Ep. 68: Habit Tune-Up: The Power of Becoming Your Own Assistant

I'm Kyle Newhart. The format of these mini episodes should be known to you by now. I take voice questions from my listeners where we try to dive into some of the nitty gritty details involved in tuning up. their productivity habit. Looking at my question list today, we have... Some questions about auto-scheduling meetings. So how do you time block if other people can auto-schedule meetings on your calendar? We talk about my advice to hire yourself as your own assistant.

How to deal with really short tasks. We do a little bit of digital minimalism here. There's someone with a cell phone habit and a teacher who's worried about losing their deep work muscles over the summer break. So this should be good. If you want to submit your own questions, you can go to calmnewport.com slash podcast. There you can learn about submitting the voice questions for the mini-episodes and the written questions for the main episode.

All right, so without further ado, I want to get started with this week's episode. But first, as always, we should take a moment to say thanks to some of the sponsors that make Deep Questions possible. One of our longest-running sponsors, and for good reason, is Blinkist. As I talked about in Monday's episode, Blinkist is a subscription service.

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Alright, let's get started with this week's episode. Our first question is about tasks that are so short that it's not even worth writing them down in your to-do list. Hi Cal, this is Tyler. I am an assistant professor at an R1 university in the U.S. My question for you is about managing Trello board.

What I do right now is if I get an incoming task on my email, I will forward it to my Trello board, which will automatically create a card. However, some tasks that I face seem to be so short that... Even the amount of time it would take to make. a Trello card out of it would be longer than the task itself takes, yet I don't want to necessarily do those tasks.

the moment that I receive them so there is going to be some residue in my inbox for these very short tasks like uploading something to some website or something. So I was wondering if you had any guidance about how to manage... Tasks that take such a short time to complete that they... don't really warrant their own Trello

Well, first of all, I should probably clarify what Tyler means when he says he's at an R1 university. This terminology comes up semi-frequently on the podcast. I realize I don't know if I've ever defined it. Roughly speaking, what that means is he's at a research university. If you're at an R1 university, you have expectations of producing a lot of original research.

The actual details of what this Carnegie classification actually means is not so important. It's just a shorthand for our purposes of this is a research-focused professor. So Tyler, getting to your specific question, I think there's two different modes in which you interact with your inbox. So the first mode is a quick chat. You're waiting for a piece of information.

You're in the middle of a particular back and forth asynchronous conversation that you need to ping pong forward, like choosing a time to meet or trying to wait for someone to send you a Zoom link for a meeting that you're supposed to be in. When you're doing these quick checks of your inbox, you can basically ignore all the other messages. I don't want you to feel as if anytime you open an inbox, everything in it has to be processed into some sort of...

2007 era Merlin Man Inbox Zero Standard or something like that. Now, of course, the existence of these quick checks is in itself an issue. This is a big part of my new book, A World Without Email. It's coming out March 2nd, as you've heard me talk about many times before, is trying to actually...

update the underlying processes by which you coordinate and collaborate so that you don't need to keep checking your inbox and advancing collaboration through these asynchronous back and forth messages. But let's put that aside for now. If you have quick checks, you can ignore what else is in your inbox. The other mode with which you interact with your inbox is one in which you are actually trying to process your inbox. You have scheduled time on your time block planner. And it's for email.

You need at least a half hour if you're going to do this tends to be my recommendation. That's the minimum. the minimum amount of time that you can actually get serious inbox processing done. And there you really are trying to process your inbox towards zero. What I do in this case is as I hit upon emails that have an obligation that's short, but just long enough that I don't want to do it right then, I keep a text file open on my computer. It's literally called workingmemory.txt.

All my computers have this. Sometimes I abbreviate it WM. And I just keep it open. It's like an extension of my actual working memory in my brain. As I look at that email, I just type in there as fast as I can type. what the obligation is that's represented by that email. I can type really fast, right? So I just throw in. I'm not trying to be specially formatted. I'm not in to-do list software. It'll just be, here's a recent example.

export recent podcast interview to MP4, upload, get a drop box of links, send it to Jay. Something I just did. Archive the email. Alright, next email. So in this way, you really can clear through all your emails pretty fast. Like you're either throwing it out, responding right away.

doing an action right away or writing a quick summary of the action in your working memory.txt. Now some of these things you're writing in working memory.txt might be really big tasks like I need to finish this report and send it to Bob and some are really short I don't really differentiate here but you can get through that whole inbox now you have these tasks that you need to do

that were the side effect, the qualia, if you will, of those emails that you were processing. They're all in this text file. They all are very clear. Now you can process the text file. Big things you can't do now. Go to your Trello boards or whatever you use for your long-term task management and give them cards, give them items and to-do lists. Now you have the short things.

I'll copy and paste and put them into the right order I want to do them, and then I'll start going through them. If I run out of time... It's fine. The rest are right there in my digital extended working memory. I don't have to remember them. when i get back to my next admin block during the day i will see them right there in my working memory list i use this same text file for everything throughout the day

copy and pasting notes, writing down ideas, I'm in a meeting, I'm putting down a note I want to talk about. I use the same text file for almost everything. It's really really useful. And I just want to make sure that by the end of the day, though, everything in there has been processed out. So as part of my shutdown complete ritual, my shutdown ritual at the end of the day, before I check that shutdown complete box on my time block planner. I will want to process that work in memory file.

down to nothing. And so if there's even very short tasks on there I didn't finish, now they're probably going to have to go on a Trello card or a to-do list. Maybe I'll put a bunch of them together on one card and it'll just be like 15 minute push I need to do soon. And it goes into the system. I don't know why it makes it easier to have this stuff written down on a separate text file but it really does because you clear your inbox

You specify and clarify what the actual tasks are in that inbox. The ability just to see them written plainly. you can move them around and erase them once you've done it it's just much easier to deal with so that's my suggestion Tyler when you're trying to actually process your inbox process, process, process, process. Anything you can't do in the moment, put it into that text file and still get rid of that email.

You do not want to use your inbox as a place for long-term storage of tasks. It is terrible at that task. All right, let's do another question now that gets into some of these nitty-gritty details of managing work in a digital office.

I'm committed to starting a time-blocking practice when I head back to work in the new year. As part of this new practice, I will put aside 30 minutes for time-block planning for the next day at the end of each work. The problem arises with my Outlook calendar. All of my team members and I share our calendars openly. My team members and I rely heavily on the scheduling assistant function in Outlook which automates finding a time when all required attendees are available to me.

Sometimes I do get invited to same-day meetings, which has become more common because of the remote work we're doing during pandemic. But the automatic scheduling tool only works if I block off not only my paper time blocking template for that day, but also block out my Outlook account.

So do you recommend I fill my Outlook calendar with time blocks or just decline same-day meeting requests or something different altogether? How do I block time for the next workday in a way that ensures I don't get booked into unexpected workday? Thanks, Cal. Well, the short-term answer here is the deep work blocks on your time block plan, put those on your Outlook calendar as well so that the auto-scheduling tool sees that time as taken up.

You can't probably get away with putting your entire time block schedule on your calendar because there will be no time free, and your colleagues will be annoyed that you are what's holding up their attempts to schedule these meetings. So that's sort of a happy battle. Now, more generally speaking, there's a deeper problem with the people you work with and the underlying workflows that you deploy if you're constantly having to on-the-fly schedule meetings.

I think that's common in a lot of knowledge work settings for people to use meetings as a proxy for productivity. right the thinking goes like this something pops up onto your radar like oh yeah we have uh some compliance with a new state library regulation that's going to be due soon. All right, what should we do about this? The easy way to get that off your mind is to say, well, let's just schedule a meeting because you know what?

I might not trust myself to time block. I might not trust myself to follow a to-do list. i might not trust myself to follow a weekly plan but most people will follow their calendar if there's a meeting they will go to it and so the meeting becomes a proxy for more deeper productivity thinking you say hey This is on my calendar. Now when I get there I'll just do that meeting and hopefully we'll make some progress when we get there.

So as a way of taking things off of your mind and having reassurance they'll get dealt with, there's nothing easier than just having something on your calendar when you'll talk about it. This is not, however, the best way to deal with most things. I think in most contexts, a well-functioning knowledge work team should have regular and highly predictable Check in our status meetings. Here's what's going on. Who needs what? What are we working on?

Two, they will have a really transparent way of keeping track of who is working on what and how it's going. And three, regularly occurring type of obligation work or project will have processes in place for getting them done that minimizes the need for lots of context shifting or meetings. All of that takes more work. All that's more of a pain up front than instead just saying in the moment, shoot.

we have to do this compliance report. Hey, Outlook, auto-schedule something. Now it's off my mind. But it allows people to be significantly more effective because you do not have your days constantly punctuated by unexpected and ad hoc meetings. There's not a lot of wasted back and forth.

You don't have to sit down for an hour to talk about something and then nothing really gets done until the next meeting is scheduled. It really optimizes your resources. So, I mean, this is the picture I paint in a world without email, this picture where...

It's clear who's working on what. There's predictable communication protocols where you get together like at regular meetings. Okay, where are we? What do you need? Hey, this compliance thing fell on it. I'm going to assign it to you in our task system. Here's what it means.

Maria, get this over to Karen. By this time, we'll check in on that at the next status meeting along with these other things. The status meetings are very easy because you have all the tasks up here on some common shared board. You can see who's working on what and what you need to ask about.

If compliance reports are something that happens a lot, you spend 20 minutes to figure out how do we want to do this? Oh, I see. Here's how it works. Everyone puts their information in this Dropbox by this time, and then it's up to this person to put into a preliminary report. You have a whole process in place. All this stuff is a little bit more of a pain up front.

But it allows you, it enables a lot more return on your cognitive resources. In a world without email, I call this attention capital theory. We have to get more serious. about how we get the best return from the attention capital that defines the main capital resource of knowledge work organization.

All right, so we have a short-term answer, which is put your deep work on your calendar so at least you have some protection and be flexible with the other administrative time, knowing that you might lose it to a meeting at any point. We have the long-term answer, which is do the whole attention capital theory thing and completely remake the way your team operates.

They give you a middle ground answer. In the short term you might have an agreement with your team. Hey, let's keep all meetings in the afternoon. Right. Nothing before one. So at the very least, you know you have control over your time from the morning until 1, and then your afternoon is a mix of administrative stuff and ad hoc meetings.

And that's a little bit easier to deal with and a little bit less frustrating than any time on any day you could have a meeting. So that's a good middle ground that could buy you some breathing room. But long term, You got to buy a world without email, buy a copy for all of your team, remake how you operate. Your work life could be so much better.

All right let's move away from the world of work slightly and get towards the digital minimalism world and try to tune up a habit here about excessive cell phone use. Hey, Cal. My name is K-Lo. I'm a computer science PhD student at UC Berkeley. I'm having trouble kicking my cell phone habit. I've deleted my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all social media. But I find myself going on my phone a lot and browsing YouTube.

And it just seems like no matter what I do, I somehow just unlock all the safeguards that I have on my phone. And it's really causing me a lot of distractions. Well, Kalo... two different things to recommend here one is just how to be more effective

in giving your brain experience not having constant distraction. You have to break this Pavlovian connection in which your brain associates boredom with distraction, boredom with distraction. That's a very strong connection right now. You're having a hard time breaking. so a couple things you can do there is one work away from your phone like in a different location

You know, I'm at a coffee shop working, my phone is at home. That type of thing. Where the amount of time for you to actually get up, walk, and go get your phone is prohibited. a big enough level of friction that you actually are going to have to just work. These protections you put on your phone that can be disabled on your phone itself, that friction is not high enough.

Leave your phone at your dorm and go to the library. Leave your phone at home and go to the coffee shop, etc. Leave your phone at home and go for a hike. Bring your algorithms prom set with you into the woods. You're 20 minutes away from the nearest phone. Well, I guess I'll have to just go back to work. Outside of the context of actually trying to work, just do things on a regular basis without your phone. This is the whole concept of embracing boredom from deep work.

This notion of being regularly exposed to situations in which you might be bored, but you have no way of actually dissipating that boredom digitally. This will all diminish. your pavlovian connection between boredom and digital distraction so go for runs exercise hikes whatever you need to do long walks without your phone

just be a regular drumbeat. You work without your phone. You hike without your phone. You exercise without your phone. Your mind just learns. Sometimes I have my phone great. Sometimes I don't. That's fine too. You've got to do that for a couple months, but you can diminish that instinct. That'll help. The second general category of fixes I want to recommend here is digital minimalism. the whole idea of digital minimalism from my eponymous book of that same name is that

It's typically not sufficient to just focus on what you're trying to reduce. It's generally not sufficient to say, I look at YouTube too much, I look at Twitter too much, it's causing harm, I want to look at it less. That is often not enough for sustainable change. What you need to do instead is focus on a positive that you're hoping to accomplish.

and then be focusing on satisfying that positive vision. So what I talk about in digital minimalism is that You develop through reflection and experimentation a vision of what you want to do with your life, what you value, what you want to spend your time doing, what type of person you want to be. You then work backwards from those positive answers to say, what is the best way to use technology to support these things I care about?

So you're not just identifying what technologies you use, but because you know why you're using those technologies, you can have very clear rules around how you use them. so if you're the artist who needs instagram for creative inspiration but you know that's why you're using Instagram it's much easier to say oh I don't need this on my phone I'll access it on my desktop I'll type in my password manually I'll do it twice a week

I'll treat it like a TV show, 30 minutes at a time. When you know why you're using the tool, what positive thing it's serving, you can optimize it. This really works, Kayla. When you're focusing on, I'm not, I don't use Twitter on my phone. I don't use Instagram on my phone because that's not part of my vision for the life I want. that's pretty sustainable because your mind is attracted to this idea of a good life, of accomplishing this life you want. And it will go through a lot.

it will go through a lot of difficulty to achieve or get something that thinks is really important. On the other hand, if you're just saying, I use Twitter too much, I should use it less. i use instagram too much it's distracting me i want to use instagram just 30 minutes a day that's not a very strong that's not a very strong pushback

Your mind says, we should use it less. I agree, in general. But why not right now? Then you have to have that battle 20 times a day. You're going to lose it seven times. So that's my bigger picture answer, Kalo, is to embrace digital minimalism. start from scratch this is what i want in my life here's how technology helps it and then just make one commitment

I'm going to follow the rules I put in place to make my life better, very powerful, much more sustainable. You're young. This is a perfect time to do it. You have a lot of potential. You have a lot of autonomy. You have a lot of energy. Now is the time to figure out what you want in your life. So my book, Digital Minimalism, it'll walk you through a 30-day process for trying to figure that out. I call it the digital declutter.

You might also want to listen to some of the past Deep Questions podcast episodes where I talk about looking at the deep life in your buckets and the buckets that are important and overhauling your buckets. I've given various bits of advice in various episodes. It all gets you to kind of the same place. when you are moving towards something that you really want You have a ton of willpower to spare. when you're trying to reduce something that you generally dislike.

That alone is not a sustainable road. All right, so to summarize, the first big category is just get more hardcore about separating yourself from your phone so you can break that connection. Your mind gets comfortable with the idea that you don't always have your phone. And then two, deploy the deep life digital minimalism type strategy here of getting your act together and what you really want out of life. Put technology to use on your behalf if you really believe in that vision.

you will stick much more effectively to the restrictions that it entails. All right, let's move on now with a question about an interesting technique that I don't talk about a lot.

but it's kind of a cool one. Hiring yourself as your own assistant. Just figure out what I mean. Hi Gal, I'm Sophie, a PhD student from South Korea. I want to ask about the strategy of hiring yourself as a personal assistant. My question is, what time is this assistant supposed to show up? Are these hours that you spend being your assistant outside the deep work hours? are they outside the work hours so let's say after 5 30 or Does this assistant show up even during the deep park hours?

Well, I appreciate this question because it's kind of a deep cut. The idea of hiring yourself as your own assistant is something I've only mentioned in passing before. Now, of course, I like this question because it's a topic that, as you might have guessed, I get into in a lot of detail in a world without email. Safi had no way of knowing this, so it's just a well-timed question, but that means it's something I've thought a lot about more recently.

Let me summarize the approach so that I can then answer this question. So the notion of hiring yourself as your own assistant is a reaction to the reality today in knowledge work of diminishment of intellectual specialization. IT tools in particular have made it possible for us to put more and more administrative or support type work on.

individuals that traditionally might have had just one or two things that they did that created value for the organization. Maybe there was a typing pool to type and an assistant to help with. travel booking and this and that and they focused on

I don't know, writing ad jingles or something like that. But IT has made it possible that we can get rid of the typing pool, we can get rid of the assistant, and it's just all on your plate. We have inboxes, you have email, you have some intranet interface for booking your travel. This all seems great in the short term because you have fired a lot of people and saved a lot of salary.

But we don't always take into account the reality that this puts a lot more work on the individuals that are supposed to actually be doing the things to create value for the company therefore they can do less of that they create less value that's not necessarily a fair trade in fact you can end up you can end up actually losing money. You gain money from firing support staff, but you lose money because now your frontline workers get a lot less done.

In the end, you have to produce a widget to sell it if you're producing less widgets because the widget makers are also booking their travel. and write an email. you sell less widgets, you make less money. All right, so one of my reactions to this reality is if you have these different roles you're playing, like administrative roles and frontline deep work, value creation roles, treat them as very separate roles.

Treat it as if you have different jobs. I'm a part-time ad executive. I'm a part-time assistant to an ad executive. Treat them like different jobs. So when I say you hire yourself as your own assistant, I mean like you think about I have this one job where I'm an assistant and I have this one job where I do my primary value creation activities. Keep the task separate.

Keep the scheduling separate. You know, here is all the stuff the assistant needs to do and what's on the assistant's plate. Here is all the stuff that me, the ad executive or whatever, your main deep work producing job. Here's all the stuff that this role. Needs to do.

And when you schedule your day, you're basically figuring out what portion of the day does this role get? What portion of the day does the administrative assistant get? What portion does the executive get? This seems at first like it might just be purely semantic. All of these tasks you do. All of these tasks you're storing. So what are you really gaining by pretending like it's two different jobs? The psychology is very important. A, it keeps the balance of deep to shallow reasonable.

because now you're very unlikely to say, huh, Let me take the deep work role and give it no time. What's the point? I don't want my administrative role to have all the day. Both are part-time jobs. The administrative assistant can get two hours of the day. get six hours of the day or whatever you want to do but you're going to keep that much more equitable you're more likely to say, look, if I'm really overloaded with logistical administrative stuff, well,

My administrative assistant role during his hours are going to have a lot to do and might fall behind on things, but that work happens during these hours and these other hours, the deep work still happens unencumbered, right? So you're much less likely to let... administrative creep or overload stop you from doing anything valuable. It also just gives you a psychological relief. Right. Just to know when you're in your deep work mode, you have this clear vision of. I'm working on this.

then this and then this and this requires I talk to this team instead of meeting for brainstorming I need to put in a long walk to think about this jingle. It's simple and it's clear. When you're doing that work, you shift into the mindset of that role.

And your mind is less encumbered and you get better stuff done. And then when you switch over to your administrative role, you're like, ah, I'm overloaded. This is crazy. And you can kind of be stressed while you're in that role, but it's contained. Again, this sounds semantic, but it really does have a psychological reality. It does make a difference.

So Safi's question is how much time should each role get and where should that time come from? Well the time should always come from your normal working hours. What you're doing here is treating both roles like a part-time job. And they should fit in within whatever working hours that you are expected or want to work. It might be frustrating because like, wow, I don't want to spend so much time as administrative assistant. I'm highly trained. I should be spending more time doing deep work.

But this is the reality of your job. It's better to confront it. You can always talk to your boss about it. If you have a deep to shallow work ratio discussion, you can say, hey, it's taking me X hours a day to keep up with non-value producing work. Is that optimal?

Maybe you want a better plan, but you don't want to escape from that reality by just mixing these two things together, by kind of doing deep work all day, but constantly distracting yourself by checking email and handling little tasks. It's not going to work. you know how do you divvy up the hours within a given workday you know it kind of just depends on what your load is and what's going on

If there's a ton of administrative work going on, that administrative assistant role might have a lot of your hours. If you're coming up to a big deadline, on the other hand, then maybe that role gets a couple hours every other day, and everyone's just going to have to cope with it. Make those decisions on the fly at the scale of the week.

And you can recalibrate that and balance that as things change. So that's what I would say. No, don't do your assistant work before or after the day. It's part of your day. Just confront that reality. You don't get to just do deep work all day. You might as well be clear about what that split is. And by the way, these don't have to be like a binary thing.

like half the day is this and half the day is that. You could have two hours for one, two hours for the other, then back to two hours for the first. They can be somewhat interleaved. That's fine as well. Anyways, it's a cool strategy. It's more than semantic. Psychologically does tend to make things much better. There's nice clarity to it. And so Safi, I hope you find that useful.

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All right, we have time for one more question here. Given how cold it is during the winter on the East Coast, I thought it would be nice to do a question that looks forward to summer. Hello, Dr. Newport. My name is Coran. I'm a high school history teacher and next semester I'll be teaching two college courses in communication studies at a university.

While I'm not afraid, and actually I'm excited to build my deep work muscles in the spring, I'm afraid that they will atrophy in the summer because I am not in a position where I have to work anymore. I have the summers off. So what can I do to make sure I keep my deep work muscles strong? Just like it's bad to stop going to the gym for three months. It would be bad if I don't do deep work.

During the summer. Well, Karan, this is a good problem to have. You know, having too much time off that you're worried about losing your edge. So, first of all, congratulations for that. Now, there's two things I would advise. One, you want to make sure that you do not lose structure and intention in your day to day.

so being in the mental habit of i have some structure to how i spend my time and i'm intentional about how i use my time that's really important you can lose that feel relatively quickly if you spend the summer just kind of winging it well, I'm kind of watching TV. Let me go for a run. I'm looking at my, I lost an hour to my phone. Okay, maybe I'll go see a friend. I'm going to, maybe I'll get on a book. Like if you're just sort of winging it.

You get out of that habit of I have some structure and a plan for my day and I'm intentional about how I use my time. Now, this doesn't mean that your summer has to be a drag. It doesn't mean that you have to be time-blocking in detail every minutes of your day. It doesn't mean you have to be working all the time. Like, your summer can have plenty of really enjoyable things. Just be intentional about it. you know here's my morning routine you should probably have a morning routine

I'm going to do something fun, but I put aside ahead of time doing something fun, okay? Then I'm going to do something productive around the house. Then I'm going to see a friend, and then I've given myself... 30 minutes of just messing around on the phone time, and then I'm reading a book, and then it's the evening. Whatever you want to do. It's not...

It doesn't have to be boring, it doesn't have to be tedious, but just have some structure to your day and have some intention about what you're doing. If you want to relax, if you want to have fun, that's fine. Just kind of plan out what that is when you want to do it. Don't be haphazard about it. So your mind keeps this habit of...

We specify what we do. We don't let things just unfold. Two, I don't think you need to be... super taxing your brain during the summer you're not going to get super dumb like in the way that maybe a particular muscle might atrophy if you're not working it out every day but you want to have some minimum intellectual engagement A reading habit is probably the best thing. A particular sequence of books that you want to read and master.

Really, if you want to be particularly sharp, like really keep that edge, maybe have a book of like philosophy or a famous history book that's not approachable by itself for you. And so you also have to like do a course on it, like an online course or buy a book, like a guide to the book. a guide to the author, a summary, and that you kind of work through the book with the help of a course or a supplementary secondary source or something like this, that's great.

Taking something that's a little bit too hard for you, that you then learn what you need to to actually digest it. To have a project like that going on all summer, so it could be a sequence of books that you learn, that'll really help keep you sharp, but you don't need overkill here. You don't need to write a book.

Or you can. Obviously, you don't need to. You don't need to take seven online courses. You can, but you don't need to. You're not going to get super dumb. But it's good to have at least some intellectual challenge just so you get used to what that feels like, or at least you don't lose the feel. of what it's like to be pushing your brain.

all right so don't sweat it just have a little bit of structure keep intention about how you spend your time be intentional even about relaxation so you get the best relaxation or really effective relaxation and maybe have at least one Autonomous light touch. but not very easy intellectual challenge like learning a hard book that you can't learn without extra help.

That'll give you a good sense of accomplishment, help keep you in the habit of what deep work actually feels like. And otherwise, just enjoy the summer, enjoy the warm weather, enjoy what we all hope is the last dying gasp of this pandemic. and then hit the ground running when fall comes. Well, speaking of hitting the ground running, that's all the time we have for today.

Thank you for the Agora que about how to submit your own email, well that's because I get so please check that out we'll be back on monday the next full-length episode of the deep questions podcast and until then as always Stay deep.