When Productivity Theory Meets Practice

What happens when neat theoretical ideas about productivity are deployed in the messy real world? In this episode, Cal is joined by Haley Pulli, a productivity coach from the company DoneDaily, to discuss case studies of clients who initially struggled with some of Cal’s ideas and how they ultimately fixed the issues. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) When productivity theory meets practice (4:26) Time blocking (14:50) Multi-scale planning (24:16) Deep work (43:05) Attention residue (50:05) Shutdown ritual (54:05) Obsess over quality (1:00:07 ) Shallow work Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.vanta.com/deepquestions https://www.calderalab.com/deep (Use code “DEEP”) https://www.quo.com/deep https://www.masterclass.com/cal Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering, Nate Mechler for research and newsletter, and Ben Crain and Rob Montz for video editing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  So on this show and in my books, I talk a lot about time management and attention management strategies. I do this because I think in an age where we have increasingly powerful digital distractions and diversions pulling at our brains, we need to bring our A game if we're going to maintain some sort of cognitive autonomy. But here's a thought that's been bothering me recently. I don't spend enough time actually following up on what happens when my abstract ideas get implemented in the real world. So this became a little bit of an obsession. I said, look, I need an episode where I follow up on the real complications that real people experience when they put my type of ideas in the practice.

• 0:43Cal Newport?

  And I was trying to figure out how to do this. And I had this idea that maybe I'm gonna, I'm gonna recruit like a whole bunch of people and I'll give them all advice and I'll follow up with them on a regular basis and, and I'll, I'll take notes on when they're having problems and what works. And, and this just seemed like a huge amount of effort. So I kept procrastinating on this. Like I felt really stuck. I wanted to do this episode, but I didn't know how to do it. But then I had an epiphany. Oh yeah, I know of a company that's already doing this. It's a company that's called Done Daily and they offer productivity coaching where you actually work with a coach who helps you develop systems and rules and then you check in with that coach every day and they help you adapt and adjust and make your systems

• 1:24Cal Newport?

  work for you. Now here's what's key. They use a lot of my ideas. Now this is no coincidence. That's on purpose. Actually, I know the founder of Done Daily. I, I used to interview him back in the early days of my Study Hacks blog. I've known him forever. And when he put together this company a few years ago, I worked with him. I talked with him about my ideas and sort of helped them develop the productivity philosophy that their coaches would teach their clients. And then I became an affiliate of the company. So I still get updates on a regular basis of, hey, how are things going with this company? And so I know a lot about it. I was like, oh, they're already doing this. They're already working with hundreds of people to help them implement my type of ideas and getting a lot of feedback about

• 2:06Cal Newport?

  it. So I don't need to go out there and on my own follow up with people. They're already doing it. So this was what I'm going to do today. I've invited onto the show, one of the Done Daily coaches. Her name is Haley Polley, and I asked her to bring case studies based on real clients of real complications they had when trying to put my type of ideas into practice in their lives, and then to discuss how they overcame those complications. It's exactly what I was looking for. So if you think about my books or my, my time and attention management episodes on this podcast, like a undergraduate degree in productivity,

• 2:47Cal Newport?

  today's episode is you're getting your doctorate. We're going to get nuanced and in the weeds. We're going to get realistic about how you actually manage your time and attention in our current moment. I had a lot of fun with this episode, a lot of great insights. I think you're really going to learn a lot as well. So let's get right into it. All right, Haley, thank you for joining me on the show.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm glad to be here, Cal.

• 3:14Cal Newport?

  I've been excited about this one because it's a question I get a lot, or maybe I should say it's feedback I get a lot where people say, on paper, this idea you talked about for organizing my life or pushing back on the forces of digital distractions. Sure, that makes sense. But in my real situation, I have to deal with X, Y, and Z. How do I adapt for that? There's a, there's a reality check to theoretical advice that I think is often important when we're talking about how to organize your life or be more productive. And you over at Done Daily are surrounded by reality checks because you are working with real people every day who are actually trying to put the types of ideas people like

• 3:55Cal Newport?

  me talk about into action in real diverse circumstances. So as I mentioned in our intro, we have a collection of different case studies. I want to go through these one by one. We'll start by hearing the problem, and then we will hear what solution you as a coach at Done Daily came up with for this person. And then I will give my take, my riff, my surprise, my shame. We'll see how this actually goes. I'm excited for this. Can we start with the example of Mark?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  We absolutely can. So Mark gets a lot of stuff done. I just have to say, like, this guy, he's, he's productive. And one thing that he was really regularly implementing, and I would imagine you hear a lot about is time blocking. But we started to discover that time blocking was creating a lot of stress for Mark, which might not be surprising to people tuning in. But what was happening was Mark was time blocking every single moment in his day, which I think you recommend. Is that correct?

• 5:04Cal Newport?

  Was he going like to what level of granularity was he going?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Nine to five. And then even beyond, because he has little kids and there were, you know, personal responsibilities afterwards. So every, every moment of his day generally was time blocked.

• 5:18Cal Newport?

  Okay. And these were full blocks. He was in the situation, I'm assuming where you create the plan where you say to yourself, if I actually got through this plan, wow, that would be great. Look at all the things I would get done. And you kind of fall in love with the, the super tight blocked plan. You're like, wow, that would be awesome if I could get every one of these type of things done. And I'm assuming it all worked well and he's, it was happy? Is that what happened?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no. As you said, this was a real life human being with real life friction, which I think is probably what you're talking about when people write you and say theoretically this works, but then real life stepped in. And one of the goals for Mark when he came to Done Daily was to actually end his days feeling less stressed. And the time blocking became a point of real conflict for him because he would schedule everything very granularly. And inevitably, you know, meetings would run late, something would take longer than he anticipated. He would get stuck in traffic. I mean, he was factoring in, you know, commute

• 6:23Speaker 01

  times. And, and I, I saw this because I got to work with Mark every single day. And I said, look, we've got to change up how you're time blocking. And so we worked together to experiment with actually reducing how much time blocking he was doing every day.

• 6:41Cal Newport?

  So was his, his stress was coming in part from just the feeling of falling off of this schedule? Like every time that schedule got violated, what, what he was feeling like this was a failure or that he was out of control or that he was unproductive? What was going on with him? What was the thing that was really driving him to be upset?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was just that. It was like, I've thought of everything in my day. I've put it all on this calendar. It didn't turn out that way and I'm frustrated about it. And also it would cut into things that he really needed to work on a lot of time. And those things were starting to pile up. So it was stress of not achieving that perfect day and the stress of things actually not happening, not getting done.

• 7:24Cal Newport?

  Because if he doesn't achieve the perfect day, there's blocks that aren't happening and the work that was in that block, now that's starting to pile up and he's starting to feel like he's falling behind.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 7:34Cal Newport?

  Okay. So what was the solution that worked for Mark?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  So the solution, well, it was kind of a couple of steps. The first step was to get Mark open to the idea of time blocking less. So actually starting to leave space on his calendar that wasn't claimed. And that took us a couple of weeks to practice and kind of get comfortable with. So, and then once we did that, it was like, okay, let's not rush to fill that up because maybe we're starting to see we can build in more buffer time, which is what ultimately ended up helping him was certain things on his calendars, lunches out for work, certain meetings, he did some walkthrough type things, even

• 8:18Speaker 01

  commuting. We built buffer time around that, which would give him kind of some breathing space. And we started to see that he was able to get more things that he really needed to get done, done. So that's how we approached that.

• 8:31Cal Newport?

  All right. So are these, these, there's two things you mentioned that sound related, but maybe they're a little separate. So just to clarify, there's the, there's like the scheduling less. So, so not, not trying to fill in, you know, having blank time in the calendar. And then there's adding buffers around things you're blocking. So maybe typically in theory, your commute could happen in 30 minutes, but let's put an hour or 45 minutes there so that you have buffer time. Were these two separate things? So was there a difference between it's okay to have, you know, some blank time in the afternoon and we're going to add buffers, make each block bigger than you think it needs to be? Or was it just we schedule less and then just expand the length of each of those blocks to fill in the gaps? You just have more than enough time for each block? What's the right way to conceptualize that?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  No right way. I think it really is personal for him. Just having the open space was a little, it didn't quite work for him. So we needed to be a little more intentional with putting in specific buffer time that was allowed to be for a, a meeting that was running late or commute time that took longer than he expected versus just this white calendar space. Because we actually ended up doing something different with a white calendar space as well. So it really was tailoring this time blocking approach to Mark very specifically based on his personality, his character, and the things that he needed to make for a successful day.

• 9:56Cal Newport?

  I want to take a quick break from my conversation with Haley to talk about some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now, look, as I get older, I increasingly find myself thinking, who's that middle aged man in the mirror? My skin in particular is catching my attention. It used to look like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, and now it looks more like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, if you know what I mean. This is where Caldira Lab enters the scene. They create high-performance skincare designed specifically for men's skin. Now, this matters because our skin differs from women's skin in key ways, which means we need our own specialized products. Now, if you're looking for a good place to start,

• 10:38Cal Newport?

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• 11:19Cal Newport?

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• 12:04Cal Newport?

  by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools like Claude or Cursor. And you want proof? Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Writer, and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. You can learn more at vanta.com/deepquestions. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/deepquestions. All right, let's get back to my conversation with Haley. This is interesting because it reminds me of it. It's a point I make shortly, and it's hidden where most people aren't going to see it because it is in the introductory text of the actual time block planner I sell.

• 12:49Cal Newport?

  But I think it's actually a very important point where I said, hey, based on what I had seen, which is exactly what you're describing with Mark, especially if you're new to time blocking, it's almost as if you have to make your initial plan, then take every block that's on there and add 50% more time. 50% more than you think it's actually going to take. Now, of course, this is going to knock things off of your plan, but what you end up with is actually much more likely to be reasonable. It's this, you probably see this all the time. I call it sometimes the fairy tale effect. We write ourselves a fairy tale about how we want the day to go, and then we fall in love with that story because it's great. Like, it really would be great if you got 20 different things done and everything

• 13:29Cal Newport?

  perfectly stacked, and then your mind is simulating being done with all of those things, and it's giving you a reward right there as you're doing the simulation. You're like, well, that feels good. That's what I want to do. But in reality, your schedule has just become intractable. So I like this idea. People are afraid, oh, if I do that, I'm not going to get enough done. But there's also this reality check of the time is the time, right? You're not advising the mark, like, I want you just to spend two hours staring at the wall every day. I mean, you're basically saying, this is how much you can actually get done. Just because you can imagine getting more done on a time block you came up with doesn't mean that somehow that's the right level of work. This is what can actually

• 14:15Cal Newport?

  fit. So, okay, so that sounds good. So, okay, so by being more generous in his blocks, this sounds like it helped, that he felt like he was not falling off the schedule as often. And I'm assuming he didn't immediately get fired. His boss didn't immediately come in and say, hey, it looks like you're getting 20% less done. I was measured it. You're out of here or something. So it sounds like there's a pseudo-happy ending here?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely, there was. And he was less stressed, less stressed, and actually getting more done.

• 14:46Cal Newport?

  All right, I love that. All right, so let's move on. That was good. Let's move on to Chris. So what was Chris up to?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  So Chris is what I would, kind of in a cheeky way, call a streaker. And it's not the kind you think, Cal. Close on, close on.

• 15:04Cal Newport?

  We were about to have a lot of our audio listeners jump over to the YouTube version, and you just disappointed them.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. He loved a big old check mark on the day, right? Like, and that every day kind of looked the same and was real, just, what's the word I'm looking for? Standardized.

• 15:23Cal Newport?

  Okay. He liked the Jerry Seinfeld advice of like, don't break the chain style person, where every day you check off on your calendar, you did the key thing, and you don't want any days where you're missing it, that type of... I'm prone to that type of streaking as well, that there is something satisfying. Okay, so what happened with Chris?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  So we went into multi-scale planning, you know, for a big work project, and in his mind, it needed to have space on his calendar every day. But like most people, every day doesn't look the same for Chris. And so we had to think of different ways for him to find consistency, which I would argue is different than a streak, so that this idea of multi-scale planning did not consume him because it became a real point of, I can't do it every day, and then the whole thing would fall apart.

• 16:14Cal Newport?

  All right, so let me, for the audience who doesn't know, multi-scale planning is the idea where you're looking at your activities on multiple time scales. So, you know, obviously, every day you're making a plan, but in the type of multi-scale planning, I talk about you're also every week making a plan for the week ahead, and then on a bigger time scale, like every quarter, every season, you're making a plan for that time scale as well. I'm assuming, so what you're talking about here is Chris had a major project he wanted to make progress on. Was it at the weekly scale where he was looking at his week ahead that he was saying, I want to make sure there's effort being put towards this project on every single day? Is that, that was, okay?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  That's the one.

• 16:54Cal Newport?

  Okay, but he's not, the difference, just what people don't know about Jerry Seinfeld, they forget about Jerry Seinfeld. At the time, when he did this, every day, I'm going to put a check mark on my calendar, that was when he was just a professional comedian before the TV show. He only had one thing to do. It was to work on writing jokes. Okay, so Chris, I'm assuming, had more than one thing pulling on his time, which is probably, you can continue the story here, but that's probably where he began to have trouble.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  It absolutely is. I mean, not only does he have a career, he had a career that required him to travel. And that was a huge point of friction. He's also a family guy. So he had kids. He had a wife. You know, he had obligations outside of work. And like I said, every day was not the same. He had many hats he had to wear.

• 17:41Cal Newport?

  Interesting. Now, was this a work project or a personal project he was trying to

• 17:46Cal Newport?

  interface in?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  No, it was work. It was a work project.

• 17:49Cal Newport?

  And how much time, in his mind, for it to count as, I worked on this today. I want to keep the streak alive. He probably, what was his minimum, like an hour or something like that?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Oh, he was starting with two hours a day.

• 18:03Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Cal Newport?

  All right, so that wasn't working. So despite his best effort, he would just have the day where you have to go to the kids event at the school, and then it's back-to-back meetings, and a dentist appointment, and then baseball practice, and you're like, I didn't get it in. What was the psychological impact on him at first? You know, what was happening? Was he frustrated? Was he worried? Was he down on himself? What was going on?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Um, it was a real... Frustration, I think, is probably, you know, the one, and he would get so frustrated with it, but it was almost like he just knew that's how it was going to turn out. So he would just kind of wash his hands of it. And we would get a whole bunch of days where he would do, end up doing nothing. And of course, exceedingly frustrated by it.

• 18:48Cal Newport?

  Oh, so if he, this is an interesting observation. So if he lost one day, he would just stop working on it for a while. Like, well, this is just not working. Oh, interesting. Okay. So what worked here? What was the solution?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  So we talked about the difference between just streak mentality, which again, I think a lot of people fall into the trap of it has to look the same every day for it to count. Well, if you're Jerry Seinfeld, working on writing jokes, write a joke a day. Great. It looks the same every day. I give myself a check mark. I move on. Chris was, I need two hours of work a day on this project. Check mark. I move on. And when that wasn't happening, we were falling off. So we, we broke down streak mentality, and I really encouraged him to start looking at it as consistency. I think a great analogy is, imagine over the course of a three-month multi-scale plan, it's about spending $2,000. Okay. You don't

• 19:41Speaker 01

  have to break that down by 90 days and spend the same amount every single day. That analogy really helped him understand it's not about exact same every single day. There are going to be days where you spend more of the money. There's going to be days when you spend less of the money. And for him, it really helped this idea of consistency. Something I taught him was touch it daily. And we talked about what touching it daily could look like. It might not look like creative work, but for him to sustain sort of his focus on it, say on a week where he had to travel. Okay, pull out your notes, refresh yourself. What is it you're thinking through? You know, when you have the odd moment to think about it? Where are you going to pick up next time? And this became a way for him to sustain

• 20:24Speaker 01

  his streak, or put better, consistency, over the course of weeks where he couldn't spend as much time on it.

• 20:31Cal Newport?

  Interesting. So it was a combination of, we're not going to completely deny your streak mentality. So why don't you make sure every day you like touch it or look at it, or even if it's just for five minutes. And then you increase the time scale in which you're looking for consistency. As you need to be making a lot of progress over a bigger time scale as opposed to a little progress every day. Was there a measure, like every week you should get at least as many hours or every month? Was there like a particular time scale or measure? Or is it more, when we look back, because I know it's one of the things that done daily does, right? You look back over the week. Is it, we want to look back and say, you got a good amount done this week? Like, how did he think about what counted as you're making consistent progress? Once it was no longer every single day you're doing two hours?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Well, when we looked back on the, on the two-hour failures, let's put it that way. We'd end up with zero a lot. So looking back was helpful for him to identify times he was able into factor, you know, touching the project, spending 15 minutes reviewing notes, or sometimes he even managed 30, which was surprising to him. And then by the end of the week, it was like, great, we have something here. We have a certain amount we can actually track that you did spend on the project versus the zero you would end up with when you, you know, planned for these fairy tale days of work.

• 21:50Cal Newport?

  Interesting. So this, this reminds me of a couple ideas. I mean, first of all, I think this is important, this idea. I mean, this is classic multi-scale planning. Making progress on things at multiple time scales is key. It's why you can't just live in the day. If it's everything has to happen every day, that quickly falls apart. There's two different ways I've also seen, you know, dealing with this. One I've tried and one that actually Jim Collins talked about, the sort of famed business author. When I was in grad school, I did a lot of deep work tallies. And I didn't even have a, a goal, right? So it wasn't, I have to get this many hours of deep work on this time scale. I just had a piece of card stock next to my desk with the tick marks per week of hours of deep

• 22:33Cal Newport?

  work. And it was just a feedback loop. If that was really small, that's actually really good feedback. I was like, I need to find more time for deep work. And that was about the level I got to. The opposite extreme is this Jim Collins approach, which I, I came across again for the new book I'm working on. He kept a spreadsheet of essentially like deep work or creative. He had some word for it, but like his, his sort of most key work, his hard thinking work. And he kept a spreadsheet of how many hours he did every day. But the key thing he had in the spreadsheet is it would add up the last 365 days. And he would say, that has to be past some huge number. So years worth of deep work, but it's the

• 23:12Cal Newport?

  past 365 days. So if he saw that number starting to get smaller, he'd be like, oh, getting closer to whatever his goal was. He would like work in some days with like a lot of the creative work to get that number back up again. And then you had a buffer if you had a, you know, you're on vacation, that number went back down again. And so there's different time scales here. That's one extreme. I'm looking at the last year. It was some crazy number, like 1,000 hours has to be how much I've done over the last 365 days. Or on the other extreme, I was just every day putting down some tick marks. Some days I put none, some more, and just making sure that seemed okay. So there's a lot of strategies here, but I like that idea of, you can't solve your, you can't

• 23:55Cal Newport?

  capture your whole goals for your life every single day. Like, you have to work on, on other types of time scales. Okay. So excellent. So that worked well. I like the $2,000 analogy too. It's, you don't have to spend exactly this much every day, but over 30 days or 90 days, you want to spend $2,000. All right. All right. Moving on, we have Sarah. What went on with Sarah here?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  So this one is not my favorite to share, but you know, the truth is, it doesn't always work out great for all of our clients. Sarah, yeah, I know. I know. But you know, it's important to talk about, Cal, because the thing is, is, you know, we worked a long time together. We worked really hard. We broke things down. We tried to make friction disappear when we could. And the truth is, sometimes the overwhelm is so much that it kind of doesn't matter how many tools, how many tactics you try. At the end of the day, if you're not willing to do what boils down to the work, it's going to be hard to make

• 25:02Speaker 01

  any progress. So that's kind of what we're talking about with Sarah. And, and what I witnessed with her a lot was that deep work with Sarah, the things that were really meaningful to her often just got completely washed out by the many other things she was juggling.

• 25:20Cal Newport?

  We're talking email, meetings, non-deep work required initiatives, that type of thing?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. It was a lot of, you know, urgencies, fires, other people's priorities would just drown it all out.

• 25:36Cal Newport?

  All right. So moving on, let's talk about Sarah.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yes, Sarah. Well, Cal, Sarah wasn't quite the happy story we'd all love to hear because the truth is, sometimes overwhelm is just too big for us to move forward. And that's really what it came down to with her. We worked a lot on trying to break steps down. We did some multi-scale planning. We attempted time blocking. We broke those time blocks down into smaller time blocks. And, and what was really suffering was Sarah had a lot of deep work projects that were stacking up on her list. We kept a lot of lists. And,

• 26:22Speaker 01

  you know, at the end of the day, all the tools and tactics just weren't cutting it.

• 26:27Cal Newport?

  So she was, it sounds like she was busy. She was doing lots of things, but not that list of deep work projects just wasn't getting smaller?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. The urgencies, the little fires, the shallow work, those were kind of the thing that we couldn't get around her doing most of the time. It was really a struggle.

• 26:49Cal Newport?

  Now, was she, was she on board with this as a problem? Or was there a part of her that was thinking, look, I'm getting positive feedback in the moment by handling these fires, by being accessible or what have you? Like, what was, how did she feel about the state of her work during the period when you were working with her?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Not good. It was a problem. And it was, you know, self-reported problem. I'm getting all of these little things done. I cannot seem to get myself to do the bigger, harder stuff.

• 27:23Cal Newport?

  So what would happen? Like, she would have a plan, you would work with her. Maybe there's a time block plan. Here's your deep work. Time is protected. What would end up happening on those days?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  A lot of times, nothing. We wouldn't get anywhere. And to be clear, we worked through it a lot. We really, we spent a long time working together. We tried a lot of different things. One thing that we did sometimes find success with, and I think this is a really great approach for anybody who is struggling with getting to the work that's hard to do. If it lives on your list for a certain amount of time, we did this with Sarah, say if I saw it on a list for longer than a week, or depending on the size of the project and the consequence of not completing it, it would fall off the list. So, we really tried a lot of different levers to compel her into that harder work.

• 28:13Cal Newport?

  Now, how much do you think her work environment was making the deep work impossible? And how much was it just something about, you know, the way she was processing, the responsibility she felt towards the urgent? Like, how would you sort of balance out that there's too much shallow on your plate because people are putting it there versus the mindset of you're just having a hard time understanding that this stuff will be important, even if, you know, other people might be disappointed, other people might be upset, you don't get back to them, but you have to do this? Like, how do we separate the organization from the person here?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So, there's two ways to do that. I think, one, as a coach, as her coach, I really tried to help her manage the amount of incoming communication. She was fortunate, she got to work from home. And so, we looked at how we could leverage tech to help with that. And also, we had to watch how much tech was involved, because that in and of itself could create some very easy distractions from getting to the deeper work that needed doing. But then, on the other side, I mean, like most people who are struggling with these issues, she cared a lot about the work she was producing and what others thought or would think of

• 29:32Speaker 01

  it. And I would venture to say sometimes she cared so much that would get in the way of even starting it, working on it, definitely completing it.

• 29:41Cal Newport?

  And this sounds like the, maybe an example partially of what I sometimes think about as the jerk paradox, which was, this was an issue that actually came out of a talk I went to give at a big law firm here in DC. And it was actually, there was a club, and it was a women's book club within the, there's a lot of affinity clubs within the big law firm, they had me come to talk. And they were explaining this issue, which is, they say, the personality trait that actually was leading to advancement was essentially being a little bit misanthropic. If you're a bit of, you're not very social, you're a bit of a jerk, you didn't care so much about like, I don't care that you need this, I'm going to work on this thing I want to do. This is what's important. And that the

• 30:24Cal Newport?

  effect of that is that people who are a little off, or a little bit, you wouldn't want to like to hang out with them, were advancing much quicker up the partner track, because they would do more deep work, which would ultimately move the numbers and bring in more money, because they didn't care that they weren't answering your email. They would prioritize themselves. And they were saying, this is a problem, because people who are actually more conscientious and like reasonable human beings are now falling behind. But those are probably actually the people you'd want in the partnership, because it's also, you know, a people business. So, I wonder if something like that was kind of going on here, is that it can be very difficult. I mean, this is the result of the digital, is that you have an inbox full of messages. We can also think of that as like a line of people who need you. And then, every moment, you're making the decision of, do I turn

• 31:09Cal Newport?

  my back on that line? Or do I want to be empathetic and help people who need me? And that's a very strong impulse. We set this up in modern work to have our natural empathetic human social impulses weighed against this much more artificial thing of doing sustained cognitive symbolic reasoning in a sort of isolation, which is a very non-natural sort of thing. That's an impossible or a very difficult trade-off to try to force our brains to make. And so, it sounds like some of that was going on here, is that like, hey, this is important stuff. People need me. I don't want to ignore people. I don't want to be slow to respond. I don't want to be there and jump on the call or the meeting when someone asks me to do it. She was being almost too reasonable of a human being. Am I pushing that too far? Or is there something like that going on here?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  No, there's definitely that going on. And you're right, like, it's a really fine balance. And if you've lived, you know, frankly, your whole life, on the empathetic side of things, it's a really hard, you know, 90-degree turn to become that jerk, right? Like, you just, that's something we practice, you know, with the coaching sometimes, is like, let's practice being a little different than we are. It doesn't always work out, it doesn't always fit, and sometimes the hill is just too big to climb.

• 32:25Cal Newport?

  So, in this case, Sarah, you ended up parting ways, essentially. It became kind of intractable, and she saw this, I'm not going to be able to fix this. And then, she went her separate way?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it wasn't, I'm not going to be able to fix this. Unfortunately, there was something else that got put on her plate that was really overwhelming, and it just, you know, also trying to factor in the coaching. And frankly, the work of working with a coach, the work of trying to do things differently, just lost out. There just wasn't any capacity for it at the time.

• 32:59Cal Newport?

  And this is a paradox of this type of advice, is that it's, when you're in the situation where you most need it, is often the situation where you have no time to give towards it. This is part of my explanation for, of all my books, actually, the book that performed the worst was A World Without Email, which actually has very big ideas and practical advice for taming complete overload. But that book came out during the pandemic. And part of the problem, I believe, is that everyone was so overwhelmed by the problem that I was talking about in the book, because all that got amplified. Once we went remote and we had to move more high-density synchronous interaction to be all asynchronous,

• 33:41Cal Newport?

  all email or Slack, it just exploded, the amount of context, digital context, such a thing we had to do. People were too busy to even think about the solutions to the things that was causing the busyness. So, it's really the, it's the irony of, I mean, I guess we see this in physical fitness too, I suppose, right? Is that it's, when you're in the worst health, that it's the hardest to do the exercising that ultimately will help you, you know, be in better health. But I do have a couple, so I have a couple ideas that come to mind. The two ideas that come to mind when I think about these type of cases, which, they just happened. I remember early in my career, when I was blogging about student advice, I had a web series where I was advising undergraduates in the Boston

• 34:26Cal Newport?

  area to use my student advice. And one of the students, who I called Lena in the series, we had that exact same issue. I was looking at her schedule, I was like, this is intractable. We have to make these major changes. And she couldn't do it, or wasn't willing to do it. She had all the pressure of her hometown on her. She was at MIT. She's like, I can't, I can't do less, like, everyone's counting on me. And it just didn't work. And she ended up having to go home for a semester on mental health leave. It just completely burnt her out. But the two things that came to mind is, one, paradoxically, if you keep adding big, deep work projects to your plate, eventually, you get a logjam where you can't make progress

• 35:09Cal Newport?

  on any deep work project. And I wonder if something like that was going on here. I write about this in my last book, Slow Productivity, that the problem is, is that each major project that has a deep work core brings with it its own administrative overhead, the sort of the meetings, the emails, the back and forth interactions needed for that project to move forward. That's a fixed cost. Each project is, this much of this goes into your schedule. And it has to be done, because you've agreed to this project, and that's how it's going to move forward. If you add too many of these projects to your plate, the fixed overhead costs add up to a point where there's no more time left to do the projects. And it's this tipping point you can go past, where it's terrible, because it's, I've never had more important things to get done, and it's never been harder for

• 35:51Cal Newport?

  me to make even a little bit progress on any of them. And I bet something like this was going on here as well, because we don't track workload in the knowledge work context in any sort of systematic way. We just assume it's better to have more on your plate than less, because then you'll have no downtime. You can just choose what you work on. And we don't factor the fact that, once you say yes to a big project, you're saying yes to a thousand emails, you're saying yes to 25 meetings, you're saying yes to 16 conversations per week in the hallway. You are actually allocating a lot of time outside of the deep work itself, and that time, that time is limited. So, that comes to mind as well. This might have been a workload logjam as well. And some of that's company culture. Like, hey, don't say no. We'll notice if you say no. No one knows how much stuff you're working

• 36:36Cal Newport?

  on, but you better say yes to the thing I'm saying here.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. The logjam, 100%.

• 36:43Cal Newport?

  I'm, you see, you got me preaching here now.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 36:47Cal Newport?

  I can't help it.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  I appreciate it, because you're backing us up, right? Like, I think everybody ends up in that spot at some point. And it can be really hard to know how to unravel it. It feels like a house of cards, right? Like, what happens if you start saying no?

• 37:04Cal Newport?

  And usually that is the answer. I mean, with student Lena, I said, look, you, you have too many activities in your, your course loads too hard. And I did the math. We sat down and filled out a sample calendar and I said, it doesn't fit. I can't fit onto your time in a week, all the activities and studying you have to do. So to me, it's self evident that you got to reduce. She couldn't because the cultural expert, you know, that's how she had gotten into MIT was I do lots of things is what I'm known for. That would be a failure if I, if I, you know, pulled back. And I think this happens in the work context too. I can't reduce what's on my plate. Saying no would be a disaster. Saying no would mark me as a, as not a team player. Like it's a difficult situation, even though you really probably have to cut your workload in half.

• 37:50Cal Newport?

  Would probably double the amount of useful work you're doing for the company, but that's a very hard equation to make. This doing less is going to make you produce more is very paradoxical for people.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  It absolutely is. And that's something I've been concerned about. As a coach with done daily is are we selling the very thing we're trying to keep people from doing? You know, it's, it's, I, I don't know that we actually want to make people more productive in the sort of general sense of do more. You know, it's just do more of what matters most and do less all around. So you can live well.

• 38:31Cal Newport?

  If you don't have, yeah, I don't like the, this is the problem with the word productivity sometimes. It's more about, do you have control over your time and attention or not? And if you do, now you have a lot of options. Now you can, you can aim it to the right places. You can, you can customize your workload. You have a lot of levers you can now pull. If you don't have control over your time and attention, it's just haphazard. And stuff is just going to pile and you're going to fall behind. It's not, I often have to argue this to people. The trade off is not if I use organizational productivity advice, I'm going to be super busy and like doing a lot. And if I don't, I'm going to be on the park bench, you know, reading a novel at lunch and life is going to be that, that somehow it is the,

• 39:14Cal Newport?

  the tools create the stress. And if you don't have the tools, you don't have to be in stress. The reality is it's, it's you're being bombarded. And if you have no systems for controlling your time or attention, it doesn't stop the bombardment. It just means you have no protection. You get hit a lot more. And if you do, now you have a fighting chance of maybe, you know, getting a shield up or finding some cover and figuring out something that's sustainable. It doesn't mean that you necessarily will. I guess that's the point of Sarah, but at least you have a chance. It's about, do you want, you want some leverage over your time and attention, some control and intention? Or do you want to just have your day unfold? But the busyness, I mean, this is, I get in this argument sometimes with, with my friend Oliver Berkman. The busyness doesn't come from having the organizational tools.

• 39:57Cal Newport?

  The business comes from the stuff that you say yes to or is being pushed at you. And that's going to happen whether or not you have a planner or not. That's, it's sort of unrelated. It's what you do with the work that this advice starts to start to matter.

• 40:12Cal Newport?

  I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Do you know what's scarier than the elaborate animated Halloween displays I've been working on this month? It's customers getting ghosted by your own business. See what I did there, Jesse? Ghosted? I'm talking about customers who call, but receive no answer and no callback, just silence. That's the kind of scary that costs you money, which is why I'm pleased that today's episode is brought to you in part by QUO. Spelled Q U O. The business phone system built so you never miss a call. You can set it up in minutes on any device. You can keep your existing number and add teammates as you grow.

• 40:56Cal Newport?

  No I T, no hassle. And QUO's optional built in AI agent handles after hour calls, answers questions and can even book appointments. So you never miss a lead, even when your team is offline. Money is on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/deep. That's Q U O dot com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at MasterClass. Jesse and I think a lot about the production values of the show. What cameras we use, the lighting, the B roll. But you know what I discovered matters the most? Telling a good story. And where did I get that insight?

• 41:40Cal Newport?

  From a masterclass course I watched with the legendary writer, Michael Lewis. The course was titled, Learning How to Tell a Great Story with the Big Short and Moneyball. And it really got into the weeds about what makes a narrative shine. Completely changed the way I thought about what we're doing here at this podcast. This is what sets MasterClass apart. You're not just watching random surface level internet tutorials. You're learning directly from the world's best from across film, business writing and creativity, including yours truly. Last year I released a masterclass course of my own that was titled, Rebuild Your Focus and Reclaim Your Time. Look, that should be reason enough for you to sign up for MasterClass right now. You need to watch that course.

• 42:23Cal Newport?

  Here's the thing. MasterClass offers over 200 classes across 13 categories with plans starting at just $10 a month billed annually. And every new membership comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. MasterClass keeps adding new classes. So there's never been a time to get, there's never been a better time rather to get in. Right now, as a listener of the show, you can get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/cal. That's 50% off at masterclass.com/cal. Head to masterclass.com/cal to see the latest offer. All right, let's get back to our conversation with Haley. All right. What about Jennifer? We, let's get a, we'll get a positive case here. What happened with Jennifer?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay. So Jennifer, wow. Now here's somebody who does fit a lot into her day. I have to admit. It's, it's like one of those people you look at and you're like, I don't know how she does it. And she does it really well. Very calm, very cool, very collected. But this is somebody who continues to improve how she does things. And somehow gets cooler and calmer as she goes. Every, you know, everybody wants to admire this person. But one thing that we worked on with her because she found, you know, because she gets so much done in a day. She is doing so much. She's wearing so many hats, shifting roles. Attention residue was a real problem. She'd kind of time block her day full out.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  She'd, you know, run errands during the day or pick up her kid or have meetings. But when it came to those moments where she really had to like sit down and do some creative, deep thinking, deep work. She was really struggling to kind of turn off the rest of the day. And so we started out by just factoring in what we called transitions. Specifically before her deep work blocks, because that seemed where, to be where it was impacting her the most. She would spend, you know, 30 minutes kind of calming herself down, maybe, you know, messing with her phone or looking through a magazine or something like that. And she just had to kind of wrangle the distraction for a certain amount of time.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  And then she'd look and she'd only have like 30 minutes to work on her deep work at that point. So we started to build in a very specific transition, or at least an intentional transition way of thinking. Sometimes it would be walking between locations before she'd sit down and do her deep work. But that was tagged as transition so that we could address attention residue before she dropped into her deep work block.

• 45:03Cal Newport?

  I'm such a fan of that advice, right? That we, we really underestimate that. How difficult it is to actually change your cognitive context from one thing to another, especially if that other thing is deep work. So, okay. So would she get 30 minutes and she would mark something like that? Would you actually, she would actually think of it as transition time? Would she have a specific ritual or activity? Like what would happen? What worked best for her during these transition periods?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  I think for her, she kind of had this visual. Like, let's say she was transitioning out of like a mom block, if you will, like taking her kids somewhere. And then she was going home to do some deep work for her job. I remember having a conversation with her where she told me like, I am thinking about taking off the mom hat and putting on, you know, my work hat. So for her, and she would do this on the walk, right? She didn't sit down anywhere and like specifically do this transition. She took advantage of a period of time that she had to spend commuting from one place to the next.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  But she intentionally visualized shifting gears so that by the time she got to the deep work, she was ready to go.

• 46:16Cal Newport?

  I love that. Okay. So you have a walk or commute or something you can do to, to, to reset your mind. I remember during the pandemic, saying something like this to remote workers where I would say, you need a commute. I know you don't literally have a commute, but go simulate a commute by walking a mile through your neighborhood to start your day. Then take a lunch break and then go for a walk. So, so we actually kind of need these slimminal spaces sometimes. But I think you nailed the, the neurological reason is because attention residue takes time. That takes time to clear out. The other place I, I like to think about, so I love that advice. Everyone should take that. I also think the other place this is really important is on the tail end of meetings.

• 46:56Cal Newport?

  That don't underestimate all of the open loops that are generated by sitting for an hour in a meeting. All of these tasks and decisions and notes and ideas. And if you jump straight from that meeting into the next thing, your mind is going to say to you, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That we just made a lot of commitments. There's a lot we have to do. When are we going to deal with this? Right? Like that. And then you will have that stress and attention residue. It's almost hard to shake. So I also like adding 15 to 30 minutes on the end of meetings. If you want an hour meeting, I'm going to put an hour and a half or hour 15 on my calendar. And have a period where all I'm doing is like taking notes, sending the emails, getting things on my task list. You can, you can, you can clearly shut down that meeting and get the attention residue off.

• 47:38Cal Newport?

  I mean, this goes back to our first example is sometimes just having, you need more buffer. That, you know, we're not, Silicon Valley doesn't get this because they're used to dealing with computer chips. They don't need buffers. Give me a command, execute. Give me a completely different command, execute. I don't care. It's electrons through the same depth circuits every time. But humans are so messy, like our brains. It takes time to switch from this into this and we just. Don't think about that. You know, we don't, I don't think management thinks about this. The only psychology that management typically thinks about is motivational psychology. How do I make sure that my, you know, sales team is motivated to sell or whatever? But we never think about what you're finding time and again with your clients is the human

• 48:23Cal Newport?

  brain is powerful. It's also slow to change. It can be messy and you need to build your workday around the reality of the main capital resource this knowledge work organization has are these brains. We really need to understand how they work to get the most out of them. They can't just shift, shift, shift, shift, shift, shift, shift. They're not a computer processor. So that to me, that's sort of emerging as a theme and some of the advice you've been giving.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Very cool. I'm glad to see that. Yeah. And I, you know, it's funny because once, once we started practicing these shifts, these transitions, she started trying it in different places. It wasn't just before deep work. Another really meaningful spot for her. And it's kind of has to do with like shutting down the meeting idea was anytime she went to spend time with her family or her kid, she found if she didn't kind of make that transition happen, she showed up there chewing on work.

• 49:16Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  And that's not really what we want. We want to be as present as possible where our feet are.

• 49:21Cal Newport?

  I've had the same issue. If I'm working at my home office, like one of my kids gets home and they immediately want to get into dad, I gotta tell you like 17 details about whatever. It's hard because your brain is still in one spot. And I've learned like actually if I'm going to be working sort of right up until like the kid's getting home, it's better to actually go relocate to my office down the street so that I can have that transition of walking home and clearing my head. I'll be ready to be in dad mode. Whereas if I'm in the home office and I haven't had that 10 minutes, the transition, it's difficult. Human brains are messy. I wish they were simpler, but they're messy. All right. All right, let's talk about Lisa. What did Lisa figure out?

• 50:02Speaker 01

  So shutdown ritual, right? We're sort of talking about a little version of that with that closing out like the meeting or the work block. One thing we bumped in to with Lisa was she was getting a little bit frustrated that that shutdown ritual wasn't happening right at the end of her workday. You know, and there's a couple of different ways to look at this. Well, there's a real reason to shut down at the end of the workday, but we had to work within the confines of her life. Right? And what often happened was she'd work right up to the point she had to run out the door to go start taxiing kids. And so often we weren't seeing that shutdown ritual take place. And for a while it wasn't happening at all.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  I wasn't hearing from her, which is that we often loop communication with a coach with the shutdown ritual. We're trying to, to get a couple of things in there and I just wasn't hearing from her. And I check in with her the next day. I know I didn't do my shutdown ritual. I'm going to try for it again today. Well, we just kept running into the same issue. She was just working right up to the point where she had to leave the office and deal with the second half of her day. And so one thing we did was move the shutdown ritual and we didn't try to cram it in between taxi rides for her kids. We didn't try to cram it in before dinner. I got with her and I said, look, realistically, where could you take at most 15 minutes to close loops?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Take a moment, recognize what you accomplished today, talk about what needs doing tomorrow and you know, really think through and reflect what was frustrating? What do we need to look at? And we decided it was at the end of the, the whole day. Right? So the shutdown ritual got moved. It's not ideal to kind of carry some closed or open loops from work through to the end, but that's just what we ended up with. And I have to tell you, she was far more successful in shutting down when we moved it.

• 51:57Cal Newport?

  Interesting. So she was doing her work shutdown routine, not right after work, but still that same day. And so she was still getting most of those benefits of, you know, for the, the rest of the night, but also probably confidence of, I know there's open loops as I run out the door. I am going to shut these down later today. So it isn't, this won't be forgotten. Just being able to tell your brain probably helped. Even if we can't deal with this right now, we are at seven. And probably even that helped from just the anxiety reduction standpoint. If you trust a shutdown is going to happen, you're still going to get a lot of the benefits that you wouldn't have if you're, if you weren't going to shut down at all. This, this happened to me last night, by the way, same situation.

• 52:40Cal Newport?

  I had things right up until I had to run from my office at Georgetown to coach baseball, which takes a long time. So I wasn't really getting home till seven and at the, and I had to eat, I was starving, eight. Then I took 10 or 15 minutes, did the shutdown. Then my wife and I went for a walk to sort of shut down the other sorts of things and get a sense of the, the day coming up. That was all happening between, you know, seven, 15 and eight, but it was still a shutdown routine. And I think it makes a huge difference. So that's interesting that it's okay. If you can't get the shutdown routine in right away, you could still get a shutdown routine in.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. It's I, yeah, I think you gotta talk to yourself. Don't listen to yourself because she was definitely saying, well, I'm failing at this. And then she was dragging open loops through her nights, you know? So.

• 53:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I mean, I used to tell people, just schedule something on your calendar for the end of the day to do it. But the problem is that sometimes works, but also that end of the day block is sometimes when the meetings happen. Right? Like that, that's, that's the issue with like, it makes sense of like, I will protect that time, but you can't always for whatever reason. And there's good reasons for it. Sometimes like that is the time that people need to grab like, no, the four to five is like a good meeting time because that's often open still on people's calendars. And so it's, it's, it's unavoidable that you're going to get into those situations in a lot of jobs. All right, we're making progress now. We're getting, so we got two more here I want to get to. Let's talk quickly about Rachel.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yes. So common occurrence with people who are high achievers, they obsess over quality, which I know you're a big proponent of. For Rachel, it was becoming a real point of conflict because we weren't getting anything done because of the obsession over quality. So we had to work on the other end. We actually had to practice choosing good enough, which was not easy.

• 54:36Cal Newport?

  So like, what type of thing? What does that mean? Like practically speaking in her job, how is obsessing over quality turning into an obstruction?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Well, you know, and I don't want to turn this into like AI bashing, but.

• 54:52Cal Newport?

  No, please, please.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  I know it's your favorite. It's your favorite. One thing I would see is she would take something as simple as an email, professional email, and run it through several AI before she would even consider sending it. And even then, sometimes it would not be sent. So that's the kind of stuff we were up against and it was a, to be clear, this wasn't like, obviously she cared. She cared greatly how she was coming across, but that, that pursuit of top quality, you know, deliverables, it just kept her in pursuit. She never could arrive sometimes at a point of this is good enough. It's time to put it out there. And we saw that reflected in some of her bigger work projects.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  And it would definitely push deadlines. It would kind of create some backup and conflict on her working teams. And so those are the kind of things that we were having to, to work through. And, and really it be, it was just, we have to practice choosing good enough. What does good enough like? What does done look like? That was a great question for her.

• 55:57Cal Newport?

  So that, so what helped? That help in like in advance figuring out a definition of done before you started working on a project or what was the most effective thing ultimately?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  That did, once we kind of got that question in place and we'd put it in our time block, right? When she was working on a certain project, remember just ask yourself, what does done look like? And then the next question we ended up adding in and folding into our everyday kind of communication and practice was, could I say good enough? And how it, it kind of became, again, we're really personalizing things. So she kind of had to develop this kind of scale of good enough for herself. Like, all right, if I'm in the five, six range, it's good enough. Let's go. Right? And just kind of let go and see what happens. And so we kind of had to expose her to good enough over a period of time where she got comfortable accepting that like, we didn't have to chase perfection in this case, this

• 56:50Speaker 01

  high quality output that she deemed never good enough actually was almost always just fine.

• 56:58Cal Newport?

  I mean, I think it's a, it's a, it's a point I underestimated. You know, you mentioned, I talk about obsess over quality. It was one of the principles in slow productivity was the third principle. And I think it was my editor who came back and said, I think you're underestimating the role of perfectionism as an obstacle when you give this type of advice. And so I ended up having to add a very large discussion about sidestepping perfectionism while you care about quality to that chapter because it's more common than I, I realized I didn't have a perfectionism problem. There's another way I've been thinking about it recently. I'll just throw out there for the listener, which sounds similar to what Rachel's solution looked like. But one of the ways I often think about it is when you obsess over quality, you, you want your skill level to be rising.

• 57:40Cal Newport?

  So the, the, your max quality you can deliver should be going up. But when it comes to any deliverable, be comfortable living within, you know, 80% of your max, good enough. Right? And what you're really looking at is like, okay, so it's, it, you're, you're doing good enough. You had 80% of like your, your max quality, but that max quality is going up over time because you care about doing things well and getting better. That means the quality of what you produce is going up over time. Right? And so whether at each step, you're at a hundred percent versus 80 matters much less than are you moving up? Right? Because if you keep getting better at something, your 80% of quality is going to be way better

• 58:24Cal Newport?

  than your a hundred percent quality when you weren't as good. But the difference to the individual is really massive because delivering good enough, I'm 80% of my max on the quality here is way, way, way more sustainable than trying to be perfect. And so it's, that's, that's what I've come back to is it's all arbitrary. Right? Like if, if you want to be delivering stuff this good, just get your skill level to the place where that's like at 80% of what you can do. Right? So there's a difference between growing your max quality that you could produce versus insisting on always hitting your max quality in the moment. So I, in my mind, because I'm a nerd, I imagine these graphs and there, there's a gap between

• 59:05Cal Newport?

  them, but both of the curves are, both of the curves are going up. But I have learned my lesson that this is actually a very important topic because a lot of people, this is an issue.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  It is. Well, I mean, perfectionism is a way to avoid ever being judged. Right? It is very hard for a lot of us to accept feedback. But to your point about improving over time, how can you become a better version of yourself if you live in a vacuum?

• 59:37Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  So with Rachel, it really became a practice of exposing herself to that so that she could improve. Right? She needed feedback from her colleagues in order to know if what she was building was working, if there were ways to do it better. Right? And she gained skill and knowledge from exposing herself. But we had to kind of find the right dosage of that because for a perfectionist, it can be really hard to open yourself up to.

• 1:00:03Cal Newport?

  All right. So I think we have time for one more here. Let's hear about David, who I think is an entrepreneur, right? So this is a good twist to have someone who effectively works for himself.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yes. And with David, it was a really, really common. It's a common thing we see amongst entrepreneurs. They end up doing all the work. Right? Until you can grow your company to a size that allows you to hire on people, you end up doing all the creative work, all the administrative work. And I'll be honest, we see it all the time. The administrative stuff, the emailing, the customer service, all those little urgencies, they will consume you. And that's what he was drowning in. He had some software development that he needed to do. And he wasn't getting to it because he was spending his whole day in his inbox. And it is common. We see it all the time.

• 1:00:55Cal Newport?

  So there was, there was never a shortage of emails to be answered. So you could, if you chose, constantly be in there answering emails. So that's what, so he was just basically, he was an inbox warrior, which is a problem if you're also the sole source of creating the value things that keeps your company alive. Because no one, as I always say, no one pays you for answering emails. And so I could see why this was a problem. Okay. So how did he, how did he get out of this?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Well, so we, we had to try a couple of different things. And I'm all about kind of experimental periods of time. So I work in, I generally work in like two week blocks with my clients to try new things. And one thing we tried doing was putting constraints on his shallow work times, his email times. And to be honest, he needed to answer these, a lot of these emails, because it was customer service, right? And he didn't have anybody just yet to manage those things. It felt very productive and in a way it was. But he was frankly, pretty good at it, pretty quick at it. But he would kind of spend his whole day kind of sitting around waiting for these emails to come across his inbox. There wasn't really big, large expanses of time for him to do the deep work that he needed to do. So we started by putting constraints on his shallow work.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  And we did see that that kind of sharpened his work in those times. Because if he only had limited time, then he had to kind of knock out more than if he was just sitting back, casually working through his inbox all day long. So that was the first thing that we did and it, and it did help.

• 1:02:23Cal Newport?

  Okay. So he was still getting everything done. Because you're saying, when you're focused on a single context with some constraints, you just are, you get more done in the, in the same amount of time. So it's not like he was, I have to sacrifice customer responsivity. Or I have to sacrifice, you know, these client leads and give up on business in order to have time for deep work, actually just having clear demarcations. It still got done, but it freed up time for the other types of efforts.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  It absolutely did. It turned, and he was kind of surprised. He was like, okay, I actually have a lot more time in my day than I thought.

• 1:02:58Cal Newport?

  That is, that is an inspiring note to end on because a lot of people feel like that's not possible. All right. Well, I think that is a, a great, optimistic, practical note on which to end this discussion. I learned a lot hearing about how real people both struggled and then ultimately adapted the type of ideas we talked about here on the show to their real lives. So Haley, I want to thank you for coming in and sharing these examples. We'll have to have you back again later with a new collection of real world tales from real world productivity woes, because I found this really useful. So, so thank you. Thank you for joining us.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for having me, Cal. I will look forward to the next time.

• 1:03:38Cal Newport?

  And of course, if you're interested in what is going on over there at Done Daily, that's just donedaily.com. Do I have that right?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  You do.

• 1:03:47Cal Newport?

  All right. There we go. Thank you, Haley.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Thanks, Cal. See you soon.

• 1:03:51Cal Newport?

  All right. So there we have it. That was my conversation with Haley Pulley from Done Daily. Haley, thanks for coming on and sharing all of these insights. I felt like I learned a lot, even though the ideas were mine. Hearing about these complications that real people had, added a whole new layer of nuance to understanding how this type of advice should actually be applied. Here's my meta observation, a sort of high level observation. You got to iterate. That seems to be the thread that weaves together all of the examples we just heard. You start with a good idea for how you're going to manage your time and attention, and then you test it. And then after you test it, you come back and say, what do I need to adjust? You test it some more, and then you adjust it some more.

• 1:04:36Cal Newport?

  And when you do this, you'll discover what works for you is going to be very different than what works for another person, which will be very different than what works for me. Maybe the underlying principles are the same. Maybe even the core strategies are the same, but they have been customized to your particular situation. So I'm beginning to realize that perhaps the biggest danger when it comes in time and attention management is not necessarily people refusing to have any types of systems. It's instead insisting on being rigid in the systems you implement. And when those fail, you just give up altogether. So maybe that's going to be our meta mindset is that everyone's life is different. If a particular idea for time and attention management isn't quite working for you, adjust.

• 1:05:18Cal Newport?

  It's okay. Make a tweak, make a move, add something, take something out. It's all about figuring out what works in your own life. So, you know, thanks again to Done Daily for giving us that information. I think I'm going to have to have them back. You know, we should have them back again with a new collection of case studies. This is really useful to get real few. And we should find other topics, actually. I gotta tell Jesse this. We should find other topics I talk about where we can get more real world feedback. I thought that was really useful. But anyways, thanks, Done Daily. Thanks for listening. That's it for today. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. And until next time, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world.

• 1:06:00Cal Newport?

  Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com/ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, calnewport.com/ideas.