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

Dr. Cal Newport (00:00:17):

We don't write to-do list. We write wishlist.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:19):

Say that again.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:00:20):

So we think we're making a to-do list for the day, but it's a wishlist. It's wouldn't it be great if we got all of these things done today and you fall in love with that story. You're like, man, if I got all of these errands done and all these calls, this would be great, and you feel so good about imagining that list being done. You don't realize that you just put three days worth of work onto your plan for the day.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:38):

I feel very called out right now.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:00:40):

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 what I'm trying to get people. The goal is to have intention for your time.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:52):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:01:08):

Oh, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this as well.

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:10):

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.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:01:25):

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 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 what I'm trying to get people.

Dr. Cal Newport (00:02:55):

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 going to watch TV for the next four hours. It's these little snippets of distraction, a little social media, a little check-in on a website right here, jumping over to this game right here. So our attention's fragmented. This makes it harder to do things, so we are 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. We don't realize the degree to which looking down at these devices all the time, allowing companies that make a fortune out of figuring out how to get us to look at that screen to dominate our cognitive landscape. We don't realize the degree to that puts us out of mental shape. It would be like we're all professional athletes and we're smoking and drinking milkshakes. We're like, well, we like the cigarettes. The milkshakes taste good. We're not realizing, well, this is making us perform much worse when we're out on the playing field. The same thing's happening with our brains. You're going to look at this stuff enough when it comes time to think hard, to come up with a new idea, to be creative, to push through that project to the finish line. We struggle and I don't know, we realize the degree to which we're just out of cognitive shape.

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:34):

Well, I also think this has a huge implication too for anybody that's caring for little kids or caring for aging parents, and so you're getting it both at work and you're getting it at home too because you're a caregiver. That being out of cognitive shape is also the reason why you have no time for yourself and you're exhausted and ever ends. I mean, are those connected?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:04:55):

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 charge content, maybe coming through social media, what does charge content mean? It's made to make you emotional so you have an algorithm that is selecting things for you to see that's going to get a reaction because if you have a reaction, you're going to scroll to the next thing.

 

(00:05:14):

Well, what's the biggest reactions we can make? You're going to be really upset. You're going to be really angry. You're going to be really surprised or sad. That's gold if you're a company trying to get you to look at a phone, but it's terrible if it's your mind and you're trying to be present with your kids and it's bath time and instead of being able to just be there and be with your kids, you're feeling anxious and you're feeling distracted and you don't feel good at all. That's the state we put ourselves in, and we just think of it now as this is what it feels like to be alive in the modern world. I don't think we realize that a lot of this is actually a self-imposed sense of negative feeling.

 

Mel Robbins (00:05:51):

Wow. I'm sorry, I just wanted that to sink in for a minute because I think that for most of us That's right, you don't even realize that there's a different way to live your life. We have been so sucked into this sense of busyness and you just called it charge content, which I've never heard anybody say before, but it makes sense of constantly needing stimulation, which is subsequently exhausting your mind and your body and your spirit.

Dr. Cal Newport (00:06:39):

I think that reaction is why I wrote the book.

 

Mel Robbins (00:06:42):

Say more.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:06:43):

The idea that putting the word slow in front of productivity makes people nervous, told me that we have a problem 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? What do people think productivity means and why is that broken? Then I had this personal thread going on, which is I have three boys,

 

(00:07:19):

And they were just entering this age, that elementary age where a switch flipped where they needed basically every dad hour possible. I guess it's a son and dad sort of thing. So then I was thinking in my own life, how do I keep doing the things I need to do to be sort of successful in my job but have way more time for them? Because they're in this phase now. It's no longer toddler survival phase. It's we need to be around dad, we need dad time. So I was thinking about it as well. So both these things came together and I was figuring out, okay, what's going on with productivity? Why is it stressing us out? Is it possible to be productive without being stressed out? Is it possibly productive without being super busy? And I went down this rabbit hole of where did our current notion of productivity come from? What is our current notion of productivity and is there one that could be slower? And this was where the book came out of.

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:11):

Cal, what does everybody get wrong about productivity?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:08:14):

This was the problem. We had a definition, and by we, I mean economist, we'd had a definition for hundreds of years, which was, it's a ratio. It's this much stuff went into the system, this much stuff came out, and if you can get more stuff out, you're more productive. It originated talking about agriculture, we have this many acres of land. If we can get this many bushels of wheat versus that many bushels, then we have a more productive way of tending our crops. Then we got factories. It made a lot of sense. We have this many workers in the factories. How many model t's are we producing per day? And when we switched away, we built Model T's, the went up that's more productive. That was the definition of productivity that we had established for a couple hundred years. Then office work became big, right? So this idea, I call it knowledge work in the book. Knowledge work is a term from the 1950s because that's when people working with their brains became a major thing in a way that it wasn't before. Those definitions of productivity didn't work anymore because there were no model T's to point to. If I'm working at an office job, I can't say at the end of the day, here's a pile of widgets. See, I produced 10 widgets today. Aren't I being productive? That person only produced seven instead in office jobs, people were working on many different things. What they were working on was somewhat unclear because it would shift from day to day. The person next to me would be working on different things that I'm working on. It all became way more vague and hazy. So we no longer had a good way of actually with numbers saying, here's how productive you are. Here's how productive that person is. And so my argument is what we did instead is we fell back on this rough rule that I call pseudo productivity, which just said, the more I see you doing, the better. So visible activity will become my proxy for you're 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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:10:22):

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. 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 and a healthcare system or the efficiencies that a fire department we're always measuring something. And 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

 

(00:11:44):

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?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:11:54):

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 most jobs you can point to, oh, this is the thing that matters, right? If you're a professor like I am, you want to teach your classes well and you want to produce research that makes an impact on the world in your particular field. And yet so much of what we do is unrelated to that or gets in the way of that.

 

(00:12:40):

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 fifties and sixties. So what I think has happened is this pseudo productivity culture in work has made its way into our personal life. Whether you have one of these jobs or not, it gets into our general culture. More is better than less. Busy is good. Non-busy is a problem. Once that gets into our culture, then other parts of your life, you picked that up, it's why I think people in their personal life are taking on more things and are busier than they would've been 20 years ago or 30 years ago, that our personal lives, cultures are often downstreamed 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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:57):

Well, I also feel like there's a lot of make wrong that people do when you look at yourself in 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, not busy because 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?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:14:34):

Well, we think more it makes us better or more is more value, or if we're not doing more, that we're missing out on opportunities, even though I think the opposite is true. I tell a lot of these stories in the book that often the people who are happiest or most fulfilled, what's it about? One or two things they do really well,

 

(00:14:53):

One or two things they really care about. When you think about people historically, for example, who you really admire, they're often neglecting in some sense by our modern standards, whole aspects of their life because they think this thing is really important and I get a lot of value out of it, this mindset of do less but do better and know why. So I'm not doing as many things, but the things I'm doing, I do well and I have a real connection to it. 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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:15:42):

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.

Dr. Cal Newport (00:15:58):

Well, the key word that's missing from that that makes it less stressful to people is do fewer things at once. So I'm really wary of doing too many things at the same time. And my argument is, here's what happens. When you agree to do something, it brings with it administrative overhead, right? Emails that you have to answer, meetings you have to do conversations you have to have, right? That's just natural and working on something, I got to collaborate with people on this work. What happens as you say yes to more things? Well, they each bring with them their own administrative overhead.

 

(00:16:35):

Now your time is limited per day, right? That's fixed. So more and more of your day will now get spent on that administrative overhead, the meetings and the emails and the conversations, which leaves less time to actually do the work. And what paradoxically begins to happen is you get way slower. So you think if I say yes to a lot more things, I'll get a lot more things done and that'll make me more productive. But what really happens is, as you say yes to too many things, your day gets increasingly jammed up talking about those things and the speed at which you actually finish things plummets. So if you work on fewer things at the same time, you're less stressed, more of your day is spent doing real work, but the overall pace at which you're accomplishing things that actually goes up. So I make this argument that the businesses that say, wait a second, do fewer things, we're going to run out of money, we're going to lose our competitive edge. I say, no, no, no, no. Zoom out and measure how many things are you finishing per year? If you're working on fewer things at once, it's going to skyrocket because your day is actually going to allow you to make progress on things, and over time you're going to get through things much faster. So I think doing fewer things at once is critical.

 

Mel Robbins (00:17:42):

It goes against that saying that everybody says, if you want something done, ask a busy person. How does this to your personal life? Because I think when you hear that, you're like, that sounds great, Cal. Who's going to take care of mom? Who's going to do this? How do you translate that to your personal life? I can see that for business. You can't be in 11 businesses at once. Do you actually know the two or three most important things that need to get done this week, this month, this year to be successful in business? And I made massive mistakes in the very beginning of just saying yes to everything out of survival.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:18:18):

Well, I have this phrase on my podcast that's called Facing the Productivity Dragon. 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, and I'm trying to do this and I'm training for the marathon and I'm taking care of my parent and I'm also trying to learn how to shoot archery. You have these big long list of things and facing the productivity dragon is actually listing out, here's all the things I want do and how much time this is going to take, and then realizing I can't do all these things and we call it facing the dragons. 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 dragons, like a reality check is like, well, what time do I have?

 

(00:19:01):

And there's phases of life where it's not what you would want. 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, that's not going to happen. Now there's another season of life where maybe that will or I'm taking care of a parent who's aging. This is a huge time commit. 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. 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, read one novel a week, and I want to spend two evenings a week if I can at the coffee shop reading

 

Mel Robbins (00:20:00):

One novel a week. Cal, how fast do you read for Crying Out Loud? That sounds a little ambitious Cal

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:20:07):

Per month, I should say.

 

Mel Robbins (00:20:08):

Thank you. Thank you. 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 were young parents, it had always been his dream to get an MBA. And when you think about this principle, do fewer things at the same time,

 

(00:20:32):

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, one for me is learning Spanish. This. So this is something I've been talking about for decades, okay? It's always there. Another one, learning guitar. Everybody in my family plays, I do not. I always 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. 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 it's just not important right now

 

(00:21:19):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:22:15):

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 'em. We knew we were going to hang them.

 

Mel Robbins (00:22:30):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:22:35):

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

 

Mel Robbins (00:22:40):

Yes, that's hilarious.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:22:42):

But I think that's a perfect example, and I tell a bunch of stories. I found this really important. I tell a bunch of stories in the more recent book about the pace at which people who did famous things actually did those things.

 

Mel Robbins (00:22:57):

I want to hear those. What are they?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:22:58):

So you look at someone like Isaac Newton, like a big example, right? Like, oh God, he wrote this book that invented calculus and figured out gravity. He worked on that thing off and on for decades. Now we don't know how long it took him. We just know like, oh, he did this thing that was really impressive. Or Jane Austin, she sort of was working on these books in the background, but it wasn't until later in life basically she got towards her young forties that she sort of finally finished these books. We don't know how long it took her. She said she wrote these great books. 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 BA that's great. And it opened up these interesting opportunities, or Mel learned to play guitar and maybe it's 10 years from now that you actually do it. The idea that it all has to get done right now, I think often traps us. So doing fewer things, taking your time with things, it adds up over time. I think it's a perfect example though, I think is like, I really want to do this, but I can't do a full-time program right now. Great, I'll take my time.

 

Mel Robbins (00:23:59):

And I love the example that you gave that, alright, I'm just in the chapter of my life where I'm raising young kids or, all right, I'm in the chapter of my life where the amount of time I have with my parents is limited and I really value that more than these other things that I thought were important. Can you speak to the person who has trouble saying no? They feel so guilty saying no. What is your advice to somebody who needs to start saying no, but just has trouble doing it?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:24:28):

You're probably saying no more than you think.

 

Mel Robbins (00:24:30):

Okay,

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:24:31):

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 until 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. You're already controlling your workload and then two that recognize other people don't care about you and your workload as much as you think.

 

(00:25:03):

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's going to go off when you say no, and they're going to be like, why is this person saying no? They don't care that much about you in that sense, right? They're just, Hey, can you do this? And you say no, like, oh, great, I'll ask someone else, right? 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 control your workload. There's also the Matt Damon rule, which is similar. His rule was always you have to project yourself to the day before the thing you just agreed to is about to happen. So if you're the night before, are you going to be psyched or are you going to say, oh my God, I have to fly to Baltimore now or do whatever. So because it's exciting in the moment to say yes to something that sounds fun because you're just thinking about the fun part, but how are you going to feel the night before when you're having to pack and go to the airport and be away from your kids? And if you're not going to be excited, then say no right now.

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:04):

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 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've alluded 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.

 

(00:27:05):

But we don't need science to convince us of something that we've all experienced directly. Our brains work better when we're not rushing. What I got from this section of the book, I could feel my brain exhale, is that in addition to that sense that I think we all feel that we're being squeezed to death to produce as much as we can, that we're also missing out on what's possible when we slow down and give our mind, body and spirit, its best chance to do our best work, whether that's the video you're creating for a YouTube channel or it's simply being able to be present with your parents when you're spending that hour with them or present with your kids when you are spending a little bit of time with them. Instead of jamming in 15 phone calls. I had something happen that was so kind of sad. I had a woman come up to me and say, oh, hi, I love your podcast. 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, it's really important that I am away because I work like crazy and I've built this big business and I'm constantly online and I'm never present with them unless I'm on vacation.

 

(00:28:38):

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 that she could actually say that. And I'm only present with my kids when I'm on vacation. The only time I'm not working. What a sad thing.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:29:02):

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. Where you see this a lot is grad students. So I'm an academic, and when I was at the doctoral program here in Boston, MIT just have a lot of memories of being back here. It's very scary for a lot of students who arrive at something like a doctoral program because you have a lot of time, you have a lot of flexibility, and the 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.

 

(00:30:05):

It's too scary, it's too overwhelming. This idea of I'm just going to sit and think and hopefully I produce a good paper six months from now, and you see it all the time that you can point out these are the students who are suffering from this. They take on all sorts of obligations. They get really frantic. They never make it through the program, but they do it because it was too scary psychologically to say, I just have to eventually produce something good.

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:26):

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

 

(00:30:34):

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 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 productivity, which isn't how we're wired today. And I want to keep going with the three principles.

Dr. Cal Newport (00:31:32):

Well, this goes back to slowing down how long you spend on things and being okay with it. We set the standard where we write ourselves a fairytale or here's these things we want to do. I want to get my MBA, I want to renovate the house. I want to learn this programming language so I can get ahead at work. And we write a fairytale 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 going to do. I'm going to do all these things right now. And it's impossible because these things take a lot of time and we stress ourselves out and we fall apart trying to do it. So working at a natural pace is don't write a fairytale.

 

(00:32:11):

Take the time things need and maybe do one thing at a time and know that if it takes you this many years to do the MBA and you don't get to the house until two years from now and that you'll later maybe you'll pick up this programming language, you're going to wait until 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 on natural pace means is in the context of even a given day, you don't have to be all out day.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:39):

Okay, well, let's talk about this because I feel that there's a lot of us that I think because of pseudo productivity and this obsession with busyness and the fact that we're very used to feeling this overwhelm and this stress and this constant buzzing that I have, for example, Cal, the most unrealistic expectation about what I could get done in 10 minutes, and I am seeing this expression on your face that I've seen on my husband Chris's face. So I would imagine maybe your wife is a little bit more like me, where you're in the car waiting and she's still running around the house trying to get some things done and make a phone call, and then she can squeeze 25 things into about nine minutes,

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:33:27):

And it takes me 90 minutes to do the same amount of things.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:30):

Yes, but you know that.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:33:31):

I know that.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:32):

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.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:33:47):

Oh yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:48):

So how is this a function of this pseudo productivity?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:33:51):

Oh yeah. We don't write to-do list. We write wishlist.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:54):

Say that again.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:33:55):

So we think we're making a to-do list for the day, but it's a wishlist. It be great if we got all of these things done today, and you fall in love with that story. You're like, man, if I got all of these errands done and all these calls, this would be great. And you feel so good about imagining that list being done. You don't realize that you just put three days worth of work onto your plan for the day. It's why I tell people to actually make a blocked plan for their day.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:18):

Okay, hold on. Can we just unpack the wishlist thing?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:34:20):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:21):

Because I feel very called out right now. I love making to-do lists, but I do think they are wishlist. 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 how everybody feels when they make a long to-do list or wishlist I should call it now?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:34:51):

It feels good.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:52):

Yes,

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:34:53):

But it's not your fault that it's unrealistic. The human brain is not good at these time predictions. Estimating how long it takes to answer for emails is not something our brain evolved to do well.

 

(00:35:04):

So we're really bad at estimating time. So our brain just says, Hey, it would be great if we did all these things. It's not our fault. I mean, there's nothing in our history as a species that made us good at fine tuned time estimations of these really abstract things we do in the modern world. So we're really bad at it. And that's why I say make a plan with your actual time. What am I doing during this next block of time? Is this deep work or is this not deep work? And if it's not deep work, then great. Let's answer a bunch of emails, get a bunch of errands done. In fact, let's batch that together.

 

(00:35:37):

If we're going to be bouncing all around, let's bounce all around. Let's consolidate that. If it's deep work though, my rules are simple, 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. This is 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 onto the news.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:07):

Do you shut your laptop?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:36:09):

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

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:13):

Okay, you can trust yourself for that. 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 message and see if anything came in.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:36:21):

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

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:23):

What do you mean you get used to it.?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:36:24):

You can actually practice this.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:26):

How the hell am I going to practice this?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:36:27):

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

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:32):

I thought I was doing this for my muscles and my stomach muscles and my biceps cal. You're saying I got to do interval training for my brain. That's how bad it's gotten.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:36:40):

You'll get better results than you probably will do an interval training for your muscles. Okay, great. Because our mind is very valuable, and I actually do this with people. I've done this with undergraduates before who have been completely distraction riddled, and by the end of a semester, I can get them locked in for 90 minutes at a time.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:58):

Cal, help me out here.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:36:59):

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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:07):

Paying your bills.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:08):

Yeah. 20 minutes. It's got to be something that requires focus and you're going to set a timer, and if you wander off and do something else, if you glance at that phone or you go to an internet tab or what have you, you got to stop that timer and start it over.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:21):

Really?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:22):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:22):

Okay.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:23):

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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:31):

Okay.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:31):

Right? So you practice that until it's no longer so difficult. Your mind isn't rebelling.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:36):

Alright. Can I ask you a question?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:37):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:38):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:45):

Two weeks.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:46):

Two weeks?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:46):

That's what I, I've noticed.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:47):

Why two weeks?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:47):

That's just what I've noticed empirically. Yeah. Two weeks you're usually pretty comfortable and then you add 10 minutes,

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:55):

So then it becomes 30.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:56):

It becomes 30,

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:57):

And you do that for another two weeks, and then it becomes 40.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:37:59):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:00):

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 a time block? I realize you got a big muscle in terms of your brain, but I got meat flaps up here waving in the wind, and so mine's not that strong. But is there a limit to how much you would recommend somebody do these time blocks for deeper work?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:38:22):

90 minutes would be the goal.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:24):

90 minutes is the goal.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:38:25):

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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:38):

Wow.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:38:39):

And then take a break.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:40):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:38:53):

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, that's when your 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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:31):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:39:34):

No, but here's what I do to get the mental relief. I keep everything I need to do written down somewhere, but I don't treat it as a plan for the day.

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:44):

Oh, this is life-changing.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:39:46):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:47):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:39:54):

Oh, it's critical. Yeah. There's a whole idea in the time management world. There's a guy named David Allen,

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:01):

Of course,

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:40:02):

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

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:05):

Okay,

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:40:06):

So it's his idea, but I live by it and 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 are obligated to do that's only in your head, your brain has to keep that alive.

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:26):

Yes. It's like the tabs are open upstairs.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:40:28):

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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:35):

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. I want to read to you from this part of your book where you talk about working at a natural pace is on page one 15, our exhausting tendency to grind without relief hour after hour, day after day, month after month is more arbitrary than we recognize.

 

(00:41:29):

It's true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don't always dictate the details of our daily schedules. It's often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest task maker. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness. I would love to have you 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? 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?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:42:24):

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. They 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. 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. This is the transaction that's happening. If they trust that you have your act together. So if you're organized, if you deliver, when you say you're going to deliver, you're reliable. You never drop the ball. When they pass something on to you, their stress goes away. 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. 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.

 

(00:43:42):

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. I'm putting this on my schedule now. That's what 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. 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. That must be like the right time for you to get it done. So trust can go a lot farther than we think.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:22):

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've vehemently argued with you, I don't have time. I don't 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. People can get themselves into this crazy making. What advice do you have for the person that's listening that wants desperately to work at a natural pace, but has no idea how to assess the demands of the day at work and in life and actually see it with clear eyes about what is important and what's not important? That phrase that I love that if everything's important, nothing is.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:45:25):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:45:26):

How do you stop yourself though, Cal?

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:45:28):

Yeah, yeah. Well, 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 Mel got back to us last time? There's a whole group of professors studying your performance, and if you're not going as fast as possible, the alarm bells are going to go off. They'll be like, what happened here? Why did this take you four hours instead of three? But the reality is no one cares that much about you. They're throwing work at you because they don't want it on their plate, and they're just happy that it's off their plate, and you have more flexibility to figure out, how do I actually want to get things done? 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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:12):

Can you ask for that at work? Could you say to your boss, is that something that makes you seem more organized? I think a lot of us are afraid to say, Hey, I've looked at my schedule and 80% of the time that I'm at work, I'm in meetings 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? I think people are terrified to reclaim their time.

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:46:41):

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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:53):

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

 

Dr. Cal Newport (00:46:55):

Meetings. Yeah, don't do it that way. Don't say, I can't get any work done because of these meetings you're making me go to and I want to do less. Now, the conversation you have instead is you say, okay, there's two different types of work. There's deep work and shallow work, and they're both important. So deep work is when I'm actually focusing on producing something that's valuable. Shallow work, like all the collaboration has to happen around this. 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 value for our company? Let's have this conversation together. And you agree on a ratio, and maybe it's like 50 50 or maybe it's if you have more of a administrative position, it's like 30% deep work and 70% non deep work, but you agree on a number with the goal of producing more value for the company,

 

(00:47:48):

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? That's your deep work time. I'll tell the team No meetings for Mel. During those times, 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.

 

Mel Robbins (00:48:36):

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, a deep versus a shallow. Both are important and both have necessity 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 focus 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 what I'm experiencing. How can you work with me to get us closer to a different ratio that just takes it out of what can feel like, oh my gosh, are they going to think that I'm whining? Am I not getting work done? Am I not being a team player and focuses everybody on what's actually important, which is adding value, focusing on what's important? That's absolutely brilliant. Well done, well done, Cal.

Dr. Cal Newport (00:49:55):

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 compliment each other. 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 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.

 

(00:50:37):

I'm really good at this. You want me doing this really good work, client or boss or whoever is you're dealing with. So yeah, I'm not doing these meetings or I'm taking these three things off my plate, or my books are doing well enough now I'm not doing corporate speaking anymore, or whatever it is. So you get this nice 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

 

(00:51:14):

Because you're thinking this isn't quite right. This could be better, this could be better. And so the goal of this is more the process of I want 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 slow productivity that are otherwise unattainable.

 

Mel Robbins (00:51:46):

Well, what I love about this is that at the end of the day, what you're forcing us to do through the lens of the way that we view work and time and productivity is to slow down long enough and truly understand what's valuable and meaningful to you in this chapter of your life or work. Because if you're talking about obsessing over quality and work and the value to the marketplace, in my words, I would say, what is the impact I'm making? And that's worth obsessing over. But I love that you translate it to the personal by saying, really in your personal life, think about what is the quality of the time that you're spending, not the quantity of the time that you're spending doing it. And in order to make that determination, you have to slow down. And it's one of the reasons then that if you are looking at your wishlist and you got a bazillion things going on, but you can say to yourself, look, in this chapter of my life, my parents are aging.

 

(00:52:42):

One of the things that I want to have more quality and in terms of obsessing over the quality of the time that I have with my parents now, which means learning to play a 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, a kid is sick and you got to go pick 'em up and be home with them all day. There's a thunderstorm and all of a sudden the wifi goes out, the rainstorm hits and traffic backs up for two hours.