Cal Newport talks about weekly templates in episode 316 of the Deep Questions podcast.

Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow

The fall is the perfect time to tune up your productivity and organizational systems. With this in mind, in this episode Cal discusses a tool he has long used in his own life but never discussed before in public: the weekly template. He then answers questions on the theme of personal productivity from listeners and reviews the books he read in August.

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0:00 Weekly Templates
25:40 How does Cal schedule his evening writing sessions?
27:00 How can I leverage my current career capital to become an entrepreneur?
[32:09] How do I find time for non-urgent but interesting deep work?
35:45 Is afternoon deep work possible?
42:30 Can I use slow productivity to help prepare for a job interview?
48:15 How do I not be reactionary during my busy season?
53:30 Using Cal’s toolkit while working in the Peace Corps
1:02:50 The 5 Books Cal Read in August, 2024

Connect with Cal Newport:

🔴Visit Cal's BLOG and website: https://calnewport.com/blog/
🔴Check out Cal's books: https://calnewport.com/writing/
🔴Check out The Deep Life: https://thedeeplife.com

About Cal Newport:
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal's particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.

Cal is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He's also the creator of The Time-Block Planner.

The videos are considered to be used under the "Fair Use Doctrine" of United States Copyright Law, Title 17 U.S. Code Sections 107-118. Videos are used for editorial and educational purposes only and I do not claim ownership of any original video content. I don't use said video clips in advertisements, marketing or for direct financial gain. All video content in each clip is considered owned by the individual broadcast companies.

0:00 so I want to talk to you today about a piece of my own productivity toolkit that I don't think I have talked much 0:06 about before but it's key to my operation it's also an exercise I just 0:12 went through preparing for the fall quarter that is just beginning so I thought this was a great time to talk 0:17 about it because I could use examples for my own life as I just went through this so what is this tool we're going to 0:23 talk about I call it the weekly template all right to understand the 0:28 weekly template we have to briefly zoom out and remind ourselves about how my 0:34 multiscale planning framework works because weekly templates fit into this framework all right quick review for the 0:41 new listeners in multiscale planning you start at the time scale of the current quarter it's like right now you'd be 0:47 thinking about the fall and you have a strategic plan or quarterly plan for that period of time what are the big 0:52 things I'm working on what are the goals I have for this quarter what do I want to keep in mind that is important to me 0:58 in this quarter this is where you keep uh yourself oriented towards the big picture of your ideal lifestyle every 1:05 week at the beginning of the week you look at your quarterly plan to help you 1:11 create your weekly plan for the week ahead right this is where you actually look at what's going to happen in the days you're going to spend a lot of time 1:17 here with your calendar you're going to spend a lot of time here with whatever task capture system you use you're going 1:23 to put aside time when you're working on your weekly plan uh on your calendar for the week to make progress on important 1:28 initiatives to protect that that time this is where you might also make adjustments to your current plan you 1:34 know what I'm going to cancel this meeting and move this meeting over here because that's going to free up a lot of time here and I need a lot of time to get this bigger initiative done you then 1:41 look at your weekly plan every morning when you create your daily plan and there I suggest time blocking give every 1:47 minute of your day of job end with a clear shutdown so in this way your big 1:53 picture Vision as caption Rec quarterly planned is influencing everything you're doing throughout the day without 1:58 requiring you to think about big picture plan at every moment throughout your day 2:03 all right so here's where the weekly template comes in is a piece of supporting infrastructure to span from 2:10 your quarterly plan to your weekly plan so the way I want you to think about your weekly template is a uh a 2:18 collection of guidelines that you put in place at the beginning of a quarter that you consistently plan when you're 2:24 working on your weekly plan so it's a way to uh at a scale somewhat larger than each week make sure 2:31 that your weeks are going to be viable to move you where you want to go that's pretty vague so what I want to do is go 2:36 through one two three four um four types of things that you would put in a weekly 2:43 template and then hopefully this this mechanism becomes more clear all right the first element that 2:49 might be in a weekly template is protected time that's where you decide for this whole quarter there is a 2:56 certain time each week that I am preemptively protecting so for myself for example in my current 3:03 weekly template for the fall I don't have any teaching in the mornings and my plan is mornings are for 3:10 writing uh at least until 10:30 but later on days when I can go later that's 3:16 part of my weekly template I I've actually gone through and just protected that time on my calendar for the entire 3:22 fall right so part of my weekly template is I'm writing in the morning you might 3:27 for example have regular protected time for um I exercise every day at my lunch hour you might have regular protected 3:33 time for you know you're working on a self-education project to open up new career Capital opportunities this is 3:39 when I do my learning so just uh fixing in advance this time I'm always using for um this particular type of activity 3:46 that's a big element of a weekly template now I'm going to give you an advanced gloss on that tip hard thing 3:53 about having a simple rule about this time is always dedicated to this activity is that you will have 4:00 exceptions let me use myself as an example here I want to write every morning and I'm willing to be a pain about this by the way I'm willing in the 4:06 moment to be a pain and say no I'm sorry I know it would be convenient for everyone if uh I could meet at 9:30 I 4:13 can't do things in the morning like I'm willing to protect this but there's there's two things I can't get around once a month we have a faculty meeting 4:19 faculty meetings have always been on Friday mornings I can't miss the faculty meetings the other thing I can't get 4:25 around is that my kids school when they have events at school where parents come in to see kids work the way they do it 4:32 and I appreciate this is like let's just do this first thing in the morning as soon as school starts so parents can 4:38 then go on to their work days without having missed too much so clearly when those things happen that will interrupt 4:44 my plan of writing first thing in the morning so I have these two exceptions I know I can't get around so what I have is a uh exception handling routine where 4:51 I say great when those two things happen I have a very specific thing I do to compensate for that lost time so the 4:58 faculty mean as soon as that's over I'm going to this library on campus 90 minutes writing if I have to go in uh to 5:05 my kids school I'm going straight from the school to this coffee shop um writing right away so I have a a 5:11 exception handling routine there as part of my protected time and my template all right second common element 5:17 of a weekly template daily themes you start thinking okay for the quarter 5:22 ahead maybe I want to dedicate different days of the week for different types of 5:28 activities this is something you want to figure out um ahead of time for example you might have meeting days and non- 5:35 meeting days you know okay I I uh I want to keep Mondays free of meeting so I can 5:41 really get into the week get my arms around things make progress on things um Mondays or non- meeting days that's a 5:46 weekly template decision every week you apply that to your week when you're making your plan you might say for 5:52 example I want to theme what type of roles I work on on different days so 5:57 maybe I need to do meetings every day day of the week but I'm going to put meetings on this particular role on 6:02 Tuesdays uh and meetings for this particular role on Wednesdays right these are regular rules that you keep in 6:09 mind when it comes time to actually schedule uh in my own academic career I often have for example Class Days versus 6:17 non-class days class days are a days where I'm teaching I treat those days differently in my weekly template when I 6:23 think about what I do there versus non-class days I like to meet with students on class days I like to do 6:29 Georgetown related administrative work on class days if I have meetings with an administrator or an advising Dean or 6:35 something like this let's do this on Class Days let's make the theme of Class Days the the non-research part of being 6:41 a professor and then on a research day well I'm going to schedule must fewer of those things so I can have more unbroken 6:46 time to actually uh work on thinking deeply you can also have for example 6:53 Fridays as a lighter day or your theme for Fridays is uh no meetings in the afternoon finish at 3 um so theming days 7:00 that's a weekly template I'm always doing this on these particular days the third we on the third element 7:08 that could go into a weekly template regular rules and limits right so this is not about 7:15 particular time but more about particular rules or limits to the things that are coming towards you that you're 7:20 going to enforce for the particular quarter so for example a rural example 7:27 might be every time a Medan or call is scheduled on my calendar I am going to make sure there is 15 minutes at the end 7:34 of that calendar event for processing that meeting or call now this either means uh I put aside an hour and make it 7:41 clear that this call or meeting is for 45 minutes or I'm adding 15 minutes to the other end of of the hourlong meeting 7:49 or call however you want to do it but this is like a very useful rule it's a case study it's an example um this way 7:54 you can process things discussed in a meeting get things into your systems clear your head before you move on right 8:00 this is like a a useful type of um role limits might be things like I'm not 8:07 speaking this semester this is very specific to me as a as a writer but there's certainly uh quarters where 8:13 let's say I'm deep in the trying to finish a book manuscript or I'm on a book tour for a book manuscript where I 8:19 will just have a simple rule I'm taking on no speaking gigs right so you just have a simple rule like that these could 8:25 also be quotas uh I am only doing one podcast a week that's an actual quota I have in 8:32 place right now this fall uh I was on a book tour in the spring now I'm not on a 8:38 book tour I don't want to stop completely spreading the word about my new books flow productivity but I also 8:44 do not want to be in that five to 10 podcasts a week like I was during book 8:49 tour I really need to be focused in other things now so I have a simple rule one podcast per week if that week has its podcast I just don't make it 8:55 available having these rules in place makes it so easy to react to the incoming uh you might have a similar 9:01 rule for example with committees you're joining okay I'm just going to do um two committees that's it I have to choose 9:07 two committees I'm going to be on there's only five peer review papers I'm going to do U maybe there's a particular 9:13 type of thing you get pulled into in your company and you say I'm not going to do that more than once a month once I've done it once for a month I'll say 9:20 no not till the next month so rules and limits are a part of a weekly template finally autopilot 9:25 scheduling looking at things that you know occur regularly or will Ur regularly throughout the quarter and say 9:31 when do I want to do them I just want to figure that out in advance I don't want to be each week when I sit down to do my 9:37 weekly planning asking myself when am I going to find time for this I'm going to make that decision at 9:42 the beginning of the quarter Friday afternoons is when I do this type of work the the online class I'm taking 9:49 that's first thing in the morning Monday and Wednesday so I don't even I don't want to have to think about it that's just when it is that's just when I do it 9:55 hey it's Cal I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video then you need to check out my 10:01 new book slow productivity the Lost start of accomplishment without burnout 10:08 this is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos 10:13 you can get a free excerpt at Cal newport.com slow I know you're going to like it 10:21 check it out now let's get back to the video one of the more interesting things and one of the more effective things you 10:26 can add as part of your autop piloting for your weekly schedule is office hours all right uh when do I want to 10:33 regularly have time to handle short things are going to require back and forth interaction and get it out of my 10:39 inbox I give you an example of that from today I won't get too specific it's like 10:46 a Georgetown administrative example um someone wrote me from the Department 10:51 like there's like a couple things none of it that complicated it had to do with like class registration and there this 10:56 class is too full this one might not be enough people like it was um nothing super complicated but it was 11:02 it was like a little ambiguous like well so what how can I be useful here what's really the issue and my first instinct 11:09 was let me just send back an email now so I can get this out of my inbox and that's just going to be kind of 11:14 clarifying we'll kind of go back and forth and figure this out I said no no no no no we could do this in 45 seconds 11:20 of talking so I said let's just talk it you know we were going to see each other later took 45 seconds like so what do 11:26 you mean by this oh okay do you need this from me no what about that great oh one exception great okay good 45 seconds 11:32 we were done office hours allows you to get that uh get that compression on a regular basis so so time you can push 11:38 in interactions are going to require more than like one message back and response right so just autop piloting 11:44 where is stuff uh where is the regular stuff actually going to happen there's clearly some overlap between autop 11:51 piloting and time protection time protection is more like my mornings are for writing the exact details of that 11:58 might depend on the day right time protection might be uh Friday afternoons I go to the The Cabin in the 12:05 Woods and um just do brainstorming right autopilot is more like this hour on this 12:11 day is when I prep my course um this is when I go through my batch so it's much 12:16 more like specific time blocks that you know are going to happen on a regular basis so there's some overlap there um 12:22 anyway so this these type of things go into a weekly template so your weekly template I have a fall weekly template 12:27 just goes in your quarterly plan is right there on the top like here's my general template I want to follow each week when I'm scheduling my week think 12:33 about what's in the template it really does make a difference because you don't have to go 12:39 through all of the thought processes required to figure out these elements of your weekly template you don't have to go through those from scratch each 12:47 week some weeks when you're creating your weekly plan you're have a good cup of coffee you got a good night's sleep 12:53 you're really like let's I'm thinking about this I'm Innovative other times like oh my God I'm just trying to figure out roughly how I want to get things 12:59 done um so you want the template there to to support you it's it's like your I call it a template because you think of 13:05 it as like here's my template for the ideal week would have these elements I'm R in the morning I'm not doing too many of these These are meeting days these 13:11 are non- meeting days like it's the it gives you the recipe or the template for what you think for that quarter is Going 13:16 to Be an Effective week quarter is the right time frame to work on this uh because things change like what's 13:22 relevant for me in the fall will be different than what's relevant to me in the winter and that's true for a lot of other period people as well so you're 13:28 you're your quarterly plan check is like the right time scale in which to look at these temp plates two you're going to 13:34 have to adjust it a bunch you get super ambitious I'm going to every afternoon 13:40 you know work in the woods it turns out like that almost never works there's like all these little things I can't 13:45 avoid that keeps messing up that plan I need to adjust this weekly template that's great adjust as needed finally at 13:52 the end of a quarter these are a good focuser for reflection if you think back what about 13:59 these weekly templates that I like what about them frustrated me like I really wanted to do this and I just could not 14:06 make that work gives you I think deeper insight about what's working and not working in your job much deeper Insight 14:13 than just like a typical day you get busy days you can have non- busy days there could be a deadline where you're overwhelmed and other times you're bored 14:19 but when you think back about your lower time scale your larger time scale weekly template adjustments I think you get a 14:25 deeper insight about what you're looking for in your working life what's working and what's not 14:30 you love the like my mornings were for writing maybe this was like super effective now you're having some insight 14:36 of like you know what maybe I'm well suited for like a a a more self-paced 14:41 more like what matters is what you produce type job maybe you're really frustrated that you couldn't make something like that work and it's 14:47 telling you about you know the meeting pace of my job is really incompatible that's what I have to find a way to 14:52 change then might be changing my role and changing my expectations I think there's great Insight that comes from 14:57 your grappling with your vision of the ideal week it kind of lives in this nice sweet spot between the 15:06 idiosyncratic difficulties of a particular day and the very aspirational big picture visions of like where do I 15:12 want to be 5 years from now it kind of gets at more what's happening what's not happening it's getting the trends of 15:17 your job not individual days but also not the two area of images so it's the 15:22 fall now figure out your weekly template just to summarize again the elements 15:27 that might go into that regularly protected time themes for various days rules and limits and autopilot 15:34 scheduling get one of these figured out for your your fall ahead it's it's really going you're going to feel like 15:39 your weeks are much better much less exhausting much more uh productive in the sense of making progress on the 15:45 things you care about you're going to be less frustrated uh it really can make you feel like it has a different job 15:50 versus the alternative of just like now I'm facing this week it's full of all this stuff I guess this seems fine let's 15:57 just go day-to-day and time block and make the most of it right it is going to feel like an a completely different job even though you haven't actually 16:03 officially changed anything about your role so give your weekly template a try I have uh one specific question and 16:11 then a broader one I guess I'll go with a specific one first when you start your writing is it usually around 16:16 8:30 um usually it's 8:30 sometimes it's earlier so ideally 16:23 two hours ideally two hours so it if I know I'm ending on the earlier side I might start early earlier right so we 16:31 leave uh we leave the house to walk the kids to the bus stop at 7:30 and and 16:37 typically my wife and I both walked into the bus stop together because we like to walk back it's like a time to catch up 16:42 um but if she has something early then I'll just take them if I have something like if I know I have an 11 or a 10:30 16:49 meeting I might just bow out the walking that day and then I could start my writing right at 7:30 and get that extra 16:55 hour mhm so we it it just it just sort of depends on what's going on and ideally six days a week or five days a 17:00 week um five days a week six days is needed okay right Sunday session is needed uh occasionally evening sessions 17:07 but I won't get too much into that now because I think we have a question yeah so so we'll get into that as well um I don't make right now I'm trying at least 17:14 not making the six day regular yeah I would like not to have to do it on the sixth day so I'm I'm going to see if 17:21 this metronome regular Relentless every single morning you're making progress 17:26 like I have a sense that's going to add up to you know slow productivity since that will keep me on Pace well that's 17:32 what you do when you wrote slow productivity right yeah I I mean I I think I was thinking about using Sundays more oh 17:40 okay right but then I I helped start at my kids school a robotics team and we we 17:46 meet on Sunday mornings so like that kind of took out the time I was very that's I I would often write on Sunday 17:51 mornings um that ate up that time so then last year like I wasn't writing as 17:57 much on Sundays as as I usually do do and so now I'm going to kind of see how that goes make that more permanent and 18:03 then my broad question is does a template look more like a calendar in your week of plan is it more like a bulleted list it's a bulleted list yeah 18:10 so so my fall template I call it um it's categories and bullet points okay yeah 18:16 so it's like here are my elements of uh here are the elements I think I used a wording of like here's my the elements 18:22 of my ideal week for this quarter I mean I use the word semester because I'm a professor but same idea yeah and just 18:27 put it right at the top of uh your quarterly plan because you're looking at that every week and that's exactly when you want to remind yourself 18:34 of of your of your template all right cool so we got a bunch of questions that are kind of similarly tactical again we're following 18:41 our theme Here of back to back to school back to work like let's get our systems tuned up but before we get to the next 18:47 questions let's first hear from our sponsors I want to talk first about our friends at Zach do you've heard me talk 18:54 about it before Zach do is a free app and website where you can search and compare highquality in network doctors 19:02 choose the right one for your needs and click to instantly book an appointment 19:07 we're talking about in network appointments with more than a 100,000 healthc care providers across every specialty from mental health to dental 19:13 health Eye Care to skin care and much more plus dock do appointments happen 19:18 fast typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking you can even sometimes score 19:23 same day appointments look zoc solves a pervasive problem I need a medic medical 19:29 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in your day ahead of time or is it 23:25 the result of overflow work just not getting done during the day do you wait until after it's over to do your 23:30 shutdown routine all right Aon good questions um I'm actually these days in my weekly uh my weekly template um I 23:39 typically aim actually now I'm finishing below before 5:30 uh because I'm using exercise as my 23:45 transition so after I do my shutdown routine I'm I'm using exercise almost every day as my transition from uh work 23:53 to non work I find that really helps to have like a a difficult physical strain help helps reset your body 24:00 physiologically not to mention your brain psychologically for life outside of work um these workouts I'm doing 24:06 though can require I know 45 50 minutes so um I'm ending work a little earlier 24:12 now I I I like to get going in the in the exercise when possible before five so I'm ending a little earlier all right 24:18 so let's get to the the meat of your question I do sometimes ride in the evening um okay so how does that fit 24:24 within my daily time block plan um it's after the shutdown right because the shutdown 24:30 routine is where you're closing all the open Loops of your day you're reviewing your plan for the week ahead you're 24:37 convincing yourself that it is fine to stop working you're not forgetting anything there's nothing that there's 24:42 urgent that you need to deal with before the next day and then you either check your shutdown complete checkbox in like 24:48 my time block planner or you have some sort of Catchphrase you say to signal to yourself I have reviewed everything I'm 24:55 comfortable shutting down we don't have to think about work again that is still worth doing at the end of your workday because an evening writing session 25:02 doesn't require you to have all those open Loops open an evening writing session is not checking your email it's 25:07 not planning it's not working on projects it's not thinking ahead it's just a singular activity I'm just 25:12 sitting here and trying to write so I do my normal shutdown the evening writing is like something separate then right um 25:18 I don't time block it because I don't time block after shutdown I don't time block my my non-work time I just note 25:24 when I do a shutdown for the day I I in my time block planner I just right evening I kind of like bullet point 25:30 below it like roughly what I remember I want to try to get done that evening I don't time block it so I just know like 25:36 okay I'm going to do an evening time writing block and I'll usually coordinate them with my wife and be like okay so here's if this works like here's 25:41 what I'm going to do um I'll I'll go to my office or head over to the coffee shop and for like an hour and here's 25:47 what I'm going to do it and so it's roughly time blocked in the sense I know I work out with her when I'm going to do it but I don't actually draw time blocks 25:54 because I don't actually do time blocking in any formal Sense on weekends or after shut Downs um for me evening 26:00 writing blocks are not overflow right I don't like this idea that if like you don't finish your plan 26:06 just keep working you know that's that means your plan was probably too ambitious or you weren't being 26:11 sufficiently focused during your day I don't like using evenings for overflow if at all possible I typically use 26:17 evening writing sessions because I'm trying to uh break a complicated story so this will typically happen with my 26:23 New Yorker writing those are hard articles to get into because the the writing caliber is hard right the the 26:29 thinking has to be super sharp but the the writing just the craft has to be very high um it's a high bar of Entry 26:35 sometimes to get into them so sometimes I like to sort of make a running start at them by riding in a new location at a new time so like I'm going to bevco like 26:43 in the that's our coffee shop going in the evening and um like coming at this in like a new environment to try to like 26:50 harness some inspiration just to kind of break into the piece and then like once a piece is going then it's more workmanlike and you can just schedule it 26:56 so typically that's what I'm doing with my afternoon writing sessions if I am behind on a a deadline the thing I'll 27:03 usually uh aim for is like a long a long weekend writing session that's more like 27:08 okay I need to throw five hours at this thing and um so maybe I'm going to stay home and work on this while like the 27:15 family's doing something else or we'll go to like my in-law's house and they have like a out building on their property sometimes I'm like great I will 27:21 go out there and write while uh you know you visit with your parents Etc so that's that's the way I think about that 27:27 but good question all right what do we got next next question is from Mark I'm a new high school teacher I also play in 27:33 a successful band so I currently have two sources of income my passion is to start my own business what is the best 27:38 approach for me to leverage my current career Capital to become an entrepreneur well Mark I'm suspicious of 27:45 your use of the word passion here like when someone says my passion is to start my own business what that really means 27:50 is I like the idea of starting my own business and I'm going to call it my passion so that like uh you have to go 27:56 along with it but there you're not wired this is my book so good they can't ignore you you don't have some genetic 28:04 predisposition for a particular job that exists in the 21st century like freelance knowledge economy when you say 28:10 it's my passion you're just saying I'm interested in starting a business okay I'm glad you're interested in that that 28:16 by itself doesn't mean much to me right so I don't hear the word passion and have that that that that sort of reaction of 28:24 uh career genu flection oh my God you got to do that like we got to make that work like the word's kind of meaningless to me so what should we do lifestyle 28:32 Centric planning okay we need to have this vision of your ideal lifestyle in a few 28:38 years and then 10 years or more out like we we'll work on those two time frames this Vision has to be holistic it has to 28:45 capture all the different areas of your life like what type of place you're living in what's the rhythm of your day who are you around like what what do you 28:51 smell what do you taste what do you see what do you hear you you want to build this aspirational vision of sort of like 28:57 the rhythms and realities of your day like what is it that you're trying to get towards and then we can assess 29:03 career Capital you have or career Capital that you could obtain and see how it would fit into that lifestyle 29:08 Vision maybe entrepreneurship works well in here right you're like oh you know what if I do this I could I could see a 29:15 path towards this lifestyle I have that like the teaching is not going to get there this is more constrained or or 29:21 whatever fine it could play a role in that but I want you working backwards from an ideal lifestyle not working forwards from something that you've just 29:26 labeled a passion because that is really that's rough and it's crude and it's often um working off of like a houseon 29:33 incomplete vision of like what this thing really means I want you working backwards from a lifestyle that's how you do a real career Capital analysis is 29:40 you you you know exactly what you want to invest that career capital in and now you're saying can I get enough career 29:46 capital I mean you're being much more you're being much more systematic about this when you're doing lifestyle Centric 29:52 planning in your situation Mark um a big thing I want you to do is be very realistic about finances 29:59 right so figure out okay for this Vision I have like how much does it cost like how 30:05 much am I how much am I spending like what would the spend be there what would get real numbers here right I mean this is really empowering for people I'm sort 30:12 of thinking about this chapter from my deep Life Book I'm working on now that getting concrete numbers as well as this 30:19 sense of like complete understanding control over your money right now and these concrete evidence-based numbers 30:25 for well if I lived here it would cost this much and I would need this much and and here's how much I can earn doing this and that um working with real 30:31 numbers is important because then you can start saying for example okay if I wanted a small business to support me 30:38 because then I could be more flexible and live this lifestyle where I'm in the woods all the time or whatever it is now 30:43 you have numbers and now you could say okay so I need a small business to generate this much money and now you can 30:48 be like okay is that reasonable like who's making that much money in these small businesses and why and then you 30:54 can start doing uh an idea that that I talk about and so good they can't you called using money as a neutral 30:59 indicator of value start seeing on the side okay well well how much money am I making money now I'm selling this 31:05 product am I making money am I selling it right is is no one buying it okay this a problem oh people are buying it 31:10 that means there's some value here so I could imagine I would have to 3x this for this plan so you're getting really detailed about uh the financial 31:17 realities all of it working backwards from an ideal lifestyle Vision all right 31:22 so I I love hearing people talk about uh use the phrase lifestyle or ideal 31:27 lifestyle when thinking about their careers I get nervous when I hear them say passion passion just means I wna and I 31:33 don't want you to say anything about it but I'm not I'm not convinced by that so you know look uh some sort of 31:39 entrepreneurial push here might be a big part of achieving your vision that does give you lots of autonomy lifestyle you 31:45 know jobs are a way of scaling up income that separate income from time there's a lot of cool options there but it's also really hard so you want to get realistic 31:51 about that also very cool that you play in a band I think that uh I love that you know Derek cers so IAL about him in 31:58 that book so good they can't ignore you he talks about leaving his job to be a 32:03 musician full-time and then leaving his job as a musician to run a small 32:09 business so that's my homework for you mark read so good they can't ignore you 32:14 find in particular that chapter about using money as a neutal indicator of 32:19 value read Derek cers story because he was uh you know he made exactly these decisions um and I'll give you the 32:26 tldr he left his job to be a full-time musician once he was making enough money 32:32 already being a musician on the side to cover his expenses he stopped his performing to work on his company 32:39 full-time once his company was making him enough money on the side that he could live off of those expenses so he 32:44 he let the money not his sense of what would be cool be the indicator of when he was ready to make a jump he then sold 32:51 that company for like 20 something million dollars so worked out well interesting guy all right who do we got 32:57 next next question is from Susan I have academic writing that needs to be done for my career I also have creating 33:03 writing projects whenever I try to schedule my creative writing the academic writing takes precedence and I 33:09 up telling myself that I'll fit the creative writing stuff in whenever I find extra time I do find extra time but 33:15 never enough to make real progress I find time blocking for my creative slf fun projects as stressful this is where 33:22 your weekly template is going to be useful because you need to probably um pre protect this time like you you got 33:29 to have it figured out this is when I do academic writing and I have enough time put aside to feel very comfortable about 33:36 my academic writing and that's going to be a lot of time and then you're going to say I'm going to put aside and regularly 33:41 schedule my time for my fund writing and it's going to be in a different place 33:47 and that's where this time is put aside and that's when I work on my fund writing and there will be less of that because it's not your full job right now 33:53 what you should not do is what you're doing now which is approaching day and saying okay I'm going to time 34:01 block my day um do I have time here what should I do next should I do creative 34:06 writing should I do academic writing oh my God I don't think I've done enough academic writing I and once I finish my 34:11 academic writing I'm busy I don't have time for my creative writing this time has to be protected way in advance and 34:16 you got to have rituals around it and it's got to be here's where I go to do this writing and it's like clockwork and 34:21 I feel I feel bad if I ever miss it it makes me feel like something's incomplete in my life and probably it's 34:27 going to be like first thing in the morning you're doing academic writing and then two evenings and one weekend day a week you have these like late 34:33 afternoon evening sessions at a coffee shop or you do your creative writing like you got to figure out how to make this regular and ritualized but protect 34:39 that time and if you don't have that if you're like okay but I don't have enough time when I try to do that like I can't 34:46 I don't have for example enough time to regularly work on my academic writing and my creative writing when you try to 34:51 figure out that time and you can't there's just not enough consistently free time in your schedule for that to 34:56 happen well now you're confronting reality what we call Facing the productivity Dragon oh I'm not fooling 35:03 myself my schedule doesn't have enough time to do both okay something has to change either I have to put off the 35:09 creative writing uh until I have like a sabatical to just do that or I have to loosen something else on my schedule so 35:15 I get the weekly template this this sort of thinking about like when this quarter do I want to work most weeks on academic 35:22 writing when this quarter am I going to work most weeks on creative writing forces you to confront 35:28 the reality of your workload at a scale that tells you something deep about your 35:33 your job on a daily scale doesn't tell you much you could no matter what your job is you can have a busy day but on 35:40 this the scale of like I'm trying to find a consistent schedule to do this writing when you fail to do that that's 35:46 telling you something that is consistently true about your job it's a very useful scale to interrogate what's 35:52 working and what's not working um so that's what I would do I you should never be thinking in my Ideal World you 35:58 never will be thinking on a typical day should I do this writing today or when 36:04 should I do this writing today that answer should have been long since established and recorded and it's like 36:10 autopilot at this point all right who do we got next next question is from Ari at my current job 36:18 I'm struggling to fit in deep work sessions I have calls starting at 7:30 a.m. which can stretch till 12:00 p.m. 36:24 I've tried shifting my deep work sessions to after lunch but been unable because I'm already exhausted well I can already tell this 36:32 is like a time time zone thing probably if he's starting at 7:30 a.m. he's 36:38 probably like West Coast maybe working with East Coasters um so Ari you're going to have to lean heavily into uh 36:45 location and rituals to make afternoon deep work more effective for you it is 36:50 hard for a lot of people I have a hard time with it most people here's a reality most people if you say hey first 36:56 thing in the day get some coffee and work deeply can do it like okay yeah like I I don't have 37:03 too much other stuff in my head from work like we're just getting started so my my cognitive context is focused my 37:09 attention residue is minimal I have energy in the morning I'm having my first caffeine of the day like great 37:14 let's do deep work in the morning most people can just do that without too much support the afternoon's a different 37:19 story and I include myself in this if I just like after we record this podcast Like Jesse if I just after this podcast 37:25 you're like you know what I think I'm going to go do some right and just took out my computer that would be difficult mhm uh I would need ritual and location 37:34 built around getting good deep work occurring you know in the afternoon so Ari It's Not Unusual that that's the 37:40 case for you as well all right so what might this mean uh I have a bunch of ideas for this uh first of all I would 37:46 suggest a halfday shutdown routine after your calls end at noon so give yourself 37:52 a half hours to close up all of the open Loops that were created by these calls make sure the stuff that needs to be on 37:57 your calendar is on your calendar the stuff that needs to go into your C capture system is in your task management capture systems the 38:02 follow-ups are happening that there's not loose ends from these calls that are still floating around so you really want to sort of shut those things down take 38:09 the next step schedule when things are going to happen get that out of your head any deep work attempt with a bunch 38:14 of open Loops from the morning still open is going to be otherwise uh very difficult um I would then suggest having 38:22 a uh a physical Interruption so this could be like going on a long walk on a set route our our 38:29 canonical example here is Darwin that is a state uh outside of London built the 38:35 the sandwalk a very specific sandline path that went through the most scenic parts of his property and he would do a 38:41 set number of circuits on that path to prepare himself for writing so it could be this I'm I'm walking doing this 38:47 particular walk maybe to a coffee shop and back or if you live near the woods on a particular Wooded Trail exercise I 38:53 become a big believer in this if you have some schedule here go do some Hard Exercise midday it really does reset 38:58 your energy levels and your brain now you're ready to switch over to try deep work keep the Deep work period 39:05 reasonable most days it is hard to be on calls from 7:30 to 12 like 39:11 you are using a lot of energy you cannot on a regular basis then say great I'll do 12:30 to 5:30 you know writing the 39:19 Great American novel you've used a lot of energy so let's go with the slow productivity principle here of slow but 39:24 steady deep work done really well every single day reasonable amount of 39:30 time that will add up to something good and and maybe it takes a little bit longer to add up to something good but 39:36 my schedule will be if I keep my schedule sustainable I can keep doing this and over time I'm going to produce lots of cool 39:41 stuff consider chemical interruptions as well so I get this special cup of coffee 39:47 or I make my mon tea or like something you do right at the beginning of the afternoon deep work session have a 39:53 location Interruption go somewhere different than where you did your calls to do work I think this is worth potentially even spending non-trivial 40:00 money and having uh notable eccentricities in your day it really 40:05 makes a big difference to say I'm going to this shed I'm going to this Library um going to this like local University I 40:14 am going to my attic deep work room I'm going to the the cabin I built in the woods whatever it is change locations 40:21 for this deep work I've done I've shut down I've gone for a walk I've made my special cup of tea and now I'm going to 40:28 the Deep work only location and then have a fixed amount of time you're working as I said this is probably not 40:34 going to be too long most days you should be happy with 90 minutes to two hours that's probably all the energy you have 40:39 left if this seems insufficient choose one day at first were you end your calls 40:45 earlier just when these calls are being set up you're like on this day I'm actually only available till 11: or 10:30 right people like whatever you're 40:52 just clear about it like you're available we're always doing calls there's one day where like you're not available at the for a couple hours at 40:58 the end so we just work around it um you can do that one day a week maybe two and have a longer deep work session but 41:03 don't try to be a hero here your brain can only do so much work especially when is you have this kind of really mixed up 41:10 demanding multi-roll knowledge work type of things going on all right do those 41:16 things regular afternoon deep work as possible just trust that 90 minutes to two hours 5 days a week four weeks a 41:22 month will produce really good stuff even if it's not as fast as you would like to go it's better that you have a 41:27 sustainable Pace you can slowly move on that over time gets you to the Finish Line than it is that in the short term 41:34 you're trying to to go heroic um the Clos the loop here when you're done with this deep work session then have like 41:40 your final end of the day session where you do your real shutdown this is where you can have like okay I have admin 41:47 tasks I need to do I would do that after the Deep work non-trivial admin tasks like I got to fill out this form it's 41:52 going to take 20 minutes you have your hour and 90 minutes at the end of the deep workk session to just um shut down your day I would leave that type of 41:59 stuff the non-trivial admin to the other end of deep work if possible so that you can get to it before it's too late um 42:04 again adjust as needed different people have different preferences different rhythms work 42:09 better but that's probably how I would do it all right Jesse what do we got next our next questions our Corner oo 42:17 slow productivity Corner uh you've missed me saying this for the last two weeks but we like to have one question a 42:22 week that's relevant to my new book slow productivity the uh the art with the 42:28 Lost Art of accomplishment I haven't said in a while Jesse the Lost Art of accomplishment without overload uh it 42:34 really is like a a source book to God 75% of the stuff we talked about on the show if you haven't read slow 42:40 productivity yet uh you got to go get it just go get it read it recommend it 42:45 because we talk about the book so often on the show anyways here's our slow productivity question Corner slow 42:51 productivity Corner question of the week [Music] 43:02 hi the question comes from fendra I got laid off recently and currently have a part-time job I spend about four to five 43:08 hours on that to keep up with the bills and rent I have an interview with a big tech company coming up in a few weeks 43:14 and I need to prepare is there a way to use the principles of slow productivity to strike a balance between my part-time 43:19 job and interview prep well let's go back to the principle we mentioned for Ari uh a key idea from 43:27 slow productivity which is trusting slow but steady so doing a reasonable amount of 43:34 work on a regular basis trusting that can get you where you need to go this is like one of the most important heris 43:41 from the slow productivity mindset is getting out of the idea of uh how busy or exhausted I am today is what matters 43:48 how overloaded I am is what matters and instead saying I want to produce at the 43:54 bigger scale stuff I'm proud of how can I do that in a way that's sustainable that's compatible with uh a richer life 44:00 and it's not going to make me completely fatigued slow but steady is the way it's like how I write books I write a little 44:06 bit most days I let it add up over a year right slow but steady I want to drill in on this a little bit though 44:12 right because uh The Details Matter here for you because you don't have a ton of time you have a few weeks so uh you 44:18 can't get this wrong you don't have the ability I'm looking at this you're working four to five hours a day you don't have the ability to just say I'm 44:23 going to take a week and just do nothing but prepare for the interview I mean it's not a bad idea I guess if you could take time off your part-time job but 44:30 it's a part-time job so you probably can't um but you don't have a lot of room for error here if like you're slow but steady if you get off to if it's not 44:37 very effective you're in trouble you won't be prepared for this interview you don't have a lot of time to course correct so let me dive a little bit 44:43 deeper um another way to say slow but steady is Relentless and 44:50 deliberate now I use this more specific terms to capture the following two important elements to doing the strategy 44:56 properly in your in your situation when I say Relentless like it really has to be every day a lot of people have uh a loose 45:04 definition of what it means to do something regularly all right we can convince ourselves yeah man I'm I'm practicing my 45:12 guitar in a regular basis but if you actually went through and measured it you're like well I only really played 45:18 twice this week and the first time you know I was just sort of like jamming along to a song and really if I do the 45:23 math I had about 15 minutes of actual prce practicing in that week but in your mind like I picked it up on several 45:29 occasions right we we're easily diluted we can easily dilute ourselves into thinking we're doing something all the 45:34 time um so you have to defeat that by being relentless no no I do this every single day here's the time I do it tired 45:41 or not tired you know whatever it takes like this is I do it every single day so you have to be relentless otherwise 45:47 you're not going to have enough results to aggregate the second term I introduced there was deliberate and I'm 45:53 I'm drawing here from the phrase deliberate practice right our our best framework for understanding how people 45:58 get good at complex activities it's attributed to the late Anders Ericson 46:04 deliberate practice says okay if you want to get better at something you have to stretch yourself past where you're 46:09 comfortable in a very specific targeted way what is the thing that I need to do better let me design an activity to do 46:16 right now that does nothing but push me on that so that I I'm stretching my ability to do that piece this is 46:21 particularly important for learning which is what you're trying to do and preparing for the interviews you cannot waste any of these sessions they have to 46:28 be designed to deliberately improve you exactly in the areas you need to improve do not waste an hour interview prep 46:35 session kind of reading stuff on Reddit you need to actually like be on the leak code website um doing the exercises 46:41 right now of a type that you're like not quite comfortable with giving it your full attention trying to figure out how to make them work if you don't have that 46:48 sense of cognitive discomfort or stretch you're wasting the time so relentless and deliberate every 46:54 single day not wasting minute of those blocks now now like the blocks don't have to be that long it could be 45 47:00 minutes to an hour a day five days a week it's not that much time and it spread out over a few weeks you will get 47:07 really really good and I think this is actually going to be long-term a great 47:12 experience for you because after you nail this interview which you will if you're Relentless and deliberate and you 47:18 get this other job and now you have uh senior it's a senior development job so you have this you know kind of big 47:24 flashy knowledge work job you remember how this went and you will start thinking what are all of the other 47:30 things in my job now that I have this big new fancy job where if I mastered 47:35 this it would be really useful it would give me a huge leg up it'd be really impressive it would open up more options and you will have this confidence of I 47:42 can learn that without having to make some major change to my schedule that if 47:47 I just devote 45 minutes a day and maybe I just do this over lunch hour 5 days a week and I'm deliberate in terms of what 47:53 I do in that time there's there's no uh limit to what I can start picking up and 47:59 now quarter after quarter you're building up all these skills you've mastered this new API you've mastered this new programming language and like 48:05 this stuff is going to add up your career capital is going to pile you're going to start making some Investments with that capital and your life is going 48:10 to get somewhere really cool so I mean this is a great General tip if you're Relentless and deliberate a uh small 48:16 amount of time each day can add up to something that I think is very impressive and that is a key 48:23 slow productivity principle one I think that deserves hearing the slow productivity Corner Music one more 48:30 [Music] 48:37 time all right do we have a call Jesse we do here we go hello Cal I've resonated a lot on the 48:46 topic of seasonality I'm a writer and a producer for a football podcast so February 48:52 through July looks very different in my line of work than August through January and I know for a lot of people that's 48:58 similar in the academic world in the off season I found so much joy scheduling 49:04 deep work hours in the morning spending time with my family implementing shutdown rituals and ultimately giving 49:11 myself space to think and right it was it was a joy I gave myself some buffer over the last month but how do you 49:18 protect yourself in season from being reactionary and ultimately being a mile 49:24 wide but only one inch deep thanks guys all right well thanks Kyle Kyle has a 49:29 football podcast is this Kyle Shanahan is that I don't like Kyle Shannon has 49:35 the time for a football podcast he probably goes on a podcast like he's not spending six months a year writing just 49:40 taking like deep work time in the morning he probably does a lot of deep work but it's a lot of like film breakdown stuff I have I've dealt with a 49:47 non-trivial number of uh professional sports franchises they care about deep work but uh I will tell you the busiest 49:53 people I've met have been Prof Sports GMS really yeah those are because they 50:00 the GMS in particular have all the concerns of like the product on the court or the field but 50:06 also like uh management concerns Staffing concerns budget concerns you know it's those are crazy jobs I'm 50:13 saying Mike Rizzo I feel your pain and I'm still waiting for my invite to come teach deep work principles to to all 50:20 those uh the Hope Row to those young players all right Kyle let's get into this um so look I'm in the same place oh 50:26 man I love my Summers I love my summer schedule my summer schedule just ended you know my my my wonderful summer 50:32 schedule where I write a half day every day I only have any scheduled appointments or meetings on my calendars 50:38 Tuesday through Thursday afternoons and oh man those schedules are fantastic uh it's painful to go back you got to make 50:45 sure though that you have just as much of a plan for your busy Seasons as you do for your easy Seasons it's fun and 50:52 easy to make a plan for the easy Seasons because you have a lot of time and not a lot to do and like you could just I want to write all day I all my meetings only 50:59 on Tuesdays like everything's possible it's a pleasure to build those plans it's way more stressful in the busy 51:05 season because like your plans don't work like I can't do this and I can't write every morning and then and I have to do this and this and you see your 51:11 schedule fall apart and it can be really stressful but you got to stick with it and in particular what should you be 51:17 what what's probably missing from your Brew here is what we talked about in the Deep dive a weekly template like that's 51:24 probably what's going to help you here if you're already doing you know multiscale planning Etc right you're not running around just completely reactive 51:31 you you have capture systems you're doing multiscale planning your weekly templates are you're going to make uh your stand to gain back some autonomy 51:37 over your time all right okay we got to do this but here's the days we record the podcast I'm treating those differently than days we don't um I'm 51:44 consolidating all these meetings like one big thing we're doing on Thursdays I'm taking these two things off my plate 51:50 because they're destroying my schedule and they're getting in the way like this is where the weekly template is where you're able to exert autonomy I think 51:58 it's really important I think that aspect of this is really important because what happens is you can be 52:05 organized but also feel out of control and what I mean by that is you know we 52:10 talk about all the time on this show contrary to the uh the interpretation of 52:16 the anti-product crowd that that think that any interest in being organized is all about just being co-opted by late 52:23 stage capitalism coer of influences like we say no no no the be nonorganized to not have your work 52:30 captured in in uh context capture systems to be doing no planning on your time to be just sort of like stumbling 52:36 through your days that's what puts you at the mercy of other forces it's going to make you miserable you're going to work harder than you you you want to 52:42 work it's everything's going to be worse like you the the step from completely disorganized to organize is a big one 52:49 but it's not the full step this gets to Kyle's issue I think because you can be completely organized I know what's on my 52:55 plate I plan my time carefully I get the most out of my time I have shut down routines I don't let my work follow me 53:01 home like you be doing all the things and be really upset because you feel like your schedule's not yours you're scheduling your time really well but 53:08 mainly what you're doing is just juggling all the balls that people are chucking at you you're preventing them from falling but it's way too many balls 53:14 to be juggling that's where the weekly template this is where you can really gain some autonomy of your schedule you begin saying I'm not just going to say 53:21 my goal is to juggle every ball that's thrown at me it's going to say I only take two balls this day and this day is three and this day I'm not juggling at 53:26 all it's where you begin to get some autonomy back over your schedule it's where you step from being organized to also being somewhat in control over what 53:33 these organized days feel like so Kyle it's a pain after a light season to make 53:39 a busy season work because it's so much harder but it's worth doing and let the weekly template maybe be the main tool 53:44 that you're adding to your toolkit this this particular busy season and and I think that'll do uh I think that'll do 53:50 much better all right we got a case study here this where people ride in to talk about their experience putting the type 53:56 of things we talk about on this show into practice in their real lives uh if you have a case study to share you can 54:01 just email it directly to Jesse atal newport.com he's organizing those all right today's case study comes from 54:08 Colton Colton says I have been a devout Newport tonian since high school and I 54:14 followed your advice on time block planning autopilot schedules and deep work throughout College once I began my 54:19 service as a Peace Corp volunteer in Zambia however I encountered a lot of problems transitioning from my kushy 54:25 college life and into my first real job and the harsh living conditions of rural Zambia was brutal I have no electricity 54:32 running water toilets or stoves it took a year for me to figure out how to get things in this part of 54:38 the world surprisingly get things done in this part of the world surprisingly most of your advice about knowledge work 54:44 applies to my work as a Peace Corp volunteer each morning I read over my 54:49 Google Calendar and quarterly goal project list and use them to build a Time pled plan for the day I managed my 54:56 curring task with an autopilot schedule that blocks off specific times each morning to do my research and writing at 55:01 work for a remote cancer lab back in the US I handle my non-recurring task with a project list that I can pull from each 55:07 morning because I work on one task at a time without any distractions I can finish all of my work by 1 p.m. and 55:13 still accomplish a ton of projects in my Village like building a medical waste incinerator for my local clinic and 55:19 Publishing a few papers in medical journals well Colton I appreciate the case study and I appreciate your use of 55:25 the word newort coronian which I uh I really hope to spread let me highlight 55:31 something from this case study that I think is important I mentioned this in the call as well there is this sense out there 55:39 that to care about personal productivity again is somehow a negative or maybe 55:45 like a a necessary evil of certain like super high-powered like corporate High pain jobs but but for the most part it's 55:52 just internalized capitalism in its worst sort of form and it's something that those of us who are um more uh 55:58 socially conscious and self-aware we want to dirty ourselves with this belies that belief this is literally someone in 56:05 the Peace Corps in Zambia building medical incinerators and working on cancer research being organized makes 56:10 that possible being organized means he can uh with complete focus and presence 56:16 starting at 1 P.M every day just be working in that Village while also still making progress in the morning on the 56:22 other things it's making his ability to be effective even under really circumstances possible this is what I 56:29 like to see personal productivity skills deployed towards it allows me to 56:35 deploy the image of the ideal life that I have in mind he doesn't use the word here 56:41 optimize he doesn't use the word here maximize output he does not use the word here hustle he does not use the the word 56:48 here like production machine no he has a vision of what would be a sustainable 56:54 feeling meaningful vision for my life and and he realized if he cannot control the incoming streams of what needs to be 56:59 done and information and task and request in his life if he can't handle that if he has no control over his time he can't get to that Vision those 57:06 Visions don't have to be heartless those Visions don't have to be mechanistic it doesn't have to be one of Blake's Mills 57:13 rendered in flesh in an in in the personal uh individual it doesn't have to be Gordon gecko right it's more 57:21 neutral than that you control yourself you can control your life what you do with your life is up to you and most people actually want to do more 57:26 interesting things than just try to optimize or maximize output so Colton I love it it's a great case study we're 57:33 productive so that we can produce our ideal lives not the highest possible 57:38 production rate possible all right so we got a final segment coming up but first let's hear 57:44 from another sponsor I want to talk about our friends at notion you've heard me talk about notion before uh it combines your notes 57:52 your docs and your projects into one space that simple and beautifully designed what I like about notion I've 57:58 said this before is you can build these sort of custom really easily these basically like these custom information 58:04 storage and retrieval systems that fit exactly the type of work you're doing a big proponent of customized systems to 58:12 get you away from the hyperactive hive mind of we're just like attaching Word Documents To emails and rock and rolling 58:18 all day long systems allow structured collaboration structured encounters with 58:23 information this allows much more sustain stainable effective work and notion we I love the way they do it we 58:29 we uh we've worked before with like a really cool setup with our Ad Agency where we could see using a custom notion 58:35 setup um all of the advertisers and we could switch views of like where's all the times we've done reads for this ad 58:43 let's put in information about this particular read now let's zoom out and see all the different reads happening this week it's a you can build fantastic 58:49 things easily whether it's for a complicated business or just organizing your own stuff as an 58:54 individual what they've been doing more though and I want to emphasize this in this read is that they have been now 59:00 integrating artificial intelligence into the product itself just to make it even easier to use notion a notion AI helps 59:09 you work faster write better and think bigger doing tasks that normally take 59:14 you hours in just seconds right so we're talking about things like uh generative 59:20 AI style text creation like hey can you write a first draft can you summarize what I am saying here um you can 59:28 automate tedious task like okay great summarize these meeting notes that we can enter it over here in this 59:33 information um and it can help you find things right because it understands your information and it makes it easier for 59:39 you to find things uh notion is used by over half it surprised me half of 59:45 Fortune 500 companies right I didn't know that was true but now that I hear it I say of course makes work systems 59:50 easy um teams use notion send less email they cancel more meetings they say save 59:56 time searching for their work and reducing spending on uh having a bunch of different types of tools um all of 1:00:01 this helps keeps everyone on the same page so try notion for free when you go to notion.com 1:00:08 Cal do this all in lowercase letters notion.com slal to try the powerful easy to ous 1:00:15 notion AI today and when you use our link you will be supporting our show 1:00:20 that's notion.com slal you also want to talk about our friends at ladder l a d d e r look we 1:00:28 we've been saying fall as a time you get your act together you get organized you you fix the stuff that needs to be fixed 1:00:35 you get ready for the new year the new school year the new post-summer vacation year the one thing that you might be 1:00:41 procrastinating on if you're like a lot of people it's life insurance if there's people who depend on you you need life 1:00:46 insurance not just some life insurance but enough that would actually take care of them if uh the unthinkable actually 1:00:53 happened so why do most people not have enough life insurance who know they need it cuz they don't know how to do it 1:01:00 where do you go who do you talk to is it hard is it too expensive this is where ladder enters the scene ladder is 100% 1:01:08 digital you need no doctors no needles and no paperwork when you are applying for $3 million in coverage or less you 1:01:15 just answer a few questions about your health in an application you need just a few minutes and a phone or laptop to apply and then 1:01:22 their smart algorithms work in real time so you'll find out if you're instantly approved we're talking no hidden fees 1:01:27 you can cancel at any time get a full refund if you change your mind in the first 30 days uh these are policies that 1:01:34 are insured by insurers with long proven histories of play uh paying claims we're talking those that are rated a and A+ by 1:01:42 am best look insurance only gets more expensive as you age so the right time 1:01:49 to get more uh life insurance is right now this is also the right time for me 1:01:56 to have dropped my ad page on the ground but I picked it up see in the way 1:02:02 and I'm going to do a good ad Li here Jesse much in the way that I was able to pick up this page from the ground you 1:02:10 can pick up your need to get more life insurance for the people you love with 1:02:15 ladder so go to ladder life.com deay to see if you're instantly approved that's 1:02:21 l a DD ER life.com ladderlife 1:02:29 docomo our final segment all right this is our first podcast of September oh it makes me sort 1:02:36 of sad I mean I like the school year because my kids are in school but my 1:02:41 summer schedule is so nice oh man and Jesse I I've mentioned you I have like an administrative role I know you told 1:02:48 the audience too did I oh my God it's fine I'm Building Systems my weekly temp plate man I'm like Cal newpor the 1:02:55 Newport Tony and Vibes is is strong my friend my trellos are smoking because they're being used so much I'm on it but 1:03:03 man I missed the summer all right so it's first episode of September so we'll talk about the books I read in August 1:03:08 hey before we do though a listener was it Zach yeah sent us me and Jesse custom 1:03:14 hats for the show so I figured we'd do this final segment in the hats if you're uh listening setad of watching you can 1:03:19 check this on YouTube 1:03:26 there we go there we go looks good yeah looking good here all right so for those 1:03:32 who are listening we have on stylish vbl CCP trucker hats of course we know what 1:03:38 that means value based lifestyle Centric career planning that is the way that we hear the Deep questions podcast think 1:03:45 about career choices uh these hats are awesome yeah I mean I'm not a fashion 1:03:52 Guru but I think it I think these look pretty Sharp it does it kind of seems like we're 1:03:59 probably uh you know these hats are from our time spent running like a state Committee in the old Soviet Union just 1:04:06 looking at these abbreviations that this is probably some sort of like Russian abbreviation for like the state crop 1:04:12 distribution socialist republic you know advisory committee but that's cool there kind of 1:04:18 like a retroness to that all right so we're going to we're going to harness as vccp energy as we do the books I read in 1:04:25 a August 2024 all right this first one's a little weird Jesse I'm just going to preface this by saying I my wife read 1:04:31 we're on vacation she was reading it I we were in the woods somewhere I was like I'll read that it was uh Emily 1:04:37 Wild's Encyclopedia of fairies written by hea 1:04:42 faucet it's a fantasy book I guess maybe like a little bit of a romance book but not I don't really know these genres 1:04:48 very well um I actually like the first two3 in particular like the it's a 1:04:54 alternative timeline world I couldn't really tell when this took place I finally found some clues 1:04:59 that it must have been 20th century or equivalent because they mentioned movies at some point but it's kind of like a Timeless uh it's a professor it posits a 1:05:07 world where fairies exist and it follows a professor who is like who studies fairies like they this is just a subject 1:05:15 that people study and she goes to like this small uh town in a country that doesn't really exist up in Scandinavia 1:05:21 somewhere like in and um stuff ensues I actually kind of like the World building because I'm a professor of there being a 1:05:28 whole academic discipline that studies like these being and it's a little bit dark and a little bit whatever um I 1:05:34 thought it went a little bit look I'm not a big novel reader so take this with a grain of salt uh once it actually got 1:05:41 past like you know we we see hints of this we're kind of studying this once they were actually like we in a fairy 1:05:46 world I felt like it was just whatever anything goes and everything's magic and whatever right like and then that that 1:05:52 kind of lost me right that World building lost me but I thought it was I enjoyed it I don't read a lot of books 1:05:57 like this I didn't realize all these books always have like a romance core or two oh really yeah yeah um so she's her 1:06:06 fellow Professor who spoiler alert is part magic or something they you know U 1:06:12 I love fair I thought it was good though I thought it was good all right then I read Annie uh Annie Jacobson's book nuclear war man there's a book right 1:06:19 there I love when non-fiction writers do something different with form and format 1:06:25 and what Jacobson did and this is a compelling book to it's a hard to put down book she basically did a bunch of 1:06:31 research a non-fiction book I think Amazon I think Amazon chose it you know 1:06:37 they have their best of the best books of the year so far and you know slow productivity was chosen as the best 1:06:42 business and Leadership book of 2024 so far I think this was chosen as the best just overall non-fiction book of 2024 so 1:06:50 far what she did is a lot of research on uh what is the US's actual like nuclear 1:06:57 war plans and procedures and protocols like how does this work who makes the 1:07:02 decisions where are the various people what happens if this gets blown up where are the missiles and then the book just 1:07:07 walks through it takes place largely in like 12 minutes it walks through global 1:07:14 thermonuclear war breaking out from the point of view of like the American okay so this person we see this on the radar 1:07:19 and the president goes here and then these get blown then this happens and we fire these missiles and and and the the 1:07:25 whole world gets blown up in the end so it's like a really kind of scary book but she's really trying to nail the detail straight of like here's how this 1:07:31 would work here's the you pull out this Caper you would type in these things these people at this base underground 1:07:36 here would be involved in this and she works the whole thing out spoiler alert it does not go well for us in Washington 1:07:42 DC so we get hit by a thermonuclear Warhead early on in the book and where we are right now we're not going to do 1:07:48 well our skin would catch on fire so this would not be good for us uh there 1:07:55 was one I got a nitpick there's one nitpick I was like this doesn't seem well okay I 1:08:01 have two nitpicks two okay by the way my family did terribly in this 1:08:07 um so the the first two missiles hit Washington DC where me and my two 1:08:13 sisters live the second Missile hit the uh Diablo Canyon Nuclear 1:08:20 facility uh in central California coast my brother works that nuclear power plant so the first two missiles killed 1:08:27 my whole family uh so we we didn't do well we didn't do well in that book all right here's my two nitpicks one so it's 1:08:33 mainly very well researched but I can tell the parts where she you know glossed over um one when she went to the 1:08:40 the Boomer class the missile Subs so are missile Subs fired missiles at the end right um she so these would be like an 1:08:48 Ohio class probably uh missile sub I know a lot about Subs my brother was on Subs she talks about when the the order 1:08:54 comes in for firing the missiles that alarm Bells start wailing on the sub 1:09:00 that's missile launch time it's missile launch time there's they don't do alarm bells on Subs the whole point is that 1:09:06 the sub is supposed to be as quiet as possible they wear sneakers on these things just to try to make sure that like their foot steps make sound they're 1:09:12 not going to have a clax and bell sound uh to tell the submariners it's time to fire missiles they would because the 1:09:19 whole point is you fire these missiles and are supposed to go back under and not be detected so that was not true then the other thing I didn't understand 1:09:24 is the presid resid on Marine 2 right so it's on the um or Marine One the helicopter right and they're rushing 1:09:29 away from the White House to try to get to Mount Storm because they they know the the missiles coming for uh the White 1:09:36 House and he's there's a particular Secret Service team that's with them that's responsible for getting them there and they're they're doing the math 1:09:42 and be like we're not going to get I don't think we're going to get far enough away from the explosion for like 1:09:50 at least the electromagnetic pulse that's going to might take out this helicopter um so what do they do 1:09:55 like we're going to put a parachute on the president and one of the Secret Service members and we'll jump we'll parachute out over Maryland well here's 1:10:02 my nitpick why not just land a helicopter why not just like what what we'll do is we'll just land a helicopter 1:10:08 on a field and uh if it does disable us it's better that we landed the helicopter than we parachuted the 1:10:14 president out and if it doesn't we can take off again and keep going like why would you parachute out of the 1:10:20 helicopter because you are worried that why not just land a helicopter 1:10:26 so I didn't that that part but I read this book in one day so it's it's a I 1:10:32 have to borrow it yeah I'll Lo it to you it's a cool non-fiction experience um all right a less good experience oh oh 1:10:40 cry in estate I read I regret to inform you eruption by I'm putting big quotation 1:10:47 marks around this by Michael kryon and James Patterson Michael kryon has been 1:10:52 dead for like 20 years now they they're still miraculously discovering books he started and other people are finishing 1:10:58 so James Patterson uh ended this book this could have this would have been an awesome Michael kryon book in his prime 1:11:04 it's about a a a volcano uh on Hawaii is going to have this big explosion and like they're dealing with the volcano 1:11:11 science and supposedly kryon had started working like interview the interviewing volcanologists like he really was trying 1:11:17 to understand it but in the hands of James Patterson which means in the hands of the people that James Patterson has 1:11:22 anonymously write his books it was just terrible really just terrible the 1:11:27 science was incoherent the space was incoherent you couldn't understand what 1:11:32 was going on it didn't matter nothing made sense I didn't know who the characters were I didn't care it was uh 1:11:39 some of the most like wooden like old fashion like weirdly like paternalistic misogynistic characters it's like all 1:11:45 the women just love this guy for no real reason it was just a really poorly written book now I have to read it 1:11:51 because I'm a cryon completist and I I decided long ago that um his post uh post-death books postumus 1:11:59 books I would count those as trying to read every kryon book because I thought there would be like two they keep 1:12:05 finding these things they keep find I read the pirate book no one else read the pirate book 1:12:11 that he supposedly started writing like they're not anyways it was not a good book do you ever go on like Reddit threads about this I should I'm thinking 1:12:18 about I don't know if I mentioned this to you I'm thinking about putting on the wall as we renovate the maker lab portion of the HQ um putting first ition 1:12:25 criton on the wall yeah that's cool yeah it's like motivation all right so I had to get the taste of that out of my mouth so I picked up literally at a a grocery 1:12:33 store Book Rack in Upstate New York I grabbed the latest Lincoln Child uh 1:12:39 Thriller Diablo Mesa because they know what they're doing Lincoln and child together they write it's it's just good 1:12:45 thrillers right not necessarily Innovative but just good thrillers Diablo M was great it was like this is just what I wanted well constructed took 1:12:52 the bad taste of eruption out of my mouth um and then I finished by reading uh gwindel bounds' book not too late 1:13:00 this a book it's good for us Jesse it's about she got heavily into um Adventure 1:13:07 obstacle course racing starting in her mid-40s and is now like Podium places in 1:13:12 her age group like is really good at it and the book is about like this like 1:13:17 middle age is not is not too late to actually get like heavily involved in like a really involving potentially even 1:13:24 physical activity golf yeah not as rare as obstacle racing I 1:13:31 liked it though anyways I liked it because it's like written for me right she's like a couple years older than us when she started this she's in her 50s 1:13:37 now I was like yeah I should I should uh because you know partial like anyways I 1:13:43 I I thought it was good she's a good writer um and uh it was inspiring like yeah you 1:13:50 should yeah I had I have a good buddy who got really into that too um he's a 1:13:55 little older than us but younger than her got really into obstacle racing 1:14:00 right um because it's something you can kind of get into if you really train like they have age groups M um it's not 1:14:07 so professionalized too that it's like the genetic freaks are going to win it right like it's you have a chance and he built all the obstacles on his property 1:14:14 and had installed in his office the U the grip related hanging things on his ceiling so he could just practice he got 1:14:21 really good too but then had like a gnarly injury like I don't know what sent me the photos don't send me this uh 1:14:27 compound fracture like just uh gnarly and I think he's not he he never got back to it he fell off something and who 1:14:33 knows I'm reading a book about rowing right now so I'm I'm flirting with maybe 1:14:39 that's a good midlife move I just saw boys in the boat yeah George Clooney directed that oh he did yeah uh I'm 1:14:46 reading David halber stam's the amateurs about the Olympic hopeful American Scholar in the 84 1:14:53 Olympics um reminds me of my hon days as a Dartmouth 1:14:59 rower except for these guys are in better shaped than I am all right anyways uh that's all the time we have 1:15:06 for today thank you Zach for these awesome hats I'm going to I I might wear this a couple places you think it's too 1:15:12 declarative like people are going to be like well if it was smaller you might be more willing to 1:15:17 wear it more often but it was just declarative you're kind of putting in people's faces I think it's kind of what you say about the Russian you know it 1:15:24 does corn Farmers right because the the CCP are the final letters of the the 1:15:31 Russian name for the Soviet reunion Soviet Union yeah I still appreciate it so thank you Zach all right we'll be 1:15:37 back next week with another normal episode of this podcast Summer's over we're back in it um we will see you then 1:15:43 and until then as always stay deep hey if you like today's discussion of the weekly template check out episode 299 1:15:50 which is about our LoveHate relationship with personal productivity I think it's a great addition to this conversation 1:15:57 check it out so eight books and around 3 million sales later I wanted to look back at what I've observed up close over 1:16:05 this period about our culture's changing relationship with the topic of personal productivity