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

Order your copy of The Let Them Theory 👉 https://melrob.co/let-them-theory 👈 The #1 Best Selling Book of 2025 🔥 Discover how much power you truly have. It all begins with two simple words. Let Them. — In today’s episode, you’ll learn how to gain control of your free time, improve productivity, and get motivated (even when you don’t feel like it). By the time you finish listening, you’ll understand how to get things done, the surprising science of focus, and simple tricks to never procrastinate again. Joining Mel today is the #1 productivity expert and Georgetown professor Dr. Cal Newport. He is here to tell you: If you’re feeling unmotivated, burnt out, and tired of wasting time, there’s another way to live. Today he shares simple tricks, tactics, and strategies that help you get things done despite all the noise. He is bringing the simple daily shifts you need to make life feel easier and to make you more focused and productive. In this episode, you will learn: -The surprising reason you can’t get anything done -The simple daily ritual that creates instant focus -How to organize your calendar (and your day) to be more productive -Why you feel unmotivated and how to instantly flip the switch -How to get your brain to focus, whenever you want to There’s an entirely different way to take control of your time. This episode will teach it to you. For more resources related to today’s episode, click here for the podcast episode page: https://www.melrobbins.com/episode/episode-322/. Follow The Mel Robbins Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themelrobbinspodcast 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. In this episode: 00:00 Meet the Guest 02:04 Why You’re Exhausted All the Time 06:23 What Everyone Gets Wrong About Productivity 15:51 Principle #1: Do Fewer Things 31:26 Principle #2: Work at a Natural Pace 49:44 Principle #3: Obsess Over Quality 53:18 The Time Management Hack That Doubles Your Productivity 01:03:02 Why You Should Put Your Phone Down 01:06:03 How to Catch Up When You Feel Behind — Follow Mel: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melrobbins/ TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@melrobbins Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melrobbins LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melrobbins Website: http://melrobbins.com​ — Sign up for Mel’s newsletter: https://melrob.co/sign-up-newsletter A note from Mel to you, twice a week, sharing simple, practical ways to build the life you want. — Subscribe to Mel’s channel here: https://www.youtube.com/melrobbins​?sub_confirmation=1 — Listen to The Mel Robbins Podcast 🎧 New episodes drop every Monday & Thursday! https://melrob.co/spotify https://melrob.co/applepodcasts https://melrob.co/amazonmusic — Looking for Mel’s books on Amazon? Find them here: The Let Them Theory: https://amzn.to/3IQ21Oe The Let Them Theory Audiobook: https://amzn.to/413SObp The High 5 Habit: https://amzn.to/3fMvfPQ The 5 Second Rule: https://amzn.to/4l54fah

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mel Robbins?

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

• 0:09Mel Robbins?

  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 bestselling author,

• 0:53Mel Robbins?

  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,

• 1:38Mel Robbins?

  and right on schedule, Cal Newport is here to help.

• 1:51Mel Robbins?

  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

• 2:33Mel Robbins?

  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

• 3:13Mel Robbins?

  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 Rule. Cal himself has authored eight bestselling 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 they leave feeling better and more empowered. Cal hopped on a

• 3:56Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this as well.

• 4:18Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:11Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 5:57Mel Robbins?

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

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, we have a lot more inputs than ever before, 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 gonna watch TV for, you know, the next four hours, it's these little snippets of distraction.

• 6:37Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  A little social media, a little check-in on a website right here, jumping over to this game right here. So our attention's 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 which that puts us out of mental shape. It would be like we're all professional athletes and we're smoking and drinking milkshakes.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 know if we realize the degree to which we're just out of cognitive shape.

• 7:41Mel Robbins?

  Well, I also think this, 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 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?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:10Mel Robbins?

  What does charged content mean?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  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 gonna scroll to the next thing. Well, what's the biggest reactions we can make? You're gonna be really upset, you're gonna be really angry, you're gonna 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.

• 8:58Mel Robbins?

  Wow.

• 9:00Mel Robbins?

  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

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:40Mel Robbins?

  that I feel scared to slow down. Is that normal?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I think that reaction is why I wrote the book.

• 9:48Mel Robbins?

  Say more.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  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

• 10:30Speaker 01

  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 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

• 11:11Speaker 01

  productivity? And is there one that could be slower? And this was where the book came out of.

• 11:17Mel Robbins?

  Cal, what does everybody get wrong about productivity?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  This was the problem.

• 11:21Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  We, 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, 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.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  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 Ts 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, 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.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:28Mel Robbins?

  It makes so much sense. As you were describing that, especially when you went from agriculture to Model T 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.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:44Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:17Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:50Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  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

• 16:27Speaker 01

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

• 16:33Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:02Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Well, we think more, it makes us better, or more is more value, or for 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 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, and I have a real connection to it.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:47Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Well, the, 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. And working on something, I gotta collaborate with people.

• 19:33Mel Robbins?

  Yep.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  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

• 20:19Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 20:48Mel Robbins?

  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 like, who's going to take her 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.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:10Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Well, I have this phrase on my podcast. It's called facing the productivity dragon. Because I get Q and A. So people call in and they often have this issue. They look, I have this going on and this, I need to do this. 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 list 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 is like, well, what time do I have? And there's phases of life where it's not what you would want.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:05Mel Robbins?

  One novel a week? Cal, how fast do you read? For crying out loud. That sounds a little ambitious.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Per month, I should say. Okay.

• 23:15Mel Robbins?

  Thank you. Like, you're talking to we mere mortals here, Cal Newport. Well, I want to give an example because one thing that came to mind is that when Chris and I

• 23:26Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:38Mel Robbins?

  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. 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,

• 24:22Mel Robbins?

  it's just not important right now."

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:24Mel Robbins?

  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

• 25:08Mel Robbins?

  and basically say, "Not now, but if this is gonna happen now, maybe I've gotta expand how much time I have to give to it and be honest with myself."

• 25:20Speaker 01

  I think it's a great example. And I should 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 gonna hang them.

• 25:34Mel Robbins?

  I think everybody who has kids feels this way. Like, "I need to get the photos up on the wall."

• 25:39Speaker 01

  I think we even ordered the photos at one point. But now they're all out of date. Our kids are much older. Yeah.

• 25:45Mel Robbins?

  That's hilarious.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:01Mel Robbins?

  When you, oh, I wanna hear those. What are they?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  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. And 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 till 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.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  And then maybe it's 10 years from now that you actually do it. The idea that it all has to get done right now, I think, often traps us. So doing fewer things, taking your time with things, it adds up over time.

• 26:58Mel Robbins?

  For sure.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:03Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:18Mel Robbins?

  That I thought were important.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  You're probably saying no more than you think.

• 27:35Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  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 it becomes 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?

• 29:05Speaker 01

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

• 29:07Mel Robbins?

  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 chicken 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. And while you're listening to our sponsors, share this with people that you care about. I think we all have fallen into this trap of pseudo productivity.

• 29:50Mel Robbins?

  Busyness, stress, overwhelm, it's at an all time high. And Professor Cal Newport is here to give you and the people that you care about the tools that you need to take your time back. And we all deserve that. And speaking of time, don't go anywhere because Cal and I are going to be waiting for you after this very short break. And we've got so much more to learn from him. So stay with us.

• 30:21Mel Robbins?

  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 bestselling 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 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

• 31:03Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 31:44Mel Robbins?

  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,

• 32:27Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 32:41Mel Robbins?

  I had a woman come up to me and say, oh, you know, hi, I love your podcast. And my husband and I were away for the weekend 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'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 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.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:25Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:34Mel Robbins?

  What a sad thing.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 34:38Mel Robbins?

  Hmm.

• 34:38Speaker 01

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

• 35:00Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:08Mel Robbins?

  Whether it's trying to figure out what your career should be in your twenties or thirties figuring out relationships or whatever it may be. You're, you know, in your fifties 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

• 35:51Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Well, this goes back to slowing down how long you spend on things.

• 36:09Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  And being okay with it. Like, we we set the standard.

• 36:12Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Where we're gonna, we write ourselves a fairy tale.

• 36:15Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  All right, 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'd be in such a good place six months from now. Wouldn't that be so great? Great, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna 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 we fall apart trying to do it. So working at a natural pace is don't write a fairy tale.

• 36:44Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  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, 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 gonna 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 natural pace means is in the context of even like a given day, you don't have to be all out all day.

• 37:12Mel Robbins?

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

• 37:55Mel Robbins?

  a phone call, and then like she can squeeze 25 things into about nine minutes.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it takes me 90 minutes to do the same amount of things.

• 38:03Mel Robbins?

  Yes, but you know that.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  I know that.

• 38:05Mel Robbins?

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

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, we don't write to-do lists, we write wish lists.

• 38:26Mel Robbins?

  Say that again.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  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 of 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.

• 38:51Mel Robbins?

  Okay, hold on, can we just unpack the wish list thing? I feel very called out right now. I love making to-do lists, but I do think they are wish lists. 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?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:21Mel Robbins?

  Or wishlist, I should call it now?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  It feels good.

• 39:23Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  But it's not your fault that it's unrealistic. It's the human brain is not good at these time predictions.

• 39:30Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Estimating how long it takes to answer four emails is not something our brain evolved to do well.

• 39:36Mel Robbins?

  Yes.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  So we're really bad at estimating time. So our brain just says, hey, it'd 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?

• 40:01Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:07Mel Robbins?

  Yep.

• 40:08Speaker 01

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

• 40:10Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Let's consolidate that. If it's deep work, though, my rules are simple. 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 the news.

• 40:38Mel Robbins?

  Do you shut your laptop?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Or if I'm working on my laptop, I'm not doing anything else on it.

• 40:44Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Now, now.

• 40:44Mel Robbins?

  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'll just check the messages, see if anything came in.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  You get used to it. It's a training.

• 40:54Mel Robbins?

  What do you mean you get used to it?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  You can actually practice this.

• 40:57Mel Robbins?

  How the hell am I going to practice this?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  I've done this with people before. We call it interval training. And this is true. This really works.

• 41:04Mel Robbins?

  I thought I was doing this for my muscles and my, my stomach muscles and my biceps, Cal. You're saying I gotta do interval training for my brain? That's how bad it's gotten?

• 41:11Speaker 01

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

• 41:15Mel Robbins?

  Okay, great.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Because like our mind is very valuable. And I actually do this with people. I've done this with undergraduates before.

• 41:21Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:29Mel Robbins?

  Cal, help me out here.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:39Mel Robbins?

  Paying your bills.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  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 gotta stop that timer and start it over.

• 41:52Mel Robbins?

  Really?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:53Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:02Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  So you practice that until it's no longer so difficult, not, your mind isn't rebelling.

• 42:07Mel Robbins?

  All right, can I ask you a question?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:09Mel Robbins?

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

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Two weeks.

• 42:17Mel Robbins?

  Two weeks?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  That's what I've noticed.

• 42:18Mel Robbins?

  Why two weeks?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  That's just what I've noticed empirically. Yeah.

• 42:21Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Two weeks, you're usually pretty comfortable. And then you add 10 minutes.

• 42:26Mel Robbins?

  So then it becomes 30?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  It becomes 30.

• 42:28Mel Robbins?

  And you do that for another two weeks?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Mel Robbins?

  And then it becomes 40?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:31Mel Robbins?

  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've 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?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  90 minutes would be the goal.

• 42:55Mel Robbins?

  90 minutes is the goal?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  That's where I have 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.

• 43:09Mel Robbins?

  Wow.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  And then take a break.

• 43:11Mel Robbins?

  Well, that's true, because if you could get 90 minutes of focus work done every day, that's probably more than you do in eight hours being distracted. Is there a particular time of day where it's easier to focus?

• 43:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:02Mel Robbins?

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

• 44:06Speaker 01

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

• 44:09Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  I keep everything I need to do written down somewhere.

• 44:13Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 44:13Speaker 01

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

• 44:16Mel Robbins?

  Oh, this is life-changing.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:18Mel Robbins?

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

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Oh, it's critical. Yeah.

• 44:27Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 44:27Speaker 01

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

• 44:30Mel Robbins?

  Uh huh.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  There's a guy named David Allen.

• 44:32Mel Robbins?

  Of course, yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  And he had this idea, he called it full capture.

• 44:36Mel Robbins?

  Okay.

• 44:37Speaker 01

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

• 44:57Mel Robbins?

  It's like the tabs are open upstairs.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:06Mel Robbins?

  Well, I feel like part of the reason why, at least for me, the busyness has hit this critical thing is because of 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 wishlist 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. It's on page 115.

• 45:52Mel Robbins?

  "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."

• 46:26Mel Robbins?

  I'd 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?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  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 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,

• 47:37Speaker 01

  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

• 48:22Speaker 01

  this on my schedule. Now that's when I'm going to get to. 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 than we think.

• 48:53Mel Robbins?

  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 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.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:32Mel Robbins?

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

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:57Mel Robbins?

  How do you stop yourself, though, Cal?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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.

• 50:42Mel Robbins?

  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 noted, I've, I've looked at my schedule and 80% of the time that I'm at work, I'm in meetings.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:57Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:23Mel Robbins?

  Okay, so like, don't do it like I just said. I'm not attending meetings.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  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, 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's like, oh, the collaboration has to happen around this, right? You know, we have to pay invoices and have client meetings. Say, 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.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  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 agree on a number with the goal of producing more value for the company, right? Then you measure, then 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?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:07Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:21Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 54:02Mel Robbins?

  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 and 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.

• 54:41Mel Robbins?

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

• 55:24Speaker 01

  We do have to be careful about perfectionism here. 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. 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.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  You want me doing this really good work, client or boss or whoever's 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 compliment 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,

• 56:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:15Mel Robbins?

  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 in 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 translated 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

• 57:59Mel Robbins?

  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've 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, the kid is sick and you gotta go pick them up and be home with them all day.

• 58:40Mel Robbins?

  There's a thunderstorm there and all of a sudden the wifi 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?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Well, I update my plan at the scale that's required. So I mean something very specific by that. So at the smallest scale is just a daily scale. So I make a plan for my day every workday.

• 59:04Mel Robbins?

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

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I do it the morning.

• 59:07Mel Robbins?

  Okay. And walk me through that process.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  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 nine 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.

• 59:36Mel Robbins?

  I want to make sure the person heard that.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:39Mel Robbins?

  Because that right there will change your life.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Oh, it does.

• 59:42Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:05Mel Robbins?

  Why is that important?

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  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 till I kind of get warmed up in the afternoon. You're like, 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.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  My email checks, I put that on my schedule for later. If you, if you just are going through your 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 it's, we're doing it at two. And it's easier to win that argument. But the, 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're 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.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  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, the, the goal here is not, I get a medal. If I can come up with a plan at nine AM that I stick to throughout the whole day.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  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, is 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.

• 1:02:53Mel Robbins?

  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

• 1:03:34Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  So there's a cult following for time blocking?

• 1:04:21Mel Robbins?

  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 gotta find two hours in my calendar to get this one thing done.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. You become like a master of your own. Of your own time. The flip side of time blocking, though, is it's hard.

• 1:04:47Mel Robbins?

  Okay, what should I expect? And what should the person who's listening expect?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:08Mel Robbins?

  What do you mean? Sounds easier to get things done.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  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

• 1:05:18Mel Robbins?

  Give me an example of that.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  I'm working, I'm writing a book chapter.

• 1:05:21Mel Robbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  As soon as the day is done, don't try to time block your personal time. Don't time block your weekends.

• 1:06:12Mel Robbins?

  So only do this at work.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:06:30Mel Robbins?

  Wow. Wow. I would love to take this even a layer deeper. Because while so much of your research in 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?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I use the phrase the deep life. As the goal.

• 1:07:03Mel Robbins?

  What is a deep life?

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  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, it's 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 ultimate goal.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  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, 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, is I realized I can't tell people to be less distracted if, if they don't have something on the other side to see real clearly, once that distraction is gone.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  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 worlds came together.

• 1:09:16Mel Robbins?

  For somebody who that statement really resonates with, that I don't have something on the other side.

• 1:09:25Mel Robbins?

  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?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  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 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 in 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.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:10:52Mel Robbins?

  Right.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:11:31Mel Robbins?

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

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Well, I think process over outcome.

• 1:11:41Mel Robbins?

  What does that mean?

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:07Mel Robbins?

  You've 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?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  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 in 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 that's the way to approach life.

• 1:13:57Mel Robbins?

  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 bestselling 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.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mel. I loved it.

• 1:14:37Mel Robbins?

  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

• 1:15:21Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 1:15:35Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Mel Robbins?

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

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It's about productivity.

• 1:15:52Mel Robbins?

  Amazing. Oh, my gosh. That's how we do it, people. Okay.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  It's great to meet you.

• 1:15:58Mel Robbins?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for inviting me for this.

• 1:16:00Mel Robbins?

  Oh, my God, of course, you were dynamite.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Here he is, everybody.

• 1:16:11Mel Robbins?

  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.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  Sirius XM Podcasts.