How to Get Things Done, Stay Focused, and Be More Productive

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Let me guess.

You can't focus.

Your to-do list, endless.

You don't even know where to begin.

You feel unmotivated, burnt out, unproductive, tired.

Lately, I've noticed everywhere I go, everyone is bringing up this subject of how I'm so tired.

I'm so stressed out.

I don't even know how it got this bad.

And then you feel guilty, right?

You feel guilty that, oh my gosh, I'm wasting time.

I didn't get enough done.

I need to do this thing.

I need to do that thing.

Well, here's what you need to know.

You can do something about it because today I'm handing you the answer to the overwhelm you feel.

And his name is Dr.

Cal Newport.

He is a Georgetown University professor, a multiple New York Times best-selling author, and the leading expert on how to take back your time.

Now, he doesn't just talk about focus.

The man lives it.

Cal has spent years rethinking time management from the inside out, how to work better, how to live better, how to live a more meaningful life.

And today, he's here for you.

And what he has to share about productivity, not what you're thinking.

This is not a conversation about hustling or doing more or doing the best or being perfect.

Cal is here to show you exactly what's been stealing your time, hijacking your attention, causing you to procrastinate and robbing you of the peace you deserve.

And more importantly, he's going to show you how to fix it.

So, class is in session and right on schedule.

Cal Newport is here to help.

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Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.

I am so excited that you're here.

I mean, it's always such an honor to spend time with you and to be together, but today,

today, you and I are getting to meet and learn from a person whose work I have admired for eight years.

It has taken me a year and a half to get him to come to Boston and spend time with us because he is in such demand and he's also in control of his time.

So, he has a very clear yes

and a maybe and a no.

And we got a yes today.

And that means if you're a new listener, I also want to say yes.

I'm glad you're here.

And I wanted to take a moment and welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family.

And there's nobody better to talk about time and time management and productivity than the person you're about to meet, Dr.

Cal Newport.

Now, Dr.

Cal Newport is the leading voice on focus, productivity, and the science of doing meaningful work in a distracted world.

For 14 years, he has been a fixture at Georgetown University, where he is the director of the Computer Science Ethics and Society degree program.

He's a research professor at the Center for Digital Ethics, which he co-founded, and the provost's distinguished associate professor with tenure in the Department of Computer Science.

His work is at the intersection of time, technology, productivity, and the quest for a meaningful life, and it has attracted global attention.

His 65 peer-reviewed articles have been cited over 4,500 times.

I even cited his work in my first book, The Five Second Roll.

Cal himself has authored eight best-selling books, including his latest work, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

And get this, he signed his first book deal with Random House when he was a 21-year-old undergrad at Dartmouth College.

When Cal talks, people listen and and they leave feeling better and more empowered.

Cal hopped on a plane and he's made the trip to Boston for one reason.

He came here for you.

So please help me welcome Professor Cal Newport to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Cal Newport, I have been waiting for this moment to meet you for a very, very long time.

I'm thrilled you made the trip to Boston.

Thank you for being here.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me.

I've been looking forward to this as well.

I would love to have you speak directly to the person who's listening and tell them what might change about the way that they live their life or that life feels if they take everything to heart that you're about to teach us today and they put it to use in their life.

I don't like the feeling of busyness, right?

What drives me is I really don't like that.

little bit of stress in the pit of your stomach.

There's just too many things on my plate for me to get my arms around at work, at home, you know, with my family, with my friends, and that sense of I'm not going to quite get this all done, but what else can I do?

I hate that feeling of busyness.

I think that level of stress eats away at me.

I want to get rid of that.

I want you to feel like you're doing stuff that you're proud of, you're producing work that matters, you're spending time with people that you care about, and you're not anxiously overloaded.

That's where I'm trying to get people.

Cal, I don't know that I've ever heard anybody talk about busyness that way.

Here's what I would love to have you help me understand.

It seems like everybody that I'm talking to in my life is having trouble focusing, has way too much work, is constantly overloaded, stressed out, and the sense of busyness, which I would say for me, the second you use that word,

that is that sort of ticking clock in the back of my mind that time is running out.

And it's also this to-do list that I feel like I'm constantly never able to get to.

The emails I can't, this kind of constant hum that's going on that I'm just not getting to it.

There's something that I'm forgetting.

I don't have enough time.

Why is this particular time so challenging for so many of us, Cal?

Well, first of all, we have a lot more inputs than ever before.

Yep.

Right.

Digital technology has never made it easier from a friction perspective to ask someone to do something or to agree to do something.

Emails, text messages, Slack notifications.

It's very easy to ask people to do things.

That friction is low.

We're also more distracted than before.

So those same digital tools that can deliver us requests for work are also distracting us, capturing our attention.

And it's not like it used to be 30 years ago, where I would sit down at the TV and I'm going to watch TV for the next four hours.

It's these little snippets of distraction.

A little social media, a little check-in on a website right here, jumping over to this game right here.

So our attention is fragmented.

This makes it harder to do things.

So we're saying yes to more things.

And then our ability to actually complete things slows down because we're distracted all the time.

And it's all digital technology that's sort of an undercurrent to all these issues.

We have to reclaim our brains, right?

We don't realize the degree to which looking down at these devices all the time, allowing companies that make a fortune out of figuring out how to get us to look at that screen to dominate our cognitive landscape.

We don't realize the degree to that puts us out of mental shape.

It would be like we're all professional athletes and we're smoking and drinking milkshakes.

We're like, well, we like the cigarettes.

The milkshakes taste good.

We're not realizing, well, this is making us perform much worse when we're out on the playing field.

The same thing's happening with our brains.

You're going to look at this stuff enough when it comes time to think hard, to come up with a new idea, to be creative, to push through that project to the finish line.

We struggle.

And I don't think we realize the degree to which we're just out of cognitive shape.

Well, I also think this has a huge implication too for anybody that's caring for little kids or caring for aging parents.

And so you're getting it both at work and you're getting it at home too, because you're a caregiver.

That that that being out of cognitive shape is also the reason why you have no time for yourself and you're exhausted and never ends.

I mean, are those connected?

It really is.

It also can give you a background current of anxiety.

So if what you're distracting yourself with on your phone is going to be charged content, maybe coming through social media.

What does charge content mean?

It's made to make you emotional.

Right.

So you have an algorithm that is selecting things for you to see that's going to get a reaction.

Because if you have a reaction, you're going to scroll to the next thing.

Well, what's what's the biggest reactions we can make?

You're going to be really upset.

You're going to be really angry.

You're going to be really surprised or sad.

That's gold if you're a company trying to get you to look at a phone, but it's terrible.

if it's your mind and you're trying to be present with your kids and it's bath time.

And instead of being able to just be there and be with your kids, you're feeling anxious and you're feeling distracted and you don't feel good at all.

That's the state we put ourselves in.

And we just think of it now as this is what it feels like to be alive in the modern world.

I don't think we realize that a lot of this is actually a self-imposed sense of negative feeling.

Wow.

I'm sorry.

I just wanted that to sink in for a minute because

I think that for most of us, that's right.

You don't even realize that there's a different way to live your life.

We have been so sucked into this sense of busyness and you just called it charge content, which I've never heard anybody say before, but it makes sense, of constantly needing stimulation, which is subsequently exhausting your mind and your body and your spirit.

What does slow productivity mean?

Because when I hear the word slow productivity, I have an aversion because I'm so used to busyness

that I feel scared to slow down.

Is that normal?

I think that reaction is why I wrote the book.

Say more.

The idea that putting the word slow in front of productivity makes people nervous

told me that we have a problem.

And where this book actually came out of, there's two things that are happening, one general, one personal.

So the general thing is the pandemic hit.

I have a podcast audience, a book reader audience, and they started to get really upset about the word productivity.

And they're really pushing.

They're like, we're tired about this word.

We're exhausted.

We don't like this word.

And I began to think, what's going on here?

Like, what do people think productivity means?

And why is that broken?

Then I had this personal thread going on, which is, you know, I have three boys and they were just entering this age, that elementary age, where a switch flipped, where they needed basically every dad hour possible.

I guess it's a son and dad sort of thing.

So then I was thinking in my own life, how do I keep doing the things I need to do to be sort of successful in my job, but have way more time?

for them because they're in this phase now.

It's no longer toddler survival phase.

It's, we need to be around dad.

We need dad time.

So I was thinking about it as well.

So, so both these things came together and I was figuring out, okay, what's going on with productivity?

Why is it stressing us out?

Is it possible to be productive without being stressed out?

Is it possibly productive without being super busy?

And I went down this rabbit hole of where did our current notion of productivity come from?

What is our current notion of productivity?

And is there one that could be slower?

And this was where the book came out of.

Cal, what does everybody get wrong about productivity?

This was the problem.

We had a definition, and by we, I mean, you know, economist.

We'd had a definition for hundreds of years, which was it's a ratio.

It's this much stuff went into the system, this much stuff came out.

And if you can get more stuff out, you're more productive.

It originated talking about agriculture.

We have this many acres of land.

If we can get this many bushels of wheat versus that many bushels, then we have a more productive way of tending our crops.

Then we got factories.

It made a lot of sense.

We have this many workers in the factories.

How many model Ts are we producing by, you know, per day?

And when we switched the way we built model Ts, the number went up.

That's more productive.

That was the definition of productivity that we had established for a couple hundred years.

Then office work became big, right?

So this idea, I call it knowledge work in the book.

Knowledge work is a term from the 1950s because that's when people working with their brains became a major thing in a way that it wasn't before.

Those definitions of productivity didn't work anymore because there were no model T's to point to.

If I'm working at an office job, I can't say at the end of the day, here's a pile of widgets.

See, I produced 10 widgets today.

Aren't I being productive?

That person only produced seven.

Instead, in office jobs, people were working on many different things.

What they were working on was somewhat unclear because it would shift from day to day.

The person next to me would be working on different things than I'm working on.

It all became way more vague and hazy.

So we no longer had a good way of actually with numbers saying, here's how productive you are, here's how productive that person is.

And so my argument is what we did instead is we fell back on this rough rule that I call pseudo-productivity, which just said, the more I see you doing, the better.

So visible activity will become my proxy for your being useful.

The busier you are, the more productive I'm going to say you are.

So we fell into this trap I call pseudo-productivity.

And that's where we got our busyness epidemic.

And I think that's what people got fed up with by the time we got to the pandemic.

It makes so much sense.

As you were describing that, especially when you went from agriculture to model tea to factory work, I personally, and I'm sure as you were listening to Cal talk,

I started to feel like I was getting squeezed.

Yeah.

And I think we've all had those jobs in those days where you just feel this relentless sense that your work or school or your obligations are just squeezing every single ounce out of you.

And it's just never enough.

And we even did come up with things to measure, whether it's quotas or it's the number of hamburgers you can crank out as a short order cook or the number of patients that you can see in an hour in a healthcare system or the efficiencies that a fire department, like we're always measuring something.

And, you know, I also think a lot, Cal, because you mentioned the pandemic and we both do a ton of speaking on the corporate circuit, that I started to notice the uptick in meetings and the number of meetings that people were obligated to attend when everybody was at home.

And I feel as though coming out of that situation and into more hybrid work for a lot of people, we've never adjusted work back.

from reactive meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting

to what's actually important and how do we carve out time for people to get things done.

What is productivity?

How do you define it?

How do you think about it, Cal?

Producing stuff that's valuable.

Ultimately, whatever your business is, your organization, there's something that you produce that brings value to your clients, to your customers, or whatever it is.

And we take our eye off of that because it's not actually as easy to measure as we would hope, especially when it's work where we're using our brain.

It's hard to measure.

You produced 17 units of value this week and last week it was 12 units of value.

So we fall back on busyness.

But the thing that actually matters is results.

And in like most jobs, you can point to, oh, this is the thing that matters, right?

Like if you're a professor like I am, you know, you want to teach your class as well and you want to produce research that makes an impact on the world in your particular field.

And yet so much of what we do is unrelated to that or gets in the way of that.

It's endless meetings and emails and jumping off and on these type of calls and handing in forms or this or that.

And the same is for almost every job.

Like, okay, I'm running marketing for a company.

What really matters?

Marketing campaigns that move the needle.

That's what matters.

Not how many emails you answer, not how many meetings you jumped in and out of.

It's like, did we get a campaign that actually moved the needle?

You can do this for almost any job.

There's the things that produce value and then there's busyness, but the busyness is what we judge people by in the moment because we had this rough rule, the pseudo-productivity rule that emerged in the 50s and 60s.

So what I think has happened is this pseudo-productivity culture in work has made its way into our personal life.

Whether you have one of these jobs or not, it gets into our general culture.

More is better than less.

Busy is good.

Non-busy is a problem.

Once that gets into our culture, then other parts of your life, you pick that up.

It's why I think people in their personal life are taking on more things and are busier than they would have been 20 years ago or 30 years ago, That our personal lives, cultures are often downstreams from our work lives and the culture that dominates there.

So I think we're pseudo-productive in our lives outside of work as well, just because it's in the air.

Well, I also feel like there's a lot of make wrong that people do.

Like when you look at yourself and the way that you're spending your time on the weekends, or let's say that you're going through a chapter, you've lost a job.

So you're looking for what the next thing is, or you've been taking care of kids.

And now you want to think about, okay, well, what's next?

I'm an empty nester.

What's next?

I've done that part of my life and job and purpose that I see a lot of people making themselves wrong because they're, quote, not busy, because they're quote not up to something.

And so what are some of the things that you see in terms of how people beat themselves up with this pseudo-productivity in their personal life?

Well, we think more, it makes us better, or more is more value, or if we're not doing more, that we're missing out on opportunities.

Even though I think the opposite is true, I tell a lot of these stories in the book that often the people who are her happiest or most fulfilled, what's it about?

One or two things they do really well.

Like one or two things they really care about.

When you think about people historically, for example, who you really admire, they're often neglecting in some sense, by our modern standards, whole aspects of their life because they think this thing is really important and I get a lot of value out of it.

This mindset of do less, but do better

and know why.

So I'm not doing as many things, but the things I'm doing, I do well.

And I have a real connection to it.

Like it matters to me that I'm doing it.

That's the recipe for fulfillment.

And busyness just gets in the way of that.

But I think we think to ourselves, if I'm not being busy, I'm missing out on opportunities.

I'm not living up to my potential.

And I'm somehow loafing.

I'm somehow being lazy.

But again, the most impressive people in terms of we admire their lives, not just accomplishments.

They don't do that many things, but they really care about the things they do.

Well, what I love about slow productivity is that you have simplified it and you've already given us a nod to the three principles that make up slow productivity.

And the first one, because I really want you to break these down, is do fewer things.

What does that mean?

Well, the key word that's missing from that that makes it less stressful to people is do fewer things at once.

So I'm really wary of doing too many things at the same time.

And my argument is, here's what happens.

When you agree to do something, it brings with it administrative overhead, right?

Emails that you have to answer, meetings you have to do, conversations you have to have, right?

That's just natural.

I'm working on something.

I got to collaborate with people on this work.

What happens as you say yes to more things?

Well, they each bring with them their own administrative overhead.

Now, your time is limited per day, right?

That's fixed.

So more and more of your day will now get spent on that administrative overhead, the meetings and the emails and the conversations, which leaves less time to actually do the work.

And what paradoxically begins to happen is you get way slower.

So you think if I say yes to a lot more things, I'll get a lot more things done and that'll make me more productive.

But what really happens is, as you say yes to too many things, your day gets increasingly jammed up talking about those things.

And the speed at which you actually finish things plummets.

So if you work on fewer things at the same time, you're less stressed, more of your day is spent doing real work.

But the overall pace at which you're accomplishing things, that actually goes up.

So I make this argument to the businesses that say, wait a second, do fewer things.

We're going to run out of money.

We're going to lose our competitive edge.

I say, no, no, no, no.

Zoom out and measure how many things are you finishing per year if you're working on fewer things at once.

It's going to skyrocket.

Because your day is actually going to allow you to make progress on things.

And over time, you're going to get through things much faster.

So I think doing fewer things at once is critical.

You know, it goes against that saying that everybody says, if you want something done, ask a busy person.

And how does this translate to your personal life?

Because I think, you know, when you hear that, you're like, that sounds great, Cal.

And I got, I like, who's going to take care of mom?

Who's going to do this?

So how do you, how do you translate that to your personal life?

Because I can see that for business, like you can't be in 11 businesses at once.

Do you actually know the two or three most important things that need to get done this week, this month, this year to be successful in business?

And I made massive mistakes in the very beginning of just saying yes to everything out of survival.

Well, I have this phrase on my podcast.

It's called facing the productivity dragon because I get Q ⁇ A.

So people call in and they often have this issue.

They're like, look, I have this going on and this, I need to do this.

And I'm trying to do this.

And I'm training for the marathon.

And I'm taking care of my parent.

And I'm also trying to learn how to shoot archery.

And what you have these, these big long lists of things.

And facing the productivity dragon is actually listing out, here's all the things I want to do and how much time this is going to take.

And then realizing I can't do all these things.

We call it facing the dragon.

This is very scary for people.

You don't want to confront the reality that maybe the things you really want to do aren't all going to fit.

And then the response after you face a productivity dragon is like a reality check.

It's like, well, what time do I have?

And there's phases of life where it's not what you would want.

You know, there's a phase of life when you have young kids, for example, where I can't also do this and that.

I can't train for this.

I can't get my cinema club up with my friends.

Like, that's not going to happen now.

There's another season of life where maybe that will, or I'm taking care of a parent who's aging.

This is a huge time.

Let me face this.

This is a major thing I'm doing.

And this is eating up a huge amount of time.

And when you face the productivity drag and you reality check, then you can make better decisions about the time you do have.

And you say, okay, these three things were too ambitious.

Their time demands were too static.

I'm not going to be able to fit this in.

But I'm also really stressed out.

So why don't I replace this with this other thing that is more flexible and it's going to help me recharge?

Like maybe what I need to do is get outside in nature more.

And that's just going to be my thing.

Or I want to just be able to read and get through a book a week, you know, read one novel a week.

And I want to spend, you know, two evenings a week if I can at the coffee shop reading.

One novel a week, Cal.

How fast do you read?

For crying out loud.

That sounds a little ambitious, Cal.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Like you're talking to we mere mortals here, Cal Newcourt.

Well, I want to give an example because one thing that came to mind is that when Chris and I

were young parents, it had always been his dream to get an MBA.

And, you know, when you think about this principle, do fewer things at the same time.

Yeah.

I think that there are a ton of things that

we all have in the back of our mind that we hang over our heads and say, you're not getting to it.

One for me is learning Spanish.

So this is something I've been talking about for decades.

Okay.

It's always there.

Another one, learning guitar.

Everybody in my family plays.

I do not.

I always like have this hanging over my head.

There are projects around the house.

I don't even want to say the word picture wall because everybody here will know what I'm talking about because I've been talking about it.

And it is very sobering to.

write all this stuff down on a piece of paper and go, come on now.

What is this busyness that I'm torturing myself with That I just, it's just not important right now.

Based on the time that I have, I would rather be hiking than sitting down and trying to learn guitar right now.

It just is what it is.

And I need to face the dragon.

With Chris, he really wanted to get his MBA and he got into a two-year program.

And we had two kids that were under the age of five.

We were both working.

And

what he ended up doing, which I think is an important thing for people to hear, is he basically said, this actually does matter, but I can't go full time.

He went one class a semester.

It took him seven years, but he got it done.

And so is that an example of like how you can use this principle to face the productivity dragon and basically say, not now, but if this is going to happen now, maybe I've got to expand how much time I have to give to it and be honest with myself.

I think it's a great example.

And I should say say I was laughing because we have our box from Crate and Barrel of our picture wall frames.

It's been in our basement for a decade.

We bought them.

We knew we were going to hang them.

I think everybody who has kids feels this way.

Like, I need to get the photos up on the wall.

I think we even ordered the photos at one point, but

now they're all out of date.

Our kids are much older.

Yeah, that's hilarious.

But I think that's a perfect example.

Yeah.

And I tell a bunch of stories because I found this really important.

I tell a bunch of stories, you know, in the more recent book about the pace at which people who did famous things actually did those things.

Oh, I want to hear that as well.

So you look at someone like Isaac Newton, like a big example, right?

Like, oh, God, he wrote this book that invented calculus and figured out gravity.

He worked on that thing off and on for decades.

Now, we don't know how long it took him.

We just know like, oh, he did this thing that was really impressive, right?

Or Jane Austen, you know, she sort of was working on these books in the background, but it wasn't until later in life, basically she got towards her young 40s, that she sort of finally finished these books.

We don't know how long it took her, so she wrote these great books, right?

This, I think, is a helpful thing to keep in mind is doing things slowly doesn't matter in the long run.

In the end, you say, oh, Chris has an MBA.

That's great.

And it opened up these interesting opportunities.

Or Mel learned to play guitar.

And maybe it's 10 years from now that you actually do it.

The idea that it all has to get done done right now, I think often traps us.

So doing fewer things, taking your time with things, it adds up over time for sure.

It's a perfect example, though, I think.

It's like, I really want to do this, but I can't do a full-time program right now.

Great.

I'll take my time.

And I love the example that you gave that, all right, I'm just in the chapter of my life where I'm raising young kids, or all right, I'm in the chapter of my life where the amount of time I have with my parents is limited.

And I really value that more than these other things

that I thought were important.

Can you speak to the person who has trouble saying no?

Like they feel so guilty saying no.

What is your advice to somebody who needs to start saying no, but just has trouble doing it?

You're probably saying no more than you think.

Okay.

Right.

It's not that the work on your plate right now is exactly all the things people have asked you to do.

And now if you start saying no, that this is the first time you've ever done it.

You're implicitly turning things down all the time.

You're probably just waiting till you're stressed before you start pushing back.

So this is not about going from someone who never says no to someone who does.

It's about saying no a little bit more often.

So I try to lower the stakes, right?

You're already controlling your workload.

And then two, to recognize other people don't care about you and your workload as much as you think.

I think we project again when someone's asking us what to do, that they have a control room where everyone has all these notes on you and everything you've said yes and no to and that a red siren is going to go off when you say no.

And they're going to be like, why is this person saying no?

They don't care that much about you in that sense, right?

They're just, hey, can you do this?

And you say no, like, oh, great.

I'll ask someone else, right?

Like, it's just something on their mind.

So I try to lower the stakes, right?

It matters more to you.

You're probably getting more thrown by saying no than the other person, but you absolutely have to.

You have to control your workload.

There's also the Matt Damon rule, which is similar.

His rule was always, you have to project yourself to the day before.

the thing you just agreed to is about to happen.

So if you're the night before, are you going to be psyched or are you going to say, oh my God, I have to fly to Baltimore now or do whatever?

So, because it's exciting in the moment to say yes to something that sounds fun because you're just thinking about the fun part.

But how are you going to feel the night before when you're having to pack and go to the airport and be away from your kids?

And if you're not going to be excited, then say no right now.

I love that.

In fact, Cal, I can think of a million things that I've said yes to.

Where the night before I'm thinking, why

did I say yes to this?

It either seemed like a good idea, Cal, at the time, or worse, I was so chickened to say no.

And now I'm really regretting it.

So I freaking love it because it does work.

And since we're talking about time, I can't help but think this is the perfect time to hit pause and give our amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words.

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Welcome back.

It's your buddy Mel Robbins.

Today, you and I are getting to learn from Professor Cal Newport.

He's a multiple New York Times best-selling author, and he is one of the world's leading experts on slow productivity, deep work, and taking control of your time.

So, Cal, I want to read to you from your book, Slow Productivity.

This is on page 59, and it's in the section where you're really unpacking this concept of do fewer things.

The advantage of doing fewer things, however, is that more than just increasing the raw number of hours dedicated to useful activity, the quality of these hours also increases.

When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility.

Maybe you're able to identify a clever new business strategy, devise an elegant algorithm, or come up with a bold advertising campaign that would have eluded you in a more fragmented state of attention.

There are boring physiological and neurological explanations for this effect involving the mind-constricting impacts of cortisol when your schedule becomes unrealistically full or the time required to excite rich semantic connections among your brain's neurons.

But we don't need science to convince us of something that we've all experienced directly.

Our brains work better when we're not rushing.

What I got from this section of the book, I could feel my brain exhale, is that in addition to that sense that I think we all feel that we're being squeezed to death to produce as much as we can,

that we're also missing out.

on what's possible when we slow down and give our mind, body, and spirit its best chance

to

do our best work, whether that's the video you're creating for a YouTube channel, or it's simply being able to be present with your parents when you're spending that hour with them or present with your kids when you're spending a little bit of time with them instead of jamming in 15 phone calls.

And, you know, I had something happen that was so kind of sad.

I had a woman come up to me and say, oh, you know, hi, I, I, I love your podcast.

And my husband and I were away for the weekend and I, and I started chatting with her.

And she said, oh, yeah, well, I'm here with my kids.

And she turned to me and said, you know, it's really important that I, I'm away because, you know, I work like crazy and I, I, I've built this big business and I'm constantly online and I'm never present with them.

unless I'm on vacation.

And she said it in a way that was was almost like bragging about the busyness.

And I do think that there is this sort of crown that we're putting on our heads.

I'm busier than you are.

I'm doing all these things.

It just made me feel so sad

that she could actually say that, that I'm only present with my kids when I'm on vacation because that's the only time I'm not working.

What a sad thing.

I think this is an angle that's worth putting in there, is that there is a bit of a psychological safety in saying, I can be busier than anyone else.

I'm not going to fail at that.

But if it's instead, I'm going to try to produce a strategy that's going to put dollars on the board, my marketing, measure this campaign.

This is going to move.

This book is going to sell this many copies.

You can fail at that.

And so we're less comfortable with, I'm just focusing, trying to get this done.

You know, where you see this a lot is grad students, right?

So I'm an academic.

And

when I was at the doctoral program, you know, here in Boston, MIT, just I have a lot of memories of being back here.

It's very scary for a lot of students who arrive at something like a doctoral program because you have a lot of time, you have a lot of flexibility, and the, the goal is very clear, produce research, write papers.

And that's really scary because it's loose and it could take you six months of thinking to produce it.

And there's an effect that hits a lot of grad students where they inject a lot of busyness into their life so that they don't feel guilty.

Because it's too scary.

It's too overwhelming, this idea of I'm just going to sit and think and hopefully I produce a good paper six months from now.

And you see it all the time that you can point out these are the students who are suffering from this.

They take on all sorts of obligations.

They get really frantic.

They never make it through the program.

But they do it because it was too scary psychologically to say, I just have to eventually produce something good.

Well, you know, I think this is a direct application to people's personal lives, because if you've ever been in a period of your life where you're stuck.

Whether it's trying to figure out what your career should be in your 20s or 30s, figuring out relationships or whatever it may be.

You're, you know, in your 50s like me, and you're thinking about reinventing yourself and you don't know what the next move is, I see the same thing happening.

People fill their days with meaningless stuff to stay busy because contemplating the deeper questions of what should I do next and really leaning into that and reading books about it and watching videos about it or going to therapy is scary.

And so you can waste years of your life piddling around doing a lot of meaningless stuff because you were scared to slow down, which is what you're teaching us, this concept of slow productivity, which isn't how we're wired today.

And, you know, I want to keep going with the three principles.

The second principle is work at a natural pace.

What does that mean?

Well, this goes back to slowing down how long you spend on things and being okay with it.

Like we, we set the standard where we're going to, we write ourselves a fairy tale.

Okay.

Or here's these things we want to do.

I want to get my MBA.

I want to renovate the house.

I want to learn this programming language so I can get ahead at work.

We write a fairy tale about, wouldn't it be great if I got all of these things done in six months?

And then we begin to fall in love with the ending of that tale.

Man, I would be in such a good place six months from now.

Wouldn't that be so great?

Great.

This is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to do all these things right now.

And it's impossible because these things take a lot of time and we stress ourselves out and we fall apart trying to do it.

So working at a natural pace is don't write a fairy tale okay take the time things need and maybe do one thing at a time and know that if it takes you this many years to do the mba and you don't get to the house until two years from now and that you'll you'll later maybe you'll pick up this programming language you're going to wait till next summer when things are quieter and then you can actually take time to take a course all of it will get done but you don't have to do it at the fastest possible pace The other thing that work at a natural pace means is in the context of even like a given day, you don't have to be all out all day.

Okay, well, let's talk about this because I feel that

there's a lot of us that I think because of pseudo-productivity and this obsession with busyness and the fact that we're very used to feeling this overwhelm and this stress and this constant buzzing, that

I have, for example, Cal, the most unrealistic expectation about what I could get done in 10 minutes.

And

I'm seeing this expression on your face that i've seen on my husband chris's face so i would imagine maybe your wife is a little bit more like me where you're in the car waiting and she's still running around the house trying to get some things done and make a phone call and then like she can squeeze 25 things into about nine minutes yeah and it takes me 90 minutes

yes but you know that i know that but i still wake up every day and it's like i impose this insanity on myself that i can get all this stuff done in a matter of 11 minutes when I know that it's going to take me 23 minutes to even drive to the place and I should have been in the car 17 minutes ago.

Oh, yeah.

So how is this a function of this pseudo-productivity?

Oh, yeah.

We don't write to-do lists.

We write wish lists.

Say that again.

So we think we're making a to-do list for the day, but it's a wish list.

It's, wouldn't it be great if we got all of these things done today?

And you fall in love with that story.

You're like, man, if I got all of these errands done and all these calls, this would be great.

And you feel so good about imagining that list being done.

You don't realize that you just put three days worth of work onto your plan for the day.

It's why I tell people to actually make a blocked plan for their day.

Okay, hold on.

Can we just unpack the wish list thing?

Yeah.

I feel very called out right now.

I

love making to-do lists, but I do think they are wishless.

And part of the thing is, is that when I write them all down, I write them down and I feel so satisfied because now I don't have anxiety of having to hold it in my brain.

And there is this weird sense, Cal, that simply because I wrote it down, somehow it's going to magically get done.

Is this like how everybody feels when they make a long to-do list?

Or wish list, I should call it now?

It feels good.

Yes.

But it's not your fault that it's unrealistic.

It's the human brain is not good at these time predictions.

Okay.

Estimating how long it takes to.

answer four emails is not something our brain evolved to do well.

So we're really bad at estimating time.

So our brain just says, hey, it would be great if we did all these things.

It's not our fault.

I mean, there's nothing in our history as a species that made us good at fine-tuned time estimations of these really abstract things we do in the modern world.

So we're really bad at it.

And that's why I say, make a plan with your actual time.

What am I doing in this next block of time?

Like, is this deep work or is this not deep work?

Okay.

And if it's not deep work, then great.

Let's, let's answer a bunch of emails, get a bunch of errands done.

In fact, let's batch that together.

If we're going to be bouncing all around, let's bounce all around.

Let's consolidate that.

If it's deep work, though, my rules are simple uh no distractions at all so once i've labeled this block of time and i'll be clear here's how long this block of time goes i block out my day so this is going to be 90 minutes it's going to be one hour two hours whatever the block is there will be no distractions during that time which means i don't want my attention to shift to anything other than the thing i'm working on right now so no email no phone no jumping on

your you do you shut your laptop or if i'm working on my laptop i'm not doing anything else on it.

Okay.

You can trust yourself for that because I think a lot of us will say, okay, I'm about to do some work here.

And then you flip it over and you're like, oh, maybe I just check the messages, see if anything came in.

You get used to it.

It's a training.

What do you mean you get used to it?

You can actually practice this.

How the hell am I going to practice this?

I've done this with people before.

We call it interval training.

And this is true.

This really is.

I thought I was doing this for my muscles and my stomach muscles and my biceps, Cal.

You're saying I got to do interval training for my brain?

That's how bad it's gotten?

You'll get better results than you you probably will doing interval training for your muscles, right?

Because like our mind is very valuable.

And I actually do this with people.

I've done this with undergraduates before

who have been completely distraction riddled.

And by the end of a semester, I can get them locked in for 90 minutes at a time.

Cal, help me out here.

Here's all it is.

Okay, we start with, let's say, 20-minute interval.

You're going to focus on this cognitive.

demanding task, studying or writing or reading a book or whatever.

Paying your bills.

Yeah.

20 minutes.

It's got to be something that requires focus.

And you're going to set a timer.

And if you wander off and do something else, if you glance at that phone or you go to an internet tab or what have you, you got to stop that timer and start it over.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, most people can do that because you have this consequence.

It's kind of embarrassing.

You're like, I can do 20 minutes.

Okay.

I know I really want to check my phone, but 20 minutes I can do.

Okay.

Right.

So you practice that until it's no longer so difficult.

Not your mind isn't rebelling.

All right.

Can I ask you a question?

Yeah.

How long, like how many days in a row does it take for somebody to start to build this muscle?

Two weeks.

Two weeks.

That's what I've why two weeks.

That's just what I've noticed empirically.

Yeah.

Two weeks, you're usually pretty comfortable.

And then you add 10 minutes.

So then it becomes 30.

It becomes 30.

And you do that for another two weeks.

Yeah.

And then it becomes 40.

Yeah.

And is there a certain amount of time that based on your research is kind of the maximum amount of time you should work in in a time block?

Like I realize you got a big muscle in terms of your brain, but I got like meat flabs up here waving in the wind.

And so mine's not that strong.

Like, but is there like a limit to how much you would recommend somebody do these time blocks for deeper work?

90 minutes would be the goal.

90 minutes is the goal.

That's where I had people aiming.

If you can do 90 minutes and you're pretty comfortable reading a book or writing or working on a business strategy for 90 minutes, you're pretty comfortable not.

going to distraction.

That's very good.

Wow.

And then take a break.

Well, that's true, because if you could get 90 minutes of focus work done every day, that's probably more that you do in eight hours being distracted.

Is there a particular time of day where it's easier to focus?

Most people, it's morning.

There are people who claim evening is better.

They tend not to have kids.

This has been my observation.

The people who say, yeah, I like midnight to four in the morning is when I get my work done typically don't have kids.

The one exception is the novelist Brandon Sanderson, who will work until three or four in the morning and then sleep till noon.

But that's not exactly a very sustainable plan.

But for most people, first thing in the morning, like that's when their energy is the highest.

That's when their focus is the highest.

They use the brain muscle early when it's strong.

And then in the afternoon, you can use it for the stuff that doesn't require the strength, the emails, the errands, et cetera.

So, do you ever make a to-do list, wish list thing, Cal?

No, but here's what I do to get the mental relief.

Okay.

I keep everything I need to do written down somewhere.

but I don't treat it as a plan for the day.

Oh, this is life-changing.

Yeah.

So

keep all of the stuff that's causing you agita written down somewhere because that gives you mental relief.

Oh, it's critical.

Yeah.

There's a whole idea in the time management world.

There's a guy named David Allen.

Of course.

And he had this idea.

He called it full capture.

Okay.

So it's his idea, but I live by it.

And full capture is this idea.

If everything you need to do is written down somewhere, not most things, but everything, you get huge mental relief.

Because his theory is anything that you're obligated to do that's only in your head, your brain has to keep that alive.

It's like the tabs are open upstairs.

Yeah.

He calls it open loops.

It's got to keep the loop going.

And that is going to use mental energy and be a little bit source of stress.

Well, I feel like part of the reason why, at least for me, the busyness has hit this critical thing is because of the the number of open tabs.

And that has to do, because I'm learning from you, with the amount of input that's coming in and my sense of obligation that I'm somehow supposed to be like a juggler handling more and more plates in the air.

So the act of creating a wish list to lighten the mental load and close some of these tabs is critically important.

for your ability to create the space to do more of the deep work and slow productivity.

You know, I want to read to you from this part of your book where you talk about working at a natural pace.

This is on page 115.

Our exhausting tendency to grind without relief hour after hour, day after day, month after month is more arbitrary than we recognize.

It's true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don't always dictate the details of our daily schedules.

It's often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest task maker.

We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.

I would love to have you, Cal, talk about that because working at a natural pace

doesn't feel

like it's accessible if you work in certain times of jobs.

You know what I mean?

Like if you're in a hospital, if you're in a big company and they have Zoom meetings all day long and you have no time to get work done.

What are your recommendations for how you

pull back time when you feel like you just don't have time at work or at school?

Well, one thing I've noticed is we often think people want accessibility and immediacy.

We think what our bosses want is you to do this thing as quickly as possible.

I want you to answer me as soon as possible, get back to me as soon as possible, do this thing as soon as possible.

The reality is that's not really what what they want.

What they want is you to take care of this problem that exists for them, right?

So here's this thing that's on their mind.

It's a source of stress.

They want that stress to go away and they want you to help them make that stress go away.

Like this is the transaction that's happening.

If they trust that you have your act together.

So if you're organized, if you deliver when you say you're going to deliver, you're reliable, you never drop the ball.

When they pass something on to you, their stress goes away.

You know, Mel's going to get this done.

She's really organized.

I trust her.

She never drops the ball.

It's not so important that you do it right away.

It's just that you've taken the stress away because I know you're going to get it done.

So if you have a reputation of being organized and on the ball, you don't have to do things immediately.

You don't have to answer things right away.

If you're not, if you're disorganized, if you drop the ball, if they worry about it, then they want you to do it right away because they're going to have to keep this in their head until it's done.

They don't trust you.

So if you can build trust with the people you work for, they're going to give you more flexibility, right?

So if you come back and say, I'm on it and I'm looking at my schedule and I keep a very careful schedule and I can tell you this is going to be Wednesday is probably, I'm putting this on my schedule now.

That's when I'm going to get to it.

It's going to be next Wednesday.

If they trust you, like, great, I don't have to worry about this anymore.

It'll get done by Wednesday.

And you've just bought yourself some breathing room.

So it's not always possible, but I do argue for people, if you get your organizational act together and build a reputation, as someone who knows how to organize your time and schedule, you can actually slow things down a little bit and you can dictate more.

I'm doing it.

Here's how I'm going to get it done.

And they implicitly will trust you.

Okay, that must be like the right time for you to get it done.

So, trust can go a lot farther than we think.

You know, I love this sentence.

It's true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don't always dictate the details of our daily schedules.

It's often our own anxieties that play the role.

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Because I don't think,

at least, when I

reflect back on times in my my life

where I would have vehemently argued with you, I don't have time.

I don't, I cannot possibly slow down because if I slow down, none of this stuff is going to get done.

And if it doesn't get done, I'm going to get fired.

Like people can get themselves into this crazy making.

What advice do you have for the person that's listening that wants desperately to work at a natural pace, but has no idea how to assess the demands of the day at work and in life and actually see it with clear eyes about what is important and what's not important.

Cause there's that phrase that I love that if everything's important, nothing is.

Yeah.

How do you stop yourself though, Cal?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we, we, we tell ourselves the story that all these people asking us to do things have a big picture of us up on the wall.

They've been tracking, okay, how long did it take before like Mel got back to us last time?

There's a whole group of professors studying your performance.

And if you're not going as fast as possible, the alarm bells are going to go off.

They'll be like, what happened here?

Why did this take you four hours instead of three?

But the reality is no one cares that much about you.

They're throwing work at you because they don't want it on their plate.

And they're just happy that it's off their plate.

And you have more flexibility to figure out, how do I actually want to get things done?

I mean, we often have.

more breathing room than we think, but we just imagine that people just need us right now and will really notice if we're not there.

Can you ask for that at work?

Like, could you say to your boss, like, do you think, like, is that something that makes you seem more organized?

Because I think a lot of us are afraid to say, hey, you know, I've noticed, I've looked at my schedule and 80% of the time that I'm at work, I'm in meetings.

Yeah.

And I am going to start declining meetings.

And I'm telling you that because I need the time to get work done.

What does that signal to somebody if you do that at work?

Because I think people are terrified to reclaim their time.

Yeah.

Well, you need to do this, first of all.

When it comes to meetings, one thing I've seen actually be effective.

So, my readers have actually tried this is you talk to whoever your supervisor or boss is.

You don't come at it from the negative angle.

Okay.

So, like, don't do it like I just said.

I'm not attending meetings.

Yeah, don't do it that way.

Don't say, I can't get any work done because of these meetings you're making me go to and I want to do less.

No, the conversation you have instead is you say, okay,

there's two different types of work.

There's deep work and shallow work, and they're both important, right?

So, deep work is when I'm actually focusing on producing something that's valuable shallow work is like all the collaboration has to happen around this right you know we have to pay invoices and have client meetings say uh for my particular job what is the ideal ratio in a week of deep work to shallow work hours that's going to produce the most value for our company let's have this conversation together and you agree on a ratio and maybe it's like 50 50 or maybe it's if you have more of a administrative position it's like 30 deep work and 70 non-deep work but you you agree on a number with the goal of producing more value for the company, right?

Then you measure and you come back a couple of weeks later and say, hey, look, I'm looking at this and because of my meetings or this or that, it's only 20% of my time is actually deep work and 80% is meetings.

What should we do about this?

The feedback I've gotten from people who have tried this is people who were convinced that, no, no, no, the meeting culture here is entrenched and this will never change.

And my boss wants me in this.

As soon as they had numbers, their bosses were like, oh, yeah, we can make a change about this.

Why don't we protect these two hours in the morning, these two hours in the afternoon?

That's your deep work time.

I'll tell the team no meetings for Mel during those times.

Like people were shocked by how accommodating their supervisors were when they had a number and a positive goal.

So I think we have to have these conversations, but it just has to be directed from the angle of, I want to be even more valuable.

Well, I want to make sure that as you're listening to Cal, you took away what I think are the three most important points.

One is labeling that there's two types of work, the deep versus the shallow.

Both are important and both have necessity, right?

Understanding and collaborating with the person that you work with.

This is the second piece to say, I want to add more value and I want to do more meaningful work.

What do you think the right ratio is between the administrative shallow stuff that has to happen and the deeper, more focused work that I need to be able to do to actually get the meaningful stuff done?

And then coming back with more data saying, this is kind of what I'm experiencing.

How can you work with me to get us closer to a different ratio?

That just takes it out of what can feel like, oh my gosh, are they going to think that I'm whining?

Am I not getting work done?

Am I not being a team player?

And focuses everybody on what's actually important, which is adding value, focusing on what's important.

That's absolutely brilliant.

Well done.

I love learning from you.

In fact, listening to you and learning from you today, I feel like time is just speeding by, and I'm so locked in and in the moment.

I have so many more questions, but I need to take a quick pause to give our sponsors a chance to share a few words.

And I also want to give you a chance to share the amazing Professor Cal Newport's wisdom with the people that you care about, because we all deserve to know how to take control of our time and live a deeper life.

And we're going to get more into that when we return.

So stay with us.

We're going to be waiting for you after a short break.

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Welcome back.

It's your buddy Mel Robbins.

Today, you and I are learning from Georgetown University's professor Cal Newport.

He's a multiple New York Times best-selling author, and we're digging into the topic and research around slow productivity and how it leads to a more meaningful and purpose-driven life.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for sharing this with people that you care about.

Now, Cal.

The third principle for slow productivity is obsess over quality,

which sounds a lot like perfectionism to me.

What does it actually mean?

We do do have to be careful about perfectionism here.

Okay.

But the idea is if you really care a lot about how good the stuff is you're producing,

there's two things that happen that complement each other.

Okay.

Right.

So one, as you begin to care more about how good is this thing I'm producing, the busyness that has been afflicting you will seem less appealing.

So as people get more obsessed with quality, the value of busyness diminishes.

So if you want to become more slowly productive, this is a great first mental step.

The second thing that happens is, as you get better at things, you get more autonomy, you get more leverage.

It is easier for you to actually take busyness out of your life because you can say, I'm delivering.

Like, I'm really good at this.

You want me doing this really good work client or boss or whoever it is?

Whatever it is you're dealing with.

So, yeah, I'm not doing these meetings, or I'm taking these three things off my plate, or my books are doing well enough.

Now, I'm not doing corporate speaking anymore, or whatever it is.

So, you get this nice complement of you begin to care less about busyness.

at the same time, you get more ability to minimize busyness, and it becomes this self-reinforcing loop.

But perfectionism is the

sort of boogeyman floating around.

I had to really get into this in the book because obsessing over quality can lead to a perfectionism where actually now you never ship anything because you're thinking this isn't quite right.

This could be better, this could be better.

And so, the goal to this is more the process of I want to keep getting better, I care about how good things are, but I have to keep shipping things.

So I'm going to try to make this the best thing I can, but also I only have a month to do it.

Okay, the next thing I do can be better though.

Okay, there's next thing.

I got to make this the best thing I can, given two months to work on it.

But turning your focus to quality, I really think can unlock levels of slower productivity that are otherwise unattainable.

Well, what I love about this is that At the end of the day, what you're forcing us to do through the lens of the way that we view work and time and productivity is to slow down long enough and truly understand what's valuable and meaningful to you in this chapter of your life or work.

Because if you're talking about obsessing over quality and work and the value to the marketplace, in my words, I would say, what is the impact I'm making, right?

And that's worth obsessing over.

But I love that you translate it to the personal by saying,

Really, in your personal life, think about what is the quality of the time that you're spending, not the quantity of the time that you're spending doing it.

And in order to make that determination, you have to slow down.

And it's one of the reasons then that if you are looking at your wish list and you got a bazillion things going on, but you can say to yourself, look, in this chapter of my life, my parents are aging.

One of the things that I want to have more quality.

And like in terms of obsessing over the quality of the time that I have with my parents now,

which means learning to play guitar or traveling the world right now is not the priority.

This type of quality is because of my values.

I love that.

So how do you get back on track, Cal, when life happens?

You know,

a kid is sick and you got to go pick them up and be home with them all day.

There's a thunderstorm there and all of a sudden the Wi-Fi goes out, the rainstorm hits and traffic backs up for two hours.

What do you do?

to get back on track when life throws you off.

Well, I update my plan at the scale that's required.

So I mean something very specific by that.

So at the smallest scale, it's just a daily scale.

So I make a plan for my day every workday.

Do you do it the night before or do you do it the morning before?

I do it the morning.

Okay.

And walk me through that process.

So I actually block off my hours.

So it's like filling in a calendar for the whole day.

So I have meetings and appointments, but then I take all the time in between and I say, what am I actually doing with this?

So I don't run my day off of a to-do list.

I run it off a schedule.

So I'll say from 9 to 10, this is what I'm doing.

And from like 10 to 10:30, I'm on this call.

And from 10:30 to noon, this is what I'm doing.

So I actually assign work to time as opposed to just having a list of things I hope to get done.

I want to make sure the person heard that.

Yeah.

Because that right there will change your life.

Oh, it does.

I think most of us run our lives off a to-do list or a wish list thinking we can plug it in play throughout the day, which never actually happens.

And so you're saying, take your wish list or to-do list of all the things and then take a look at your day and assign

a time to the task that you're going to get done.

Yes.

Why is that important?

There's two things you get.

One, you get more done in that time because A, you're figuring out in advance what's the right time to work on things.

So you notice like, you know, I have this open time in the morning.

That's the right time to work on this hard thing, not to just start doing my emails and waiting until I kind of get warmed up in the afternoon.

You're like, oh, oh, my afternoon's very fragmented.

This is the right time.

So you're doing work in the right time, or you say, I have 45 minutes between these two meetings midday.

I could take a bunch of small errands and I could batch those all together and get them done.

The other thing that happens is when you're actually working on something, if you've assigned that time, you can give it your full focus.

So you say, I put aside an hour to work on this.

That's all I'm doing during this hour.

My email checks, I put that on my schedule for later.

If you just are going through your day day more loose, you're constantly having a debate with yourself.

You know, we're going to have to check email at some point.

Why not now?

And you're like, well, I'm working on this.

Your mind's like, well, why not now?

Why not now?

And you're constantly fighting with your brain with the schedule.

You say, why not now?

Because we're doing it at two.

And it's easier to win that argument.

But the subtle thing that happens is you learn how long things actually take.

So when you build these plans at first, and this is very consistent, you're going to be wildly off.

You are going to probably be cutting the time required to do things in half.

So you'll be very ambitious with these schedules at first.

Like, I'll write this whole report then and in 15 minutes, I'll clear my email inbox.

And then, and you're going to constantly fail at these plans at first, but you're getting feedback about it.

And then over time, you begin to learn, oh, this is how long this really takes.

Writing these reports really takes three hours, not one.

Cleaning my inbox, that's like 90 minutes.

It's not 20 minutes.

And you learn how long things really take, which is you begin to pace yourself accurately.

And so that's how I do it.

But the key thing here is your plan's not going to work.

You're going to get knocked off it by midday.

That's completely fine.

You just fix the plan for the remainder of the day next time you get a chance.

The goal here is not, I get a medal.

If I can come up with a plan at 9 a.m.

that I stick to throughout the whole day.

The goal is to have intention for your time.

And it's okay if that intention has to change two or three times because this meeting took too long or I had to pick a kid up from school.

That's fine.

It's not a problem.

The key is next time you get a chance, you're like, let me remake a plan for the time that remains.

And it might look very different now.

Now I might be like, I'm canceling this, I'm canceling that.

And in this 20 minutes, I'll make this emergency call.

And so on the daily scale, that's how I recover: I expect to get knocked off my plan.

And then I just fix it next time you have enough time to sit down.

And I do it on paper and just sketch out next to it.

You just explained the reason why I have struggled with time management my entire life.

I have managed my entire life from a to-do list instead of taking that list first thing in the morning and assigning a particular task to a particular time.

And I can give an example that I think a tremendous number of people could relate to.

And I'm sure as you're listening, you'll relate to this, which is, let's just say it's one of those days where

one of my kids has a soccer match that is starting at four o'clock in the afternoon and I know the commute is 45 minutes

and I leave work on time.

And then I remember on my to-do list, there was the need to stop at the grocery store.

And so I then somehow think that I can squeeze that into a 45-minute commute, run in.

I don't have the list handy.

And so now I'm racing around again, doing the same thing in the grocery store that I'm doing with my entire calendar, which is just jamming something in instead of having a plan.

And then when I inevitably arrive a half an hour late and I'm feeling stressed and overwhelmed and busy and like I'm always failing,

this would absolutely change the way that I live my life.

And I know it seems preposterously simple to some people.

This is a revolutionary idea to me because I've never lived my life this way.

So there's a cult following for time blocking.

See, I don't think about this as time blocking.

I think like, I think about this as something else entirely.

When I think about time blocking, I think about like, okay, I got to find two hours on my calendar to get this one thing done.

Yeah.

What you're basically saying is, no, everything that is on the list that you expect to get done today needs a time and a task assigned to it.

Yeah.

You become like a master of your own, of your own time.

The flip side of time blocking, though, is it's hard.

Okay.

What should I expect?

And what should the person who's listening expect?

Yeah.

So the positive side is that the number I hear back from people typically is 2x more done.

So the amount of things they get done actually doubles just because they're now actually, when they're working on something, just working on that thing.

The flip side is that's cognitively really hard.

What do you mean?

Sounds easier to get things done.

Well, because you don't realize the degree to which you mix together different things typically to try to make work less difficult.

So you're

working, I'm writing a book chapter.

Yeah.

But as soon as that strain gets hard, I also jump over to email or jump on to see what's happening over here.

And I kind of jump around.

So I don't have to sustain focus too long on any one thing.

And you're giving yourselves a lot of mental breathers.

When you time block, you get rid of the breathers because you're like, no, this is what I'm doing.

This is why you get 2x more done.

I'm just writing this chapter for the next hour, which means you're going to write twice as many words, but it's hard because all you're doing is locked in.

And then you're saying, I'm emptying my inbox.

straight for 30 minutes, doing nothing but emails, one after another.

I'm trying to get this done in this time block.

It's efficient, but it's also hard because you're, it's hard to go from email to email and try to get all these things done.

So I always tell people, if you're going to time block, you got to shut down that time block schedule as soon as the day is done.

Don't try to time block your personal time.

Don't time block your week.

So only do this at work.

It's too hard otherwise.

Yeah, it's too hard.

So it's a cheat code for really learning about how long things take and making good use of your day, but it's really takes off your energy.

It's making good use of your day.

It's making full use of your brain, but that's exhausting.

Wow.

Wow.

I would love to take this even a layer deeper because

while so much of your research and your books are about productivity and time management, underneath all of this is really how you use these principles to create a life that you love.

How is slow productivity, deep work, time management connected to living a better life?

Yeah, I use the phrase the deep life

as the goal.

What is a deep life?

It's a life where you're spending more time on the things that matter and less time on the things that don't.

Right.

So that's the goal.

I coined the term during the pandemic because this is what I was thinking about.

It was what my readers were thinking about.

It's what my listeners were thinking about.

And I made that connection you made, which is, wait a second, all of these things I'm talking about, what's the goal they're really serving?

That is trying to create a deeper life, one where it's really focused on things that matter and you're minimizing the things that don't.

So slow productivity, that really plays a big role in the deep life because it allows you to produce stuff you're proud of and support your family without having work take over your whole life.

That was a huge priority to me.

Deep work, like that idea of focusing without these distractions, without these quick checks of inboxes, right?

That lets you produce stuff that really matters.

Why does that matter?

Because it feels good, it's impactful, and it gives you autonomy.

Again, as you get good at things, you get autonomy, you know, in your life.

So deep work gets you there.

Time management is because I don't want to be stressed, running from thing to thing.

I mean, so many of the time management ideas I invented was because I didn't want to be stressed out.

You know, it was me trying to be able to enjoy the things that I wanted to enjoy.

So it's all about for me, doing stuff that matters and trying to minimize the stuff that doesn't.

The deep life is the the ultimate goal.

You know, it was funny.

It came up in part because I also give a lot of advice around technology.

I talk to people about not being on their phones too much.

And one of the issues I had with young people in particular is they're on their phones all the time, but they said, I can't just follow your advice to use the phone less because I don't have something on the other side to do more of.

I don't have the thing on the other side that is being taken away from me because I'm too much on my phone.

This is all I have.

And so that's one of the other reasons I started talking about this: I realized I can't tell people to be less distracted if they don't have something on the other side to see real clearly once that distraction is gone.

The more they enjoy their life outside of distraction, the more likely they are to actually take steps to be less distracted.

So it was funny how those two roles came together.

For somebody who that statement really resonates with,

that I don't have something

on the other side.

What is the advice that you're giving to the students that you're seeing or the graduate students that you're doing research with when that's the pushback for why they can't get off the phones or they can't do deeper work?

Yeah.

Well, one of the things I tell them is you have to get comfortable with your own mind again.

I believe this really strongly, that one of the more important things that humans do is they spend times alone with their own thoughts, especially when you're young.

This This is where you make sense of your experience.

It's where you update your knowledge of yourself, that mental scaffolding, your understanding of who you are and what you're going through the world.

It's where you also figure out your values, like what matters to you, what doesn't.

Like, why did I feel this way?

I was at this party and I was around these people and I felt kind of off.

Let me think about that.

You know why?

Because I think there's something they were doing that I don't like that.

Maybe that's a value of mine that I don't like that type of lifestyle.

It's how you discover yourself and figure out what matters.

One of the biggest, I think, unspoken disasters of the distracted smartphone age is that it eliminates your ability to do that reflection.

Because we used to, until about 15 years ago, have to be alone with our own thoughts all the time.

You would just be in line somewhere.

You would be, you know, waiting for your order to come at the restaurant or your friend to get there.

And we were very used to just being with our thoughts and thinking.

And then this distraction machine came along.

Right.

And we could banish every possible moment of reflection or solitude.

And because of that, there's a generation, one of their big problems we don't talk about is without that time alone with their own thoughts, they don't understand themselves.

And that's why they're having a particularly hard time turning off TikTok.

It's not just that TikTok is addictive.

It's that they, where is those hundreds of hours of self-reflection where you figure out, here's who I am, and here's what I want to do.

So I often start with, let's just practice.

being alone with your own thoughts 15 minutes at a time, one walk at a time, do one errand without your phone.

It feels terrible at first.

They really are uncomfortable with it.

But that's how I think we become human.

What would you say to somebody that feels like it's too late, that I'm behind?

Well, I think process over outcome.

What does that mean?

Well, we tell ourselves stories about where other people are.

Often the stories are wrong, by the way, right?

We think this is what this person has done because I see it on Instagram.

The real stories are often very different.

You don't realize what they're going through or how hard it was or what they regret, or maybe this victory is more

show than it is actual reality.

So don't focus so much on, I need this exact outcome.

Like I need to be a writer and my book needs to be number one on the New York Times bestseller of this or that.

Focus on the process of, I'm working on things that matter.

I'm getting better at it.

And I think it's important and it's meaningful to me.

Right.

That's the deep life.

I want to write.

So what matters is let's write.

Let's figure out a way I can start writing in a way that's meaningful and I can join a writer's group and I can hone this craft.

And in that process is where all the fulfillment comes out.

I mean, if you look at professional thinkers, like mathematicians who win major awards and get fields medals or what have you, what do they do right after they win the biggest award they can in their field?

They go back to working on new

work because that's what's interesting.

Einstein solves general relativity, spends the rest of his career working on new physics problems.

The most important result of the last 200 years, but the fulfillment was, yeah, that's great.

This was successful.

But I like working on math.

Like this is important.

And I want to work.

And so process can be more important than outcomes.

You have shared so much with us.

And I cannot wait to put so much of what you've just advised, the specific tactics to use in my own life and here in the office.

What are your parting words?

I tell people doing fewer things, but doing them better seems like a scary jump in our current world.

But I think the way that we think about productivity, value, and our current world is broken.

And it's scary at first, but once you do it, you're going to have more control over your work.

You're going to be less stressed.

It's going to change the way you think about your life at home as well.

Doing fewer things, but doing those things well, that has to be the recipe for a deeper life.

And it's, I've studied knowledge work for a long time.

I've studied where distraction comes from, where productivity comes from, and I've never been more convinced.

convinced that's the way to approach life.

Well, now I'm convinced too, Cal.

So thank you, thank you, thank you for making the time to come to Boston.

Thank you for being here, for teaching us everything that you taught us today.

Everybody, get out there and get this incredible best-selling book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

And more importantly, I think what it delivers on is it's a roadmap for reclaiming your time, which is going to help you reclaim your life.

And it's going to help you build a more meaningful life.

And we all deserve that.

So thank you, thank you, thank you for your work, Cal.

And thank you for being here with us.

Thank you, Matty.

I loved it.

I loved it too, Cal.

And I know you loved it too.

And I want to also take a moment and thank you.

Thank you for making the time to learn about slow productivity and how to stop being so busy and reclaim your life.

I love the tools that Cal shared with you and me.

I'm going to be implementing them.

I know you are too.

I cannot wait to hear what happens when you start to take control of your time and you implement all of his research into your life and into your work.

I know it's going to get better.

And thank you for sharing this with people.

And one more thing, in case nobody else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life.

And there's no doubt in my mind that everything that we learned today from Professor Cal Newport is going to help you do that.

Alrighty, I will see you in the very next episode.

I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play.

Okay, let's do it.

He's here for you.

And what he has to share about productivity, it's not what you're thinking.

Hold on a second.

Saying yes would be the easiest thing in the world and it would be the dumbest thing I could ever do.

Yeah.

So

it's a lot about why you're here.

Yeah.

That's right.

Slow productivity.

Amazing.

Oh my gosh.

That's how we we do it, people.

Okay.

Thank you, James.

Great to meet you.

Great to meet you.

Yeah, thanks for inviting me for this.

Oh, my God.

Of course, you were dynamite.

There is, everybody.

Oh, and one more thing.

And no, this is not a blooper.

This is the legal language.

You know.

what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you.

This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.

I'm just your friend.

I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.

Got it?

Good.

I'll see you in the next episode.

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