nightmare. I handed in the thesis a couple months ago, and looking back on the year, can attest to the fact that Cal's ideas just work. At the start of the project, I had outlined the chapter deadlines with my supervisor, but quickly fell behind. Out of my five chapters, only in the final chapter did I make the deadline. The rest of the chapters were always a few weeks behind the ball. In part, this was because of my misaligned expectations of the complexity of my topic, but the other reason was a large amount of non-study roles and responsibilities. I'm going to skip past sort of a summary of what some of those things were, but like family responsibilities, personal responsibilities, etc. With all this going on, I fell back into old habits and started working longer deep work sessions that would sometimes stretch for eight hours. They were uninterrupted but grueling and incredibly unsustainable. I would end most days with a brain that was fried, leaving me without any capacity to be emotionally available to my wife and family. That's when I decided to double down on the slow productivity principles. I pulled back from responsibilities, defined clear boundaries with work, maintained shutdown rituals, and limited my research blocks to four hours per day, sometimes even three Or two, depending on my energy levels. I realized that I need to stop stressing about the delays on my chapters and just work at the natural pace that each subtopic needed. I stopped caring about words produced per day and instead focused on the quality of the ideas, making sure that my argument didn't leave open threads. All in all, the thesis was immensely challenging, but not because of a grueling work schedule. It was more because of the normal level of cognitive load that comes from wrestling with complex ideas. The thesis also became much more enjoyable. The ideas were better. I was able to produce original research in my field, and I had enough space to maintain the rest of the commitments in my life. I was slowly productive, one might say. When I submitted my thesis to my supervisor, he was deeply impressed. He said he would teach the material to future undergraduates and then sent it to be marked by one of the leading theologians in my field internationally. Having just got the grade, it got high marks and my supervisor wants me to publish it. All right, well, I have to go back multiple pages. Isaac, Isaac, I appreciate the case study there. That's slow productivity in action, right? We place upon us the busyness and the speed demands, and then we stress ourselves out. And then we convince ourselves that busyness and those speed demands are necessary or will be a failure. And what happens when we practice slow productivity? We reduce what we're working on. We set clear boundaries. We focus on quality. We say it's going to take what it takes. No one was keeping track of how many things you were doing. No one had a stopwatch on your work. And what happens is you produce great stuff. What is going to be remembered about Isaac? Not, hey, this took you four weeks more than it could have. What's going to remember is this is one of the best master's theses that we've seen in the last 10 years. That's slow productivity at work. Being great, doing great work, having great opportunities, thriving professionally and enjoying your work is not about busyness. It's not about quantity. It's not about speed, not about hustling, not about knocking through 90 things on your to-do list. A slow, steady, sustainable work on work that's really important. That is what is valuable for a lot of people in our current knowledge economy. So I think that is a great example. I'd love to hear slow productivity work. ([Time 1:19:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e4a3b488-b12f-4c0f-81b2-a0227d2fbfc4)) - **Time Block With Weekly-To-Daily Flow** - Use three block types: deep (filled), admin (double-border), and meetings (triple-line) with explicit tasks listed. - Weekly plan against quarterly goals, place protected blocks on your calendar, then copy appointments into daily time-blocks. Transcript: Cal Newport In fact, I might even do a little bit of drawing here as long as I have the as long as I have the tablet up all right so a couple things to talk about about how I actually do time blocking all Right well first of all I want to say I have three different types of blocks that I mainly use and I actually use a visual differentiator between them and so I'll do some sample blocks on The screen here for people who are watching instead of just listing okay so if a block is an admin block I'll do a double thick wall. So I do a block and then I do another block inside of it. So it's kind of like a hollow border. That indicates to me that this is for shallow work. So it's for doing administrative tasks. And if it's one thing, I could just write it inside of the block. Typically in an admin block, though, and let me put, I guess I should put times on the side here, Jesse. So let's put, you know, nine, 10, 11, because there's time blocking. Typically for an admin block, what I'll do is I'll put a number inside. I talk about this in the front matter of my time block planner. There's a big essay. If you buy a time block planner, I have a huge productivity essay in the front of every one. I'll put a number in it. So I put the number one in that admin block. And then over in the upper right, where it's unlikely to be covered over by future blocks, I put the one up there. And then I will list like a to-do list next to that, the things I want to do during that block. So that's what I'll typically do for admin. If I have, let's say I want to do deep work next um so maybe in this sample schedule i'm putting on here from 11 to 1 i want to do deep work here i do double thick borders where it's filled in So see for admin i have like a thick uh open border here i just put a thick border that's that's filled in so now it just says by a glance that's gonna be a deep work block and then i'll typically Just write in there, you know, what I'm doing. So like I put the word writing in there now. The other type of block that'll often show up on here is if I have a meeting or a call with someone else, let's say from nine to 10, I'm doing a meeting or a call with someone else, you know, There I have a format. I've done two different things, but what I've been doing recently is triple lines. And then that tells me this is, you know, like call with Josh. So I kind of have a visual indicator on my schedule. I can sort of see a mix of where deep work is, where admin work is, and where appointments or calls are talking to other people. I like doing this way so I can get at a glance, like what the ratio is of these things. And if I flip through some pages, I get a sense of how I'm doing visually and pretty quickly. All right. How do I actually put things on the time block schedule? Well, a secret is if you use my style, like multi-scale planning, some of my other advice, there's not that much decisions made day of. So the way this works is, you know, I do a weekly plan. And a key thing about a weekly plan is I'm looking at my calendar for the week ahead. And I look at like where I have appointments scheduled, what days are more open than others. I want to know where the open water is, for example. I want to know what days might be better for working on long projects versus others. I also want to see if there's any spoilers. So a spoiler appointment is like one thing you scheduled, you weren't really thinking about it, but it's messing up a lot of other things. Like I agreed to meet someone in the city at 10 on Friday, but I had nothing else scheduled until three. And that prevents me from just like working for four hours in a row at my office or whatever i'm going to cancel that spoiler i'm going to write that person at the beginning of the week not Right before it because that's rude but you know it's monday morning i'm going to be like hey i know we had a plan for coffee on friday but can we move it to thursday because i'm looking at My calendar like i have a couple of things in the city and it's not going to be a spoiler and so you move things around but the other thing you do during a weekly plan is you look at your quarterly Or semester plan where you have your bigger goals or projects for the quarter, as well as any like sort of rules or heuristics. Like I want to exercise every day at lunch or whatever it is. And I make sure that I'm properly reflecting those on my calendar. So here's a key twist. I think I developed this habit maybe after it's not in the front matter of a time block planner. So this is kind of newer. I will put on my calendar appointments like it's any other meeting or appointment to make sure I'm making progress I'm satisfied with on my quarterly or semester plans. Right. So if like one of my things is I want to finish this academic paper during this semester, I might, you know, when I'm looking at my week, like, you know, we're making progress. This is a good week that what would make sense is if I could get a rough draft of the conclusion written and to my collaborators, that will keep me on track. You know what I'm going to do? Again, I'm in weekly plan mode. I'm going to go find the time in my week when I'm going to work on those conclusions and put that on my calendar, like a dentist appointment. All right, I'm going to grab that Friday morning now that I cleared that out. And I'm going to, Wednesday afternoon, like that's what I'm doing. I'm looking at my quarterly semester plan. It's like, you know, you need the, we need the walk every day. And I'm like, I'm going to go block that time off to make sure that my long walks are on here. So I'm making sure that to a reason, it's not mechanical. Everything on my quarterly plan must now end up in this week. It's like, no, what's a reasonable amount of progress on these things that makes sense for the week I have? I put that on my calendar, and now that time is protected. So when someone calls, like I want to set up a meeting, that time has already been put away. It's already been protected. All right, now let's switch to the daily plans. Wednesday morning, I'm making my time block plan for the day. I go to my calendar and I copy from the calendar everything on the calendar onto my time block plan. Well, because of my weekly plan discipline, a lot of my day is now going to be, honestly, already spoken for on my calendar. So when I start filling in my day on my time block planner, a lot of it already has blocks on it. And then all I'm deciding is what to do with the time that remains. And there, yes, you want breaks. You want some seasonality. If you had a very busy day, make this day a little bit better. A lot of what you're going to be adding is probably just like some admin blocks to make sure that you can keep on top of things like email or whatever. And if you find yourself coming out of a day, like I've overbooked these, I don't have time to like keep up with my email or these other things, or I have no breaks in the day. Then you could go and adjust your plan. Like actually let me take some things off of my calendar. Let me block off like an hour for lunch for the past days because I've been burning out. You can adjust to it. But I've been having this cycle between bigger picture goals, calendar, time block planner, back to bigger picture goals and calendar. It's this feedback cycles. But that using my actual calendar more for non-appointment things has been a part of my practice, especially when I'm in these busier periods where I have big administrative roles. Because if I'm not protecting the time, I get to that Friday. I'm like, all right, let's time block. There's no time left. It's been eaten up by meetings and appointments. And now suddenly I can't make progress or anything big. So that would be, that's my discipline of like actually using my calendars and time blockers. And t... ([Time 1:26:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b4eea444-38c1-472c-b645-55035d2dcf62))