How to schedule deep work: Time blocking | Cal Newport and Lex Fridman

how do you integrate deep work into your life what are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend just at a high level yeah what are different ideas there well i mean i'm a big fan of time blocking right so if you're facing your workday don't allow like your inbox or a to-do list to sort of drive you don't just come into your day and think what do i want to do next yes i mean i'm a big plan of saying here's the time here's the time available let me make a plan for it all right so i have a meeting here of an appointment here here's what's left what do i actually want to do with it so in this half hour i'm going to work on this for this 90 minute block i'm going to work on that and during this hour i'm going to try to fit this in and then actually have this half hour gap between two meetings so why don't i take advantage of that to go run five errands i can kind of batch those together but blocking out in advance this is what i want to do with the time available i mean i find that's much more effective now once you're doing this once you're in a discipline of time blocking it's much easier to actually see this is where i want for example the deep work and i can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them so i can prioritize this and you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying what's next i schedule every single day kind of thing so as i could try to in the morning to try to uh have a plan yeah so you know i do a quarterly weekly daily planning so at the semester or quarterly level i have a big picture vision for what i'm trying to get done you know during the fall let's say or during the winter like i want to these are there's a deadline coming up for academic papers at the end of the season here's what i'm working on i want to have this many chapters done of a book something like this like you have the the big picture vision of what you want to get done then weekly you look at that and then you look at your week and you put together a plan for like okay what am i going to what's my week going to look like what do i need to do how am i going to make progress on these things maybe maybe i need to do an hour every morning or i see that monday is my only really empty day so that's going to be the day that i really need to nail on writing or something like this and then every day you look at your weekly plan and say only block off the actual hours so you do that that three scales the the quarterly down the weekly down to daily and we're talking about actual times of day versus so the alternative is what i end up doing a lot i'm not sure it's the best way to do it is uh uh scheduling the duration of time this is this is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings i'm like religiously don't do meetings all other academics are jealous of you by the way yeah i know no zoo meetings uh i i find those are that's one of the worst tragedies tragedies of the pandemic it's both the opportunity to what okay the positive thing is to have more time with your family you know sort of reconnect in many ways and that that's really interesting uh be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things the negative is actually both those things are also sources of the negative uh but the negative is like it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule and there's nothing more draining to me intellectually philosophically just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10-minute zoom meeting like what are we doing here what's the meaning of life i have every zoo meeting is i have an existential crisis so kierkegaard with a internet connection uh so uh what the hell were we talking about oh so when you don't have meetings there's a luxury to really allow for certain things if they need to like the important things like deep work sessions to last way longer than you uh maybe planned for i mean that's my goal is to try to schedule the goal is to schedule to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour and hope i can keep going yeah and i hope i can get lost in it and uh do you find that this is at all an okay way to go and uh the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world or is there some magic to the time blocking well i mean there's magic to the intention there's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities right so i'm often juggling multiple jobs essentially there's there's academic stuff there's teaching stuff there's book stuff there's the the business surrounding you know surrounding my my book stuff but i'm of your same mindset if a deep work session is going well just rock and roll and let it let it go on so like one of the big keys of time block at least the way i do it so i even you know sell this planner to help people time block it has many columns because the discipline is oh if your initial schedule changes you just move over one next time you get a chance to move over one column and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining so in other words there's not there's no bonus for i made a schedule and i stuck with it like there's actually just like you get a prize for it right like for me the prize is i have an intentional plan for my time and if i have to change that plan that's fine like the state i want to be is basically at any point in the day i've thought about what time remains and and gave it some thought for what to do because i'll do the same thing even though i have a lot more meetings and other types of things i have to do my various jobs and i basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot so that's kind of my strategy is like just be okay just be okay getting yelled at a lot because i feel you if you're rolling yeah well that's that's what it is for me like with writing i think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's you don't really get on a roll in some sense like it's just difficult uh but working on proofs it's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof if you start to get some traction just you've been at it for a couple hours then you feel the uh the pins and tumblers starting to click together and progress is being made it's really hard to call pull away from that so so i'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone of course there is also uh a positive effect to uh pulling yourself out of it when things are going great because then you're kind of excited to resume yeah as opposed to stopping on a on a dead end that's true that there's a the yeah there's a uh there's an extra force of procrastination that comes with if you stop on a dead end to return to the task yeah or or a cold start yeah whenever i feel like i'm in a stage now i submitted a few papers recently so now we're sort of starting something up from cold and it it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not yeah we're in it like here's where we are we feel like something's about to give here we need the very early stages where it's just i don't know i'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard to understand them i'm going to have no idea how to make progress it's not it's not motivating you

Channel: Lex Clips

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Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, cal newport, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: ykNcnrNvpTI

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021