Cal Newport on Time Blocking and Productivity

the pros and my pros like the lebron equivalent so the people who are super busy it's what they do so if you bring that mentality to a job where you don't have as much on your plate you get a lot of breathing room you get a lot of flexibility it really can open up a lot hey it's ryan holiday welcome to another episode of the daily stove podcast my guest today needs no introduction because he is one of our most popular guests of all time one of my favorite authors of all time i'm talking about cal newport author of deep work so good they can't ignore you uh and most recently digital minimalism and his new planner the time block planner a daily method for deep work in a distracted world i love cal i love talking to cal he's one of my favorite people one of the people that i have missed not being able to see because i haven't been to dc now in many many months because of the pandemic but cal is one of the best writers i think of our generation one of the best thinkers about productivity and focus and creativity of this generation and just overall a really smart interesting guy somebody i love talking to so here's my episode with cal newport you can check out his new time block calendar we talk all about that and of course if you haven't read deep work digital minimalism we're so good they can't ignore you you are definitely missing out and cal has a new podcast which you should check out and he and i did an interview about my most recent book the lives of the stoics which i suggest you check out and of course listen to my other episode i think this is maybe from june where i talk to cow about being productive in the midst of this crazy pandemic that we're in so check it out here's my conversation with cal newport well i'm excited to uh to do this it was funny i was i was gonna say this in the intro but so when your episode came out on the podcast last time this was right as all the civil unrest stuff was happening uh in the summer and uh someone commented how dare you interview a privileged white male on your podcast with all this going on in the world even though our thing had been recorded you know weeks earlier and then it was the most popular episode of the whole year so it was a it was an interesting reminder to me that like the things that people sometimes manage to take offense to which were totally unintentional uh are not at all representative of what humans actually feel in the aggregate yes it's a terrible sample yeah i made the mistake of asking my audience recently i'd be like oh send me suggestions for the podcast email address um i i'm yet to have any two suggestions that are compatible with each other every single suggestion i've had it's like it's there's there's zero pattern in the suggestions all of them are self-contradictory and i realized there's no useful way so sampling audiences doesn't work like unless you could actually like randomly sample your audience it just doesn't you know well and and then you also have to vet these suggestions against reality so like the number one suggestion is always like why do you have ads and it's like uh why do you expect uh me to spend hours of my life every single week plus the cost of hiring an editor and i think sometimes people think that everything is free and it doesn't like because they're getting it over the internet therefore and and because there was no marginal cost for them to receive it therefore there must have been zero costs to create it so sometimes we get that with daily stock they'll go like you know you have this store why do you sell stuff they'll go like what is what would seneca think about this or you know what would marcus aurelius think of this and i sort of go like well you know if they took it you know uh as they sat there on their estate tended by slaves you know in their empire supported mostly by plunder and and wars of aggression um i think they probably wouldn't have a problem with it and i would actually be okay with you selling the coin yeah that's all right but but it's also it's like guys this whole this whole machine costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to uh run and operate and and to you know reach at scale and there's opportunity costs as well which i think is obviously harder for people to understand but like you know every episode that you spend on your podcast is time that you didn't spend writing it's time you didn't spend researching but most importantly it's time that you didn't spend at home with your family yeah yeah and my my agent's always about that she when she fights back against like appearances and stuff like that she's like that's time that cal could be writing his next book that's that's always her thing yeah i agree well i think you and i have the problem that we've had audiences for a long time too so like we have audiences that go back to the old days because they that's that's kind of the issue it's like in 2007 or whatever you know i i had my domain on a little server and there's 50 of us and those same people are around so then it feels different but yeah like office space is expensive and equipment's expensive i don't know no no that's an interesting point because it and it actually ties into i think a sort of a dilemma or an experience of becoming a successful creator or you know trying to master any profession which is like okay um when you start not only uh like when you start you're typically young uh you're typically uh have this hunger to learn and the level that you're doing it at is much more uh is much less expensive and easier and whatever so it's like lebron james playing basketball in middle school this is just a guy that gets up plays basketball goes to practice there's nothing going on in the world as he goes through as he progresses to where he is now he now spends something like a million and a half dollars a year maintaining his body right he's the same person playing the same game but to maintain it at the level that he's doing um because it becomes harder and then because people figure out what you're doing and it it just becomes more competitive the the cost is greater so it's it's weird that at you'd think like hey as you as your audience grows it would be easier to maintain uh but it actually becomes harder because you're fighting against entropy and you're fighting against people who are in similar spaces and and just like you've already picked all the low-hanging fruit so so to to keep writing good books it's actually harder and harder to do yeah yeah and the stakes raised etc etc just like lebron had to bring home championships eventually yeah that's at different stakes all right i wanted to talk about the journal uh because i'm fascinated one with journals so let's talk a little bit about journaling but i'm let's start with the concept of time blocking because it's not one i so i i want to hear that i want to hear the case for time blocking well so time blocking is how i have for a very long time organized my day so it was something i talked about on my blog i went back to try to find the earliest references i mean i think it goes all the way back to 2013 but then i wrote about it in deep work which was 2016. and it was my way of controlling my time and attention i thought this was a pretty large missing component to a lot of time management systems was this notion of okay when you actually get to your day how do you figure out what i'm going to do and a lot of the big systems if we do like david allen's or you go back to some of the mentality even of stephen covey's is based around like prioritization tasks you have list you have context you have different priorities for tasks and it's about going to your list and saying what's next okay now what's next and what i discovered is that if you look at the whole day like a chessboard you know okay i'm really busy here i have free time here i'm gonna have a really busy into the day you can start moving things around in a way that makes a lot more sense like well right now is going to be the time to work on this because i see what's happening at three o'clock or at three o'clock i'm going to have this window here maybe i should do a bunch of email there i probably should you know when i go to run this air and get these other things done you see all the time like chess pieces it turns out you can get a lot more out of that same day then if you instead just try to go uh moment by no moment okay what's next what's next the other benefit i used to get from time blocking is it keeps you on task because if you're just working if your idea is like look i'm going to work today i'm going to try to get a reasonable amount of stuff done i have some lists i have some meetings you know okay i'm going to take some breaks obviously like oh this is what i'm doing for this half hour i've already decided that so no i'm not going to take a break sure look at like baseball trade rumors right like i'm locked into this right now and if you want to take breaks you schedule a minute you also get more out of your time so it had just been my secret sauce and at some point i got frustrated with the notebooks i was using and that's when i had the idea like why don't i produce my own now that sort of goes to what we're talking about with lebron james where it's like sort of early on in your career when you have more energy and less things pulling for your time you can sort of get away with an amateur system like i wake up and i do whatever i was gonna do today you sort of go where it leads but then as you become more successful or as you have more balls that you're trying to juggle it becomes increasingly essential that you have some sort of a system or a practice yeah well for me i was using these type of systems before i needed to interesting i was like a productivity nerd and you know i've been really into this i had written these books in college about how to be really productive in college and so i was into productivity systems so as a grad student which is a really easy job i mean it seems like a hard job when you're a grad student because you haven't had any other job yet but relatively speaking it's an easy job i was using all these systems just because i was a productivity nerd and because of that i had a ton of extra time and so i was writing books and i was running my blog i wrote a book concurrently with my doctoral dissertation because i was bored like i had a lot of time because i was using these techniques just because i was in the techniques as my job got harder so as i went to become a postdoc and then a professor and then a tenured professor but then also a dad and with a bunch of kids and my writing career took off without the system so i'm a little bit odd that i started it before i needed it and because of that i just had massive free time and now that i actually need it it absolutely is my lifeblood yeah it is funny that the the people i know that that were in grad school or are in grad school we're doing phd programs it seems like it takes a very long like it takes a very long time and then i remember i was asking my friend one of my best friends from my school like how it was going and he was like you're not supposed to ask grad students how it's going because it's a it's it's kind of this open-ended uh chaos it's just it's like a thing that just happens and that strikes me as prob there must be incredible inefficiencies in that model that if you had systems you could take advantage of and finish faster or get more done concurrently yes and i i wrote about this a lot especially back when i was aiming more at students with my advice writing i called the phenomenon dissertation hell because there was a blog when i was coming up called dissertation hell which encapsulated exactly that mindset yeah grad students would construct this world that there's nothing more difficult than you know needing to work on a dissertation and you're absolutely correct i mean the i say this on my podcast a lot because i get a lot of questions from students and i say a lot on my podcast that being a doctoral student in some ways it's much easier than a normal job and in other ways it's much harder so it's much easier in the sense like you don't have that much to do right now you don't have and but it's much harder in the sense that the things you do have to do uh are hard they're intellectually demanding and that short-circuits a lot of people's brains but you know i came into grad school with first of all my productivity habits i was a nerd i also got married very young right so i got married when i was 24 like right after i turned 24 my wife was 23 so she had a normal job all throughout grad school and i just figured look i don't want to be at the office or you know at mit when she's home so i'll just work during the time when she's working i was like the only guy in the theory group at mit who worked bankers hours you know right it turns out like it's really effective you come in at nine you make a plan for your day i had way too much to do i used to write three to four blog posts a week i wrote three books while i was in grad school um i i published a lot i mean i published a lot of papers um and i still felt like i had a lot back on and it's like oh i didn't have a part-time job going around trying to meet people right like i never was going to bars i never was spending time on dating apps i wasn't trying like it was like it was a no new friends policy like i was like i already found my person so that whole that whole thing is is out of the out of the picture so that was very helpful but then it's not just the like hey bankers hours because not every relationship has the the the specifics there that you're talking about but i did find it was like like like let's say everyone's working at the office um and the people who don't have anywhere to be they're sort of at the mercy of like parkinson's law right it's like hey we're just gonna go on this until whatever but for me it was like no i told my wife i would meet her for dinner at eight or you know like my weekends are are spoken for so i think it's not just the hours but it's also having a backstop of another person who who's sort of you whose time you have to respect that prevents things from just expanding to fill an unlimited amount of space in your life right and this is a problem so the problem you're putting out here is another reason why to bring it back why time blocking is useful because part of what you do when you time block again is you look at your day your entire day and say what do i want to do here as opposed to again you're if you're just working this parkinson's loss thing especially if you don't have a wife you don't have to get home to pick your kids up from school yeah you just fill the time that's what grad students do they stay up until midnight for some reason they they they come it's it makes no sense but if you're time blocking you're not going to draw out a schedule that says like well let me take three hours off here and then let me kind of half work and watch youtube from four to seven and i really think like seven to eleven that's what i'm gonna really you know when you're when you're actually looking at the schedule in black and white you're like well wait a second i could kind of get this all done by noon you know something else right so so like this underlying point is a big one that if you don't control your time and this was actually in my very from i'm thinking back now my second book i wrote which was a student book i wrote it while predominantly still an undergraduate it was called how to be a straight a student and it was study habits from actual straight a students but i had a time management section that was my my secret sauce like what i brought over from being an entrepreneur when i was a teenager and basically even back then in that book i was saying time block and it was i was a little bit looser about it then but even back then i was saying figure out in advance like what you want to do with your time this control notion it opens up so much and by the way you were right like the pros and by pros like the lebron equivalent so the people who are super busy and super high you know productive it's what they do i mean they have they control their minutes they control their days they see when should i do this when shouldn't i do this they're like air traffic controllers except for instead of pushing 10 they're pushing tasks and that really is how high performers operate so if you bring that mentality to a job where you don't have as much on your plate as one of these super high achievers you get a lot of breathing room you get a lot of flexibility you get a lot of space to pursue other things you can induce implicit seasonality into your job even though it doesn't exist it really can open up a lot i haven't gone to grad school but i i find that some similarities to what you're talking about with with uh with writing books you know you and i will talk to someone you'll be like oh i signed a book deal and you're like congrats and then like three years later the book isn't done and you know they're not robert carro and they're not robert greene like they're this isn't going to be some epic biography and when i ultimately read the book i go there's not there's not three and a half years worth of work here you know what i mean this is like this is this and and and i've i've always surprise i'm always surprised in how that happens um because i know i know that the way you do a book is you show up every day and and in the space we're in the sort of non-fiction but not like sort of epic biography space it's very unlikely that your argument is going to be so complex and requires so much research that you shouldn't be able to turn this around in six months to a year i mean to to get the manuscript done uh editing and all the other stuff can take longer but i'm always amazed like people are people like how do you they ask me how do you get so many books out i i'm actually amazed the other direction well let me run a theory about you excuse me so right before we started recording i was recording an episode of my podcast and i was i was answering a question from a reader in australia and so she was in a phd program and she was preparing finally to write her dissertation and so she was telling me how she was clearing the decks yeah she like i'm leaving all my extracurriculars i'm cutting down and her question was she was really nervous about like i've never really i'm nervous about you know how big these time blocks are going to get like i really don't normally do more than two or three if i'm trying to clear the decks i really want to get this done and my answer was like i think you're going to make things worse by inflating the difficulty here so much you've inflated this thing in your brain into something that's going to require you to have nothing else going on that you know you have to quit all your extracurriculars which what she was doing that is going to take six or seven hours a day or no progress will be made i was like i think that's going to make it take longer and so i wonder if that theory is at play with some of these writers we know where it takes them three years is because if in your head it's like this is the hardest biggest thing i'm ever going to do then it's really hard on tuesday to write when you're like but i have two meetings and i have to take my kid to the dentist and i'm not really feeling inspired you know like treating it as not so big of a deal maybe uh no no that's sir that's that's a good point i mean i do i do find i find people who who weren't writers like they were somebody who did something and now they're writing a book maybe they had a podcast or a youtube show or they're an influencer or whatever um off what can happen is they love books and i love books too but books are this sacred thing but then because they haven't like one of the great advantages i got being a research assistant is i saw that books are just an assemblage of pages right it's not a it's not like some magical thing it just is um and so so they i think they often get intimidated and they make up in their head what it's supposed to look like and then so what they struggle with is the reality of writing a book which for me like i just i've i've worked up basically on two two and a half projects during the pandemic it's like i get to the office at 8 30 and i'm i'm like done ready to eat not think about the book and that level by like 11 at the latest some days you know what i mean it's like two two and a half hours is over six months is a book yeah yeah i mean i think academics know this because that's what academic writing is like so like academics have an easier time and a harder time writing public-facing books they have an easier time because uh you produce academic papers on a regular basis and they have to be really smart they have to go through peer review so you're used to this idea of like okay i can produce something hard relatively quickly so we kind of get used to that and you write enough academic papers it's all just you know every day you look at the whiteboard like it's just you make progress every day the academics have a harder time sometimes though because they are used to a level of rigor in their expertise that just makes them really nervous when they're writing public-facing books because they they can't help but think about their peers in academia being like sure i don't know so yeah yeah you can't think about you can't be thinking about the audience you got to be thinking about the task in front of you yeah yeah but but i think there's something to be gained from that mindset of of like yeah intellectually hard work the way really nice products get built is just a little bit each day i mean you just think they thought stuff and you know you just thought stuff thought stuff that stuff you have to generate it's like thought reps you know and you can only do so many a day and you do them uh and it's a job yeah yeah well i think the worst even worse than though uh not getting the book done is the other thing that makes me cringe is when you hear people talk about like man last six weeks i you know i barely slept because i had to get my book done before they rented a cabin somewhere yeah that's not book writing i mean if you're doing it in six weeks that's not book writing i don't know what that is but right uh that's a failure too that's not no you can't just grind it out when like under deadline pressure i wanted to talk to you today about elements element is a maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home work gym anywhere else electrolytes are a key part of a happy healthy body all athletes know about the importance of electrolytes but the truth is we all need them whether you're an athlete a diabetic keto dieter whether you just want to curb 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every day over a long enough time and then then you get you get an editable manuscript like if you don't do the work you don't have pages which you can then edit and refine but then and this is something i struggle with more like you have this impulse to ship right like it's done it's as good as it can be let's go but then you also need sort of a it's like you need a it's like you know they they they uh they like lay concrete and then they have to let it sit and then they need to see how it how it settles you know so like i turned in my my uh last manuscript i think i turned it in on wednesday of last week and so i already have like these are my note cards today of stuff in the last five days that have just occurred to me that i wrote down that when i get the manuscript back in probably a month will all be changes that i'm making so it's like i'm not working on the book but it's still kind of cooking in my mind and little marginal changes are sort of reveal themselves but but if if it had already gone to the printers like if i was you know these these people that are doing these sort of hot political books you miss that ability to just uh uh get that sort of serendipity like before it's too late kind of changes yeah yeah well you're right that's that's the that's the downside of the way you get the book done is you have that mindset of look it's not don't over inflate this just right but you're right that puts you in the mindset of like okay let's let's roll let's roll uh and going back and doing the edits i struggle with that too i mean one of the ways i deal with i always worry when i get to like the stage you're entering now with your latest book i always worry i start thinking like what the hell is this like yeah this last half of the book is you know this this is not right or that's okay that can't be the right way i'm missing this this is not like the greatest argument um and uh the the way i get over that is i i start thinking about the next book i think it helps that you and i write a lot of books because when i start i just say well you know what the next time it'll be better and that's how i try to get past the i mean often it is a trade-off i mean i could probably sit more with my books uh yeah and and really like come back and let me rewrite it like try to masterpiece them but instead i i i think i've got this idea and i've been i'll work on it for a year i think it's a good representation of it um now let's let's move on to the next thing so it's better but it's a good point i mean i've noticed it for example being able to work in the last year or two with the new yorker for they have a completely different editing process than you would have with a book right and so like with the new yorker they it's not a book it'll be like 5000 words it's back and forth it could be back and forth for months of like this isn't quite doing it i don't think this is this c-section is not really like echoing the a section you know like it's it's this sort of back and forth collaboration where it's just picked apart and rebuilt and tightened and what about this and bring this in and it's a whole thing and you can't do it with a book or if you do that with a book it's like you can write one book every five years so it's interesting i feel that tension um and i get over it by being like well the next the next book will be better is what i always tell myself and that's how i that's how i keep moving well this goes back to the time blocking thing but i i had a um a friend who who is uh an nfl reporter and you know nfl coaches work these insane hours and i said like let's say the the coaches union and the players union come together and there's some sort of for whatever reason and they said just in the way that workouts for the athletes are limited what if if some regulation passed for the coaches where the coaches had to work bankers hours like it was nine to five for coaches you couldn't do all night film sessions you couldn't go straight from the the locker room after a game to the plane to the practice facility you couldn't work these insane hours and i was like would the product on the field be noticeably different in any way and they were like absolutely not that they're like the all the work that these coaches do it has almost no it's it's mostly a competition they are in with their staffs and with each other that um you know so i so i wonder it's like i and i've i've worked with some of those publications you're talking about it is is it real is that the way they get to the quality they get to or is this an anachronism and a system that's become almost a kind of a religious thing that uh actually you know quantity would enough being able to produce more quantity would actually be a better way to get to more quality than the than the sort of whatever the process you're talking about is yeah i mean if you have something that works i i get the hesitancy you know why not shake it up and i think you're right about that specific example look at washington dc our football team our head coach this year had to get cancer treatment during the season you know and so it significantly significantly reduced the time the team is might win their division so right now they're actually good for a change they've had yeah they've had the least amount of coaching they've probably ever had and it's working and it's working and it's working uh so but i i think your broader point your broader point there is probably i i think is interesting yeah um in general being worried about like what is proverbial religious uh what like religious role this is what it needs to be done and there's some notion to creative destruction like what if we try it this way or what if we try that or i mean i do that with my habits all the time i'm always looking for inefficiencies in the sense like why am i spending time on x you know i i don't need to do that is there a much simpler way to do it i think i've saved a lot of overhead doing that i mean even with like my mini media company that sort of surrounds all the the stuff that happens when you write enough books and do these type of things all of my decisions have been biased towards reducing overhead reducing complexity yeah so i don't have staffs i don't have i'm like i've tried to keep everything uh like i and i think that makes a really big difference i mean i think it probably saves up like a non-trivial amount of time in my life so just as a concrete example of yeah questioning this thing that's taking up a lot of time and produces some value is it producing enough value yes is it producing enough value for the drag or for the overhead yeah yeah no and that goes back to what we're talking about too with the price right and so sometimes people can think like oh that price seems high or why is why is this not free or whatever and it's like because it has to pay for itself of the other things that the creator or the owner could be spending their time on and if it doesn't it becomes really hard to justify right exactly right it's not just it's not just a not a hobby but just if you're just starting up a podcast on the side for example uh outside of your it gets uh you know it has some traction it's a completely different calculus than right like ryan holliday's spending you know if he's going to publish something every day for the daily stoic podcast you know that's a book a year maybe right i mean almost no no daily stoic it's it's it's about 80 to 100 000 words a year that i do in in the email um yeah and yeah that's the podcast yeah yeah yeah and uh which is a non-trivial amount of money these days so you know there you go no no it's uh if you're a world famous author like ryan i mean a book a year is uh it's not well so i was going to ask you to go back to this idea of planning so here's why i don't time block and tell me what i'm missing because i'm all i am i think earlier i think earlier on in my life i also had a lot of arrogance about my systems so it's like this is the way that i do it this is obviously the only way to do it and anyone else who's doing it differently is somehow an indictment of the way that i'm doing it um but as i've gotten older i've been i think i've gotten more flexible about trying different things which is i think the way you want to go i think a lot of people go the other direction that as you get older you become more close-minded to new things but when i look at like a person who has time block a time blocking schedule i actually get like anxiety i've talked about this before like i like an empty calendar like today this is the only thing in my entire calendar um that to me is like a good day whereas like later in the week i've got like three things in the calendar and some other thing that i like some sort of administrative obligation and i'm like i'm like that's a that's a crappy day you know what i mean so for me like when the calendar is full that actually means i have less time to do what i want which is usually writing and thinking and reading yeah but you can think of time blocking as uh how you make use of the empty days right those are actually the days when time blocking is useful right i mean if you run a day that's full of uh meetings you know full of zoom full of calls or this or that that's actually the scenario in which time blocking is not that useful i mean you have your calendar and if that's all you're doing is jumping from call to call you don't really need auxiliary planning if you have an empty day i to me this is when time blocking shines because you're like okay well what do i want to do with this day and you kind of wait till you get there to make the decision right so it's not you're not it's not looming like okay what i really want to do is uh i'm going to write first thing in the morning and get this thing done here this errand and i'm going to work on this in my head when i do that errand and then i want to this frees up time here to do this thing with my son and then i want to come back here and do this and i can be done that could be done at three right look i got the plan here and then i can do a shut down i can do a shutdown when it's done so it allows you to take the the open water and put some structure onto it and you get a lot more a lot more out of it though i will say the thing about you though is uh one scenario in which time blocking is not as useful as if you have a combination of autonomy and routine it's like right full-time writers can fall into it you have a routine like so full-time writers can fall into this interesting middle zone where a lot of days it's like i have a very common structure to my day and i have a ton of autonomy so i'm not juggling a lot of um a lot of time blockers are trying to figure out how do i make sure this gets done and these tasks are accomplished and i'm making progress on this thing that's due next wednesday you know it's really optimized for that if you're in a writing routine you know i write and then i do this and then i'm done or something like that people who have a lot of routine a lot of autonomy don't always get as much benefit so you might also fall into that gray zone but i think the empty days are the days where time blocking actually relieves my stress a little bit i'm like okay i have a plan and i executed it and now i love the distinction of i'm done right a good time block plan gives me that and like oh i'm done or i can end the day early in my time block plan and actually get that psychological boost of oh i got an early and early into the day because somehow the i followed the schedule so i feel like my boss granted me an early release as opposed to oh i stopped working early so yeah i guess hearing you say that maybe i'm more of an implicit time blocker than an explicit one like like my assistant knows never to schedule not i mean essentially never don't schedule things before 11 a.m and don't ever schedule anything that goes later than 4 p.m and so like really the only time that things can possibly be scheduled is really in that sort of four or five hour window there in the middle um that uh you know often doesn't get filled anyway so so the right like the morning is already blocked off for writing and then the afternoon is blocked off for family then the middle part is essentially blocked off for whatever random stuff i have to do for the day whether it's recording a podcast or shooting a video or doing a phone call that's where those things get slotted in and ideally they don't even get slotted in because i'm not doing them yeah no and and that's not a bad way to do it so where time blocking is going to really start to shine more is when you're you're juggling a lot and you have to figure out okay i have meetings that i don't control at various times i have tasks that are due at various times i have larger projects that are due at various times progress needs to be made regularly this needs to get started early i need to fill in this gap here so a lot of people who are in let's say like a standard knowledge work job are in a consistent state of having this pool of things that are on their plate that is too big to get your arms around on any one day it's just big and stressful and so every day is like how do we construct a day that is not only going to make the best attack into that but also make sure that we are on track for all the different things that we need to be that we need to be on track for and in those scenarios time blocking does really well it also does really well as i mentioned before when people have actually a lot of flexibility right i'm at home i'm working from home i don't have a ton of meetings maybe it's been very useful for people during the pandemic because maybe them and their partner are both at home and there's some child care that has to happen and suddenly having a lot of clarity about i'm going to work here here on this and you here i'm taking care of the kid and you're doing this and this ability to really just move your days together and move those pieces like chess pieces really helps people when it otherwise just seems like chaos i'm at home i'm kind of watching the kid i'm kind of not and this is happening and my mind is wandering i'm in the same room that i also watch tv in and i'm there's a nice clarity to it like you know this is what i'm doing right now there is something to the close of the day you're talking about like for me like a good day is so i i this is this is a video like this so a couple years ago on one of my books i did these signed pages uh like and they ship you the pages and you sign them and there's like 2 000 extra ones or whatever that's what i use is my to-do list it's like the perfect consistency of paper it's like the right length anyways that's what i do my to-do list on every day but what i've really loved like a good day is i've crossed all the things off on the to-do list and then i'm tearing up the list at the end of the day i have like a compost bin next to my desk and i tear it up and that then i recycle it later um but but a day where i got distracted or got busy or things went wrong when i'm carrying the to-do list over to the next day there's something there's it feels like i'm running about carrying a balance on my credit card do you know what i mean it feels like i'm not closing the day yeah well but see one of the advantages of blocking over just listing is now you can look at your whole day and say well what's the best way to get these five things done well the best way is that like these three i can consolidate they're kind of short and i'm going to do it in this one hour block between these two meetings which means this one i probably should do right now in the morning because i have 90 minutes and it's going to take that long and this this other one you know what i'm going to have to move that call because this is really urgent and that's where that's going to fit in and suddenly you get all five done whereas otherwise you might have wasted the first 60 of those 90 minutes sort of doing email and then miss that window in between because you know and you you end up getting uh you end up getting less done and then the other part of time blocking is when you break your schedule so it doesn't work out because something goes long or something drops on your plate which is fine and normal you rebuild it so in the planner there's these columns so as you as you break a schedule you cross out the rest you move over to the next column and then you fix the schedule in that column and then if you break it again you you cross out and you move over to the next column right so you rebuild your schedule when it changes so you're always trying to maintain intentionality about like okay what's the best i can do with the time that's left but that exercise really teaches you how long things take and you start to realize like okay i can't just fool myself into how long it's going to take to whatever write this type of memo because i have to rebuild my schedule so then you start to develop a much more nuanced understanding of this takes much longer than i think and then once people get that more nuanced understanding they start making more changes to their schedule then they look at their calendar and say this is untenable these these meetings are spread in such a way that it's impossible for me to get what's done all right let's do like ryan does nothing before 11. or i need to get out of this this and this right like you you suddenly it's like you're getting real good data on you as an execution machine how long how long things take what your schedule actually looks like you're like the football coach looking at the plays and then it leads to people making changes because you're getting the data you need so you're not just like i'm busy i'm always trying to do things i feel like i'm carrying my list over from day to day now you can pinpoint you can diagnose the problem this is what's going on and you can so there's all these ancillary benefits that float around that approach one of the things that that hit me when you were talking there is like that these people go oh uh with like my note cards like how i research books that go wouldn't wouldn't there a digital system be a more effective efficient way to do that and and sort of what you were describing it's like hey something bumped now you got to redo the the thing the impulse in today's society is like oh digital is where that should happen because it you know you adjust one thing and then it can adjust all the other things but but it strikes me there's actually probably something to the physical form being forced to do it by hand that you like about it right yeah well i mean first of all it means you don't have to go on your computer to see what's going on and to adjust it so if you're in you're in a mode where you're reading or writing and you want to go on to a tool uh you don't have to yeah it's embodied so you're you're drawing out these blocks you're crossing out the blocks uh and so i agree with that and and i don't know digital tools i mean they have their place obviously i think there's certain things that digital tools are good for i think digital tools are good for calendars because look if you have a really busy schedule there's a lot of appointments coming and going and moving and i think digital takes that out i think digital tools are good for keeping your master task list because a lot of collaborating yeah or collaborating like we're doing or if you want to keep track of 500 tasks like i don't want to write all those and move them around or this or that but i think for scheduling um there's something to it i mean there was this movement you know in the early 2000s like 2000 to 2008 there was this productivity movement that thought computer algorithms combined with productivity was going to like unlock stress-free work and peace and it was going to make everything much easier that we could kind of what was causing us stress was trying to figure out like what to work on and what was going on in her schedule and computers should be able to do that right and then and then we could we could make work much less stressful we could basically outsource all the executive decision making to machines and that's when you got tools like omnifocus in which you could have tasks that existed with these different statuses and context and then run these complex queries that would essentially spit out work on this you know and none of that worked none of that worked right it turned out like you can't uh that wasn't the key if we could just outsource into these digital tools like really complicated tools would tell us like what to do and we could just crank widgets and the whole thing would be just sort of automatic and life would be low stress it didn't work out it turns out that like a big part of the art of work is figuring out what to work on and when to work on it and doing stuff is hard and actually most of the difficulty was actually doing stuff not in the deciding what to do right and that actually just having a piece of paper and just confronting your day and saying what do i want to do today was was actually ends up being the right thing to do the having a computer database spit out make this call next and you would just do it that didn't work there's no there's a few things better than just i'm confronting the whole picture and this is roughly my plan and i have to just do it now what's the difference between a planner and a journal in your opinion well i think of a journalist as capturing expository information about your thoughts of your day whereas a planner is where that's retroactive a planner is prospectively looking forward to what do i want to make out of the day sure so my journal i'm capturing thoughts like here's what i'm thinking about here's what happened today here's what's on my mind in a planner i'm saying i mean it's much more it's much more pragmatic it's just i have seven hours today what am i doing those seven hours and this is the tool i'm working with it's my cartographer's map and ink right that's the tool i'm working with to figure out what i want to do for the next seven hours although yet what's interesting about doing it contemporaneously is that it then becomes in retrospect a journal of how you spend your life of how you spent your day which is in the aggregate how you spent your life yeah well which is one of the the big things i sell about the planner is you have a record now so it's really easy to go back and flip through your time block grids for a bunch of days and you have right there evidence of what's going on i mean i i recommend that people have patterns for their blocks to differentiate them so like i shade in thicker lines uh deep work blocks so those blocks are have have thicker lines you can just look at a day and just see right like where were there deep work blocks and then i added a metric section to every day for the planner a big believer in metrics so you know deep work hours number of steps i took number of calls i mean whatever it is that you want to track so that gets tracked every single day as well so now you can you can go back through a planner is whatever it is three months or four months you can go back through and and see what's the story what's the story of these metrics like you have a book that captures one quarter one season of your life and i agree with that i think the learning is a huge thing learning about how long things really take how much am i really getting done a lot of people who are new to time blocking will be like shocked to see the degree to which wow i do very little outside of meetings and email right yes i'm trying to i'm trying to build these days and that's all i have time for and every time i try to put something in it gets blown for email and it's a it's a i think like something like that is a really important reality check and either they have to just say that's my job or make drastic changes to their jobs but we're like without the feedback so i think you're right on that it's like a a non-linguistic journal in some sense as well as a prospective planning tool yeah i do this one journal in the morning that and a bunch of people make them now but it's just you write one line a day so i write what i did yet like one sentence about the day that just passed and what i'm now for almost four years into a five-year journal and what what i love is being able to to write you know today what i did yesterday but then see what i did 366 days ago and then double that and triple that and so to be able to to see sort of how life is progressing and what was memorable about this day on the planet one year ago two years ago three years ago in some ways is almost more representative as a journal than me trying to write you know what i'm thinking and feeling do you know what i mean there's a the the literalness of it is almost more revealing than than the pros uh on the other journals i you know i did that the first almost first two years of my first son's life i had one of those exact journals like we did this we had these people over here's what's going on with sleep and i got that exact same benefit out of it i would go back and say where were we like a month ago where were we six months ago where were we this point last year right and it gave me a really good sense of progress i was like oh okay interesting like look we're it's different you know we back then we were it was we were like overwhelmed and we weren't sleeping and you know someone came by and now look where we are today uh and i remember that being really meaningful so i i'm i'm with you on that i think that ability to look back and say what was i doing so i'm hoping now that i have these planners that i can have a nice shelf full that builds because that'd be really nice like well let me what was going on you know pandemic fall 2020 you know right now i can actually see you know it's right it'll be good for our biographers i'm not i'm not sure either of us have done anything notable enough to to warrant our papers even being reviewed at a university but uh that remains to be seen my last question for you was um i've gone through waves of this during the pandemic like i remember i think you and i yeah we talked in june uh ish and uh or maybe it was may but um texas has gone through this weird cycle where you know we took the pandemic very seriously and then we all collectively pretended it was over and then not we but then the state collectively you know pretended it was over then it got serious again then then leading up to the fall we pretended again and then obviously now here we are in winter and it's a disaster um but what i what's been weird for me is like my sort of quarantine bubble and productivity bubble has has been nice because i haven't been doing anything i've been doing meetings i've been focused creative not going anywhere but i've noticed that once when everyone else is going back towards real life all of a sudden the pull it becomes harder to say no i guess what i'm saying have you have you done much thought let's say the vaccine is here let's say you know uh certainly probably certainly but but in the next six to eight months you know some semblance of uh a more integrated uh extroverted world uh may be upon us how do you how are you thinking about people maintaining this kind of uh deep work bubble that some of us have been in yeah i i mean i have been thinking about that even for myself so i mean part of the question is what what to not let back yes exactly or or is it even going to be possible that's what that's what i'm trying to that's what i'm trying to figure out is what not to let back i mean i i have this sense that i am i am i'm probably going to be in certain situations uh untruthfully exaggerating my fibrous fears probably like well after the point where i actually am worried like i really wish i could come speak but you know i don't know about the vaccines only like five percent effect you know they get out of some trouble i don't know how long i don't know how long we'll get away with that i mean i i think the first things i have on the books i have been using i've been using my elderly in-laws as a fantastic excuse hey look i would love to come to your outdoor you know mask wearing garden party but i just can't i'm gonna be seeing my elderly in-laws next week and i can't even take the most remote risk and people like oh sure please please don't come and uh and yeah i don't know how long that i can sustain that yeah how long are we gonna how long do we get away with that yeah um you know i said the first things i have in my books that are in theory traveling in crowds is like next fall i think and i don't even know how i feel about that not from a viral perspective um because it'll be adjusted if need be but but from uh oh flying again right oh and having to go like you know i have you went to a book launch during pandemic i have one coming up uh in in march and it's sort of nice oh it's way better it's great it's like i invested in the studio and and i can do uh i can do tv i can do radio i can do uh i can do podcasts so but i am missing i guess it's like so one of the ideas i have for example is so i miss um more one-on-one interaction like with other sort of interesting smart people so like we've i've already sort of started laying the groundwork for a writer's group here in dc there's there's a bunch of really interesting writers here uh who who i know and i like and they write for big publications and i'm like okay that type of thing uh that type of thing i am i am looking forward to getting back to um we built out this big socially distanced patio which is there's certain things i do like there's a group of guys we watch movies with and stuff like that um that like enabled those type of things to keep going because we have this big thing and these nice armchairs that are you know spaced out or this or that so i don't know it's going to be interesting um yeah what do you think about what are you going to do with speaking well it's weird like to go to your point about the book launch so i did lives of the stokes in uh september and so i i didn't travel anywhere uh i actually didn't even do kind of a full launch in some respects i i wasn't treating it as like a full full book lunch and it sold i mean it debuted number one it sold it had the a launch on par with you know several of my other books and i think it made no difference you think it made no difference like we could do a counter factual or is it just like you're so your fame is rising so like it's hard it's hard to tell i mean i let's say i don't know what else you want i guess you're number one right like it was a and and as people don't really realize about these type of books like big launches are nice but like a big big selling book versus not usually at least for you and i is is going to be a story written over three years you know yeah it's not it's not like uh the law the number of books sold in like a successful launch is still you know uh ten percent at most of of a successful book whether it had so anyways yeah yeah no ideally the first week should become a a forgettable note in a long selling career of a book so yeah i definitely think about that i i mean maybe maybe if i'd done more events or something that the first week sales could have been 10 higher which which might have been you know not not that many more books right and so i i think it was it was a different experience it was a better experience the speaking thing is interesting because like this month i may actually i think i'm close to if not surpassing my my best speaking month since i started speaking ever yeah uh and i and i haven't i haven't left my house i've done yeah you know and and so that if if you're telling me i could i could maintain that uh or what if that goes away yeah that's what because i've been to it seems like you're probably the same experience everyone didn't move virtual for a while if they want to see what was going on and then starting in like september everyone's like okay we'll do it virtual and it's just fantastic i mean it's it's you're doing 45-minute zooms for lots of money but are they are they gonna let's say they don't keep doing that that's the thing yeah i know i think i think uh i think what i found the big breakthrough for me was okay yeah there was that period so basically from let's say march to may uh there was no virtual speaking because people hadn't gotten there yet because everything was just getting pushed um what i found like so i i if you told me at the beginning of the year hey you know two months that that cost me quite like let's say 20 of my year's income those two months or the three months of stuff that got canceled um if you told me i was going to absorb that hit at the beginning of the year i'd been like well that's going to be untenable but what i actually found was that energy just got redirected towards other things that were also cr that were not just revenue positive but were were creatively fulfilling and personally more less disruptive right because i wasn't traveling and all that and so i think we we opened this talking about opportunity costs i think the opportunity cost of speaking and traveling and doing these other things is now harder for me to deny so i hope i'm going to be able to say no to more things but i don't necessarily trust myself either well i mean so not to get to insider baseball but um so what do you think about this theory that you know when it comes to like a book launch for someone like you uh or someone like me like the actual model is you have an audience right so you have an audience that is a consumer of your your essentially media channel and that audience is going to sell a lot of book at first and but they're going to be the seed that's going to spread the word because you have x thousands of people and and if they really like the book they'll be spreading the word and that that kind of dwarfs any you know most particular just you talking straight to people that don't that aren't part of your audience and so then from that viewpoint and we have common publicists who are probably watching this right now or so they might get freaking heart attacks i'm just a portfolio i'm just hypothesizing here okay i'm just hypothesizing but from that point it there's a dif there's maybe a new model where it's like yeah you're focusing on you have like a media company and you're focusing on that and what you produce and your shows and your writing this big audience and one of the things your your company produces is uh books and your audience will take it and embrace it and help spring it out there and like you're saying the the notion of you have to start from scratch like i have to go out there and tell an audience about a book maybe that's becoming depreciated in this world of like you own your own media companies basically well i think you'll you'll find that on on the launch of your next book which is like for the virtual stuff they'll go okay hey uh obviously you know insert indie bookstore cannot do an in-person event but they want you to do an instagram live event or something and go okay how many people currently attend you know their instagram live things and they're like oh between like 50 and 60 and and then you're like and how many books are they selling oh you know like five to ten and they're like whoa okay that's an hour and a half of my life plus it's got to occupy a block on the calendar yep to sell seven books i mean when you look at the royalty that's like 15 bucks or something but but more importantly you go oh if i just record an extra episode of my podcast that will reach however many tens of thousands of people or if i just write one article that will reach this many people or if i you know um so so you you sort of realize i think with a pandemic made clear and and i think makes extra clear for creators is like actually investing in your platform day-to-day is the best use of your time and these launch activities or these speaking of the things you're going around doing actually aren't moving the needle for you at all and and they come at the expense of doing building this other thing which you then own and have you know the the best chance of you know sort of getting someone to check out your book or whatever yeah i mean i think there's something to that and and of course the caveat being it's very hard to do and like most people aren't going to be i mean the creative media channel that has a lot of listeners but yeah i'm i'm starting to feel that way i mean i've started this podcast and doing some other things because would you have started this if there wasn't a pandemic probably not this was a pandemic project yeah because i wasn't i see i'm always around people i'm in front of my students i'm in front of audiences i'm in front of like i'm always interacting with people and i felt very isolated and so i said okay let's how can i i try i did a lot of writing at first the first month i wrote a blog post every day just because i was antsy just i wanted to do something and i was like i don't know if this is the right way to reach out to this audience and yeah so i started the podcast as a project i got in you know i was inspired by uh some of the spotify acquisitions i was getting suddenly i started seeing i was like oh podcasts are not necessarily just this thing that people do in their spare time because they kind of feel like they have to i was like oh this is actually a media model that's very very powerful and very disruptive and very distributed and very uh uh decentralized right it's not through major players you're not your stuff is not owned just you and a server company that host it and right um yeah so the pandemic got me doing it but it's definitely changed the way uh because i'm i'm talking to a web designer and this is a small point but thinking about even like cal newport.com like i'm having this realization for the redesign i'm thinking about is it shouldn't be an author website like author websites are all about like let me tell you about this author and i'm like no probably the better analogy is more like a streaming service website you know sure this is a place you come there's a different clear point of view yeah there's a conte and you come here because you you you are on board with that point of view and the ideas and the way they're delivered and you want to consume it and there's different media in which it's coming but you think of it the same way as when you go to netflix or something like this it's no one's it shouldn't be about uh what's my bio it should be about there's new episodes of this you know that are available no i love it well look let's do this again when the new book comes out which i i won't even tease for people let's let's talk in march and uh i'll be very curious to see how you handle a a pandemic book launch yeah well i'll take lessons from you because i'm assuming if it goes half as well as yours i think i'll be pleased though all right man i appreciate it this is awesome as always you

Channel: Daily Stoic

Views: 28,682

Rating: 4.8961625 out of 5

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, einzelgänger, massimo pigliucci, einzelganger stoicism, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: LrJcHp0Ocm8

Length: 61min 25sec (3685 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021