Ep. 394: Do I Need a Better Planning System?

Okay, so I have a question for you. How do you figure out what to do with your time during any given day? Now, I think this question matters more now than it ever has before. Because if you don't have a good answer to it, if you just sort of wing it as your day unfolds, guess what forces are going to take control of your intention? Email, Slack, social media, online chatter, YouTube, streaming services. This is a show about finding depth in a distracted world. And to succeed in this goal, you need a good planning system. But how do you create a system that's not only going to work, but it's something you're going to stick with over time? This is what I want to talk to you about today. And I have an expert that's going to join me to help us in this conversation. Her name is Sarah Hart Unger. She's a doctor and a mother and also a planning aficionado. She's the host of the Best Laid Plans podcast on which I've been a guest. And in December, she published a book with that same name that had the subtitle, A Simple Planning System for Living a Life That You Love. Amazon selected it as one of the best nonfiction books of the month. So I invited Sarah on to get into the nitty-gritty details of how to build a useful and realistic planning system. She even helps me figure out solutions to some problems I've been having with my own system. So there's some changes I make after talking to her. She also makes a case for why she only uses analog tools, which I think is interesting. I'm not quite sold on that, but I think it's an interesting case. So anyways, this is a deeply practical discussion and one that I think is absolutely vital to our mission here on this show. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music. All right. Hey, Sarah, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to be back. Of course. I mean, I'm excited about your book and I'm excited to get into the weeds on planning. I have a whole list here of practical things I want to learn from you. I want to talk about like what makes a good planning system good. How do you keep systems sustainable over the long run? Digital versus analog, family versus personal versus work, tasks and planning and how that differs. I actually saw a lot of connections between your new book and slow productivity. So I want to get into that as well. So we're going to walk away from here with like lots of ideas about how to get your life under control. But I want to start by just motivating this entire conversation for my audience. Like why is planning important? We need to ask that question. Why is it being talked about? Like why do I care about it on this show, which is largely about fighting back against digital distractions? I actually think that it's really well connected. So I'm going to give you my take for why I think planning is important, Sarah. And then I'm going to ask you to sort of give your – the way you think about it, right? So from what I noticed is there was a period – I really kick it off around 2019 with Ginny O'Dell who brought a sort of anti-neoliberalism, anti-capitalism critique to the world of things like planning and productivity and the sort of related topics. And essentially the anti-neoliberal critique was to care too much about planning is to commoditize time, to think about your efforts as things that can be turned into productive value. And the sort of ideal anti-productivity vision that was being pushed, starting with Odell and then lots of commentators during the pandemic, was really what you should be doing is just in an unstructured way walking through fields and watching birds and uncommodifying your life. And that this was the tension between commodifying your time and watching birds in a park in San Francisco. And this was sort of the setup. That never rang true for me. You know, like you, I have three kids. I have seven jobs. Like there's a lot going on. And to me, the opposite of having a planning system is not walking through the fields and enjoying birds. It's chaos. It's stress. It's anxiety. And this is how I connected back to my program here on this show. It puts you into exactly the state where the digital overlords can dominate. Because when you are overwhelmed and reactive and don't know what's going on, guess what suddenly becomes really appealing? Well, let me just pull up the phone or let me just fall back onto like email and just sort of shoot messages back and forth. Let me zone out to a streamer because it's going to numb out the anxiety I feel. So I thought of planning as a key step towards a deeper life, not as something that was getting in the way of a deeper life. And there was this sort of clash that was happening. All right. So that's my soapbox speech. But you've been working on this topic so practically for years with your podcast and now with your book and with your blog. Why do you think about planning as being important? Yeah, well, first, I guess it's super interesting to bring back to that like Jenny O'Dell kind of movement because I do think people get stuck in thinking about planning as having to be married to productivity. meaning if I want to plan it means that I'm trying to cram in as many quote productive things as possible and capitalism you know the wheels spinning etc but that to me is such a unfair way to characterize planning because to me planning is so much more about thinking ahead of time about what you want to do in your life and then making sure that you have things lined up so that you can do those things. And for me, if I were to want to go birdwatching in a San Francisco park, let me tell you what I'd have to do. I would have to do a lot of planning to make sure that that could be accommodated in my life without, you know, having a kid not get picked up from an activity or not pay the bills or whatever it is. So I guess that kind of goes along with what you're saying as well, which is that those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive. The free time, the intentional leisure and the planning. And in fact, I think if anything, for many people, depending on their stage of life, the planning piece is actually required in order to make the best use or, I don't know, the use that aligns most with what they really want to do with their time. And so that is what has driven my passion about planning. It's not about turning out more widgets, earning more money necessarily, but it's about fitting in the things that you want to do do in this one life that we all have. You know, I'm also a huge fan of sort of the mortality focused literature, the sort of Oliver Berkman, Jodi Wellman type stuff. And that just for me, lights a fire around planning, which to me also has sort of two prunes to it in a way. One is about making sure we're not just going on autopilot and making sure that we are fitting in the things that we want to do. And the other side is making sure we're not getting overwhelmed by little tasks coming at us, trying to kind of take a bite into our lives. And by making sure you're managing all those tasks and making sure you're purposefully adding in the things you want, then hopefully you get to do more things you want to do. Like, I don't know, birdwatch in a San Francisco park. Well, let me give you an analysis. I'm going to not psychoanalyze, but I'm going to analyze you. And then you're going to tell me if I have this right, because I have this theory about partially why you're, you personally are in a very good situation to be leading people through these topics. And I think it, I don't really understand your profession. You're a pediatric endocrinologist, right? Clinical doctor. But my, but I think it's important that you're a clinical physician because my understanding and in some sense, that's a, that's a very demanding job, but it's also very structured, right? You have this sort of cadence of appointments. That's like probably pretty standardized in your practice. Whereas a lot of people, and maybe in the Ginny O'Dell camp and people in my world, you're often in like a more vague knowledge work environment where there is this sort of, which is where I get the Odell critique. There is this sort of sense of like an endless knob of productivity that you can turn that seems tied to like busyness and how many hours you're willing to work outside of work. And there's like a rightful, you know, negative association that people in like a email based office job start to build where they're like, all right, enough of this productivity talk because my boss just wants me to do emails till midnight and like enough is enough. Did it matter that your job had enough structure that you could stand aside a little bit from some of the maladaptive stuff that was happening in certain knowledge work jobs? It was, I think, smoke screening, the importance of organization and planning because it was sort of like an orthogonal issue that also needed to be solved. Am I getting medicine right there or am I just romanticizing? I've personally experienced both sides because I've had more like leadership type roles where the emails are like rolling in and the meetings and everything's a little bit more, you know, kind of like a world without email, but the opposite of that kind of. But then yes, the rest of my job has been very, very structured. And you are right. A lot of my passion was born out of a time period when almost all of, not all, but like a very large fraction of my hours were very much accounted for by others. Like it was during my residency training where we had caps at 80 hours per week that we could be at the hospital. But other than that, you know, our time was not really our own and it made sense to be incredibly attentional with the hours that were left. And I guess that is where a lot of my passion around planning was born. But you're right that my current life is much more around that. Much of my time is fairly structured and that is one of the things I love about my clinical job is that I can go in, see my patients, write my notes, and kind of feel like I did everything for the day. Is it true you had your first kids when you were still this overlapped residency? My first kid was during fellowship. So that's the subspecialty training after residency. Can I ask you a brief unrelated question that is related to the pit on HBO? I love the pit. You can ask me anything about the pit. My husband and I, because he's a vascular surgeon, we like sit there and analyze every episode for correctness and maybe misinformation. Vascular surgeons think that they should be bringing, they're doing too many things in the ED that they should be bringing consults in. That's what I heard. It's like, no, you can't, don't mess with that nerve in the hand. You've got to bring down. Okay, but here's a question on behalf of my whole audience, more important than anything else we're going to talk about. Can you please distinguish between third year medical student, intern, like pre-residency first? I cannot, my sister is a attending, you know, ER doctor and I still don't understand. What is the order of things that happened? And then we'll get back to Platy. But I got to understand this. I don't understand which character is what, when. Well, I'm trying to remember like who's a third year and who's a fourth year. Like Javadi, is she a fourth year maybe? So in med school, you usually do your core rotations. So that's the very first year in the clinic, your third year of med school. And then the fourth year is more like subspecialty rotations. I don't feel like the pit does a great job of saying who's a third year and who's a fourth year. Is that intern yet or not? Fourth year is that? Is fourth year the same as intern or is that post fourth year? So medical school has four years. I didn't know that. Then begins your intern year, which is also known as the first residency year. And most residencies, well, the ER residency is actually four years long. So sometimes it's totally unclear, but we know Santos is R2 because I keep saying it over and over again. Yes. And the really young doctor in the first season, I think, was third year or fourth year? Maybe like a fourth year. Okay. And then when do you get called doctor? You get called doctor when you begin your residency. So after med school, before that, I used to use like an archaic student doctor. Yeah. Heart hunger or whatever, but yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, now we got the important stuff covered. We can get back to the easy stuff, like trying to manage life in this chaotic world. All right. So let's go back then. You've been thinking about planning an organization for a long time. You've had your podcast, your blog, and your book. I think I have that order, not quite right. Probably blog, podcast. book. That is correct. How today do you think about the elements that have to go into a successful planning system? Yes. So in my opinion, and I know it might differ a little bit from how you talk about it, but I feel like there are three big ones. The first one is a calendar that's completely functional and shows everything. And in my book, I refer to that as like one master calendar. And that can be, it sounds so straightforward. Like, of course I have a calendar, but a lot of people are actually consulting multiple places, even on a day-to-day level to actually figure out where they're supposed to be. So master calendar is number one. Number two is a really robust task management system. I've coined the term airtight task management because I want to communicate that like, you know exactly what's coming in, where to look for it, how often to look for it and where to put it so that you know you will see it. And to me, that's the part where you're sort of preventing the moth eating, like things coming at you from really getting too much of your time and attention and, you know, putting the tasks in their place where they belong. And then finally, you need a fantastic and robust goal setting system. You talk about yours in like a multi-level scale planning, and I have a very similar version of that called nested goals. It has a couple more levels than yours has because I love a month. I love the monthly level, which you don't really talk about. but similarly you know you're planning every year and then every season you're looking at that yearly plan every month you're looking at that seasonal plan every week you're looking at your monthly plan and every day you're looking at your weekly plan and that sounds so much more involved as it than it actually kind of is in practice but by doing that and having like a really clear-cut purposeful ritual at each of those time points you know that you're going to be integrating kind of the urgent and what you need to do in a given day or week with the kind of higher level goals that you've set in more thoughtful planning sessions. Right. So this is fascinating. I think this is a key distinction. I struggle to communicate this sometimes as well, is that there's these different elements that all go under the umbrella of planning. You have the whole sort of information organizational aspect of it, and then you have the sort of time control aspect of it, which you're calling like goal setting system. And I think often people will zoom in on just one piece could be the like I have a planner a planner called a time block planner but it's not a planning system it's like one piece like in your terminology it's like one of multiple pieces that goes into a goal-setting system that itself could be part of a larger planning universe but there's people who say I bought my time block planner so can I organize my whole life with this thing and I was like no no no no that's like you just you bought an exercise band that's probably a good thing to use as part of a large health and fitness routine, but just having that exercise ban is not the whole thing. Okay. So I want to go through, let's go through these in this order because I think it actually, I think calendar to airtight task management, the goal setting system is easiest, the hardest or simplest, the most complex. I feel like things get more and more complex as we move down. All right. So master calendar, when you say shares everything, so you're talking about professional, personal family, we need everything in one place. Are you a digital person? Are you a Google calendar where you could have like multiple different calendars you turn off and on. You're going to be shocked and everyone is always shocked, but I'm largely paper-based. I have three kids. I also have like five, not five jobs, but maybe three jobs if you count, like the podcast is one and then all my other media stuff and then my physician job, which is three days a week. I do work part-time as of now on my clinical side. But for me, I'm able to actually have my master, I have it right next to me, my master be paper meaning okay is every detail of every little thing in here no meaning there are blocks in here this is not going to show up but where it just says patients and i can't like see exactly what the patients are that i'm going to see because first of all that would not be hip compliant and second of all that would be you know way too much to put on paper anyway but i know that when i go to work i'm going to log into our electronic health you know system and see exactly which patients I have to see. But still, this is enough for me to know this is where I have to be on any given day. And on my, you know, kids level, I have a whole section on the bottom that talk about like where the drop-offs and pickups are. Wait, what do you mean by section on the bottom? This is outside of the flow of time. It's like at the bottom, you have like kind of like a to-do list for like listing out drop-off pick-off times. That's a choice that I've made, but I do use a vertical planner so I can see pretty much everything kind of like scaled to time, just like you would pull up in Outlook or Google Calendar. But because I don't always do all the driving, you know, I'm like, I have, we have a nanny, I have my husband, I drive, I have three kids, they're going in different directions. I kind of like to still know where all the kids are. So I kind of put a row beneath there where I put all the comings and goings of gymnastics and basketball and dance and all that. So it'd be like drop off at 3.30, pick up. So just like listing it. Okay. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. We've taken to, so we're Google Calendar people, my wife and I because then I have my work calendar so she can see and I can see what she's doing but we put the kids like family stuff we put those as those are like appointments on there as well and we'll try to span the time the driving actually takes so like that half hour will be now a reality of this calendar is there's a ton of overlap stuff happening because now everything is on the same screen so you know in google calendar things that intersect time wise overlaps There's a lot of like... But at least you can hide, right? Let's say you can decide to only look at your part. You can unclick it off. Yeah. No, and I'm not against digital whatsoever, but you did ask what I use personally. I think both are fantastic. I just, sometimes people write off paper kind of thinking like, well, if your life is complicated, there's no way that will work. And like, I've been making it work for a really long time. I do a very small writing and I enjoy using paper. So if that does not apply to you, I 100% say embrace the digital solution. when my kids get a little bit older as well. And, you know, right now I kind of have one using digital, but my two younger ones, not so much, but I could imagine us migrating when it makes more sense for everybody. Can I ask how large the formatting is? So is it day per page, five days per page? Like how big are these columns? So my calendar exists on the weekly pages. It's like kind of can see on the video of a Hobonichi Cousin Planner, which is A5 size. So each column is like a little more than an inch wide, but it has a very small grid lines and it goes all the way from, you know, midnight to midnight. So you can see a whole week. You can see an entire week at a glance. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And then how much are you putting non-appointment things on there? In other words, and when are you putting those things on there? So things that are not, you know, I need to be here. There's a meeting. There's an appointment. I'm seeing patients doing these areas. But optional tasks that you're adding just to kind of keep track of what you're doing with your time. is that we're bleeding into task management and goal setting probably as well right it just probably touches on everything a little bit so this is super interesting because people love to like fixate on like well is it all in one tool or is it not and in my case it is but i do think like this is an important time to step back and like realize there's it's still performing different functions for me um and there's no reason it has to be all in one tool but for me I do actually do most of my, pretty much all of my shorter term task management on paper as well. So I have two places, well, we're kind of skipping ahead to task management, but when you are deciding where to put a task, you want to put it in a place that it makes sense that you're going to see it at the right time. You can either assign it to a very specific time, like you can literally calendar it in, you can assign it to a day, and you can do all these things digitally as well. Or you could assign it to a week. That's a little bit harder to do digitally, but you can find some workarounds. And so for me, many of my day-to-day tasks, and I use the word task instead of goal here because I often talk about kind of goals turning into tasks around the weekly level. But I have a more, like the eighth column on the left-hand side has a lot of tasks that I want to do for the week. If I have a task that I come across that isn't that urgent, then I might assign it to a future week. So well, next week doesn't have anything, but the week after that has a couple of tasks. Or I may actually stick a task up at the top of a day if I don't have a specific time slot for it, but I want to assign it to a specific day. And what I do with this is so arbitrary. Like you can do the exact same thing in Apple Notes or Todoist or Todo or things. Like the actual place, the vessel where you're holding these things is going to be unique to what your style is and how often you like to use devices versus paper, etc. The important thing is defining for yourself where these holders are. Where do you put tasks that you want to see for the week, but you don't want to assign to a specific day? Where do you put a task that you know you're going to see at the beginning of each day? And where do you maybe put a longer-term task that you don't want in your face for a given week, but you know you're going to want to see later? Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. As listeners of the show know, I'm not a huge fan of huge overhyped pronouncements about AI. 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People that just like stop you on the street and tell you They want to do X, Y, Z. And you need to have a really thoughtful way to make sure that each of these pathways has a pipeline that like makes sense. Like you're checking them enough, but not necessarily all the time. And I actually kind of teach people that every given box that you might receive a task in might have its own cadence that makes sense. So maybe you look at the sports team app twice a week, but you only look at your email three times a day or something like that. Like I'm making that up. And then to be very clear about once those tasks come in, where are they going so that you are not going to lose track of them and you see them at the right time? Sometimes the answer is to just do the task. You know, something comes at you that's one minute or less. You just get it done. But then a lot of the times the answer is to put it into whatever system you're using for task management so that you see it at the right time. Okay. And so you're vessel agnostic, but the idea is you have a singular vessel that when you check these various pipelines, stores the tasks. And then there's a separate sort of system or cadence for taking it out of that vessel and getting it onto your weekly plan, your daily plan. Is that more or less right? that? Yes. I mean, sometimes there's not really like an extra step there. Like if the vessel is your text messages and someone sends you a task there, it's not like it's going to some holding place. You would, you would then, you know, let's say you make sure that at the part of your processing, and I know you talk about processing at the end of every day, either with a TXT file or however they're doing it. But as you're processing the end of each day, you take any text message that's left, you leave it unread if it's something you have to handle and you put it straight into whatever tool that you are going to use, whether that is, again, the to-do list app, your planner, whatever it is. And being very careful about once you've chosen where these tasks are living, you cannot be swapping around and using multiple storage vessels. You've got to be like, this is my one place. And you have to have rituals that include looking at that place. And again, that seems kind of obvious, but I get a lot of people, they're like, well i put some place some stuff on my monthly and some i'm weak i was like well when are you looking at those pages right you want it to be somewhere that you're going to be checking at the appropriate cadence so you know you're going to see it all right so what do you use right now yeah so right now um i do a few things so if something comes at me like randomly throughout the day i do exactly what i just said which is that i will text myself or email myself and leave it unread and one of the things i do at the end of every single day before as i'm shutting down is to make sure that those, anything that's left unread is captured. I do that with WhatsApp as well. Like if I get something from school and I'm like, oh, I need to deal with that. That needs to go into my system. That gets left unread and that inbox gets checked by the end of the day. So you said unread emails and unread messages. Text or WhatsApp messages. Okay, so that's what, that's going to be doing your processing step, what you're looking for. So if you think up something, just, you know, ex-Nila, like, oh God, I forgot. I need to like start planning for ex. You might send yourself an email. Yes. So that it'll be there unread. And I'm leaving it unread because it means it hasn't been processed. Okay. So then when you process, you process when end of the day? End of the day. All right. But each day I want to see no unread texts, no unread WhatsApp messages, and no unread emails. So what are the problems? It doesn't mean I've like archived them or dealt with them, but they are, they're not black. So then what are the, I don't even know how, can you send yourself tech? I'm so tech bad. Can you send yourself tech messages? Oh yeah, you can send yourself tech messages and then you can actually leave them. You can like, I don't know, you swipe over and you click the thing so it shows that it's unread. My fingers know how to do it. My brain can describe it. There's some sequence of things I do all day long, which I can't actually tell you what it is. Okay, so then what are the options then? So this is fascinating to me. I like getting to the nitty gritty here. At the end of the day, you're processing. What are the options for what happens to the information in like one of these unread emails or text messages? Yeah, so that is where this like where my task management system comes into play, which again, tool agnostic, but I largely use my planner. So I'm either assigning it to like this week if I need to get it done this week. I'm assigning it to a future week or I'm giving it a specific calendar slot within my planner so that I know on Wednesday I'm going to wake up and be like, oh, at 10 a.m. I said I had to sign the kids up for that camp that's going to sell out in 30 seconds. Perfect. I'm going to see that that morning. I'm going to know about it and then I'm going to do it. So this is interesting. So your main place, you store the task. It's your planner itself. It exists somehow tied to time, be it at the weekly scale or the daily scale or in like a particular slot. I put almost all of my tasks and even my goals tied to time. I mean, that's kind of how I link. I call them goals kind of at the larger time horizons, like year or season. And I call them tasks when we get down to the weekly or daily level. Again, they're not always specifically tied to time, but I mean, I guess they kind of are because even if I'm putting it in a future week's time frame, and even if I haven't entirely committed to dealing with it in that future week, it means I'm going to see that task on that given week. because again, just like the day and I have things that I want to make sure I process by the end of the day, I'm never going to exit a week without doing something. And this is actually a very key point of task management to everything I've put there. It doesn't mean I've gotten them all done, but I've either decided, you know what? I don't want to do that anymore. I'm crossing it off or I'm migrating it. And actually, this is kind of comes from the bullet journal world. Yeah, like an arrow through it. And then I move the task to somewhere else. Oh, interesting. Okay. And then do you do that at the end of each day? Is that when you're looking at tasks that were assigned to that day you didn't do? Or is it more at the weekly cadence? You look at the whole week of things that were assigned either to the week or to particular days that didn't get done. So I do make a list for each day as well. We didn't even get into that. But I tend to do the exact same process. Again, this is going to be much, much quicker on a daily level. Maybe I had six tasks I assigned myself. There was one I didn't get done. But as I'm doing that sort of like end of day processing, if I have an empty checkbox on my planner, I better figure out what I need to do with that task. If I miss a day here or there, usually I'm able to kind of catch up by making sure I haven't crossed it off the weekly. So there's kind of multiple layers in there. But in general, I do that processing really at the end of every day and as I move forward to the next week. Something that's interesting to me about this approach is it may be a way around a real issue I have, and I think a lot of people have, which is task system aversion, which is this notion of if things are going into a task system, It could be a singular vessel and a very good program and things are being stored and categorized in there. There's a sort of activation energy that builds up, especially if like you're stressed or you're overwhelmed or the week is going difficult and you're like my day is full. Like I often have days where – because I work within a very fixed amount of time where I'm constantly racing the clock. It's I got to get this article in. These edits are due. There's these urgent things or whatever. and the activation energy of like, let me now load up a task system and read all these tasks and confront all that I have to do. And like, I don't have time to do anything in this day. And I don't want to do that. And then I fall out of the task system for multiple days. So if you're just on your, the one tool, I always say like everyone uses at least this one productivity tool or organization tool as a calendar, because you can't remember when your dentist appointment is without it. So, you know, you're going to look at your plan, like the, the, the weekly, like what am I doing today? What am I doing this week? Like that will get used because you have to see. And so having the task in there means there's no separate activation energy. This is huge. And it's actually like why David Allen stuff doesn't totally work for me. And it's what you said. It's like that residue of like, I don't want to look at all the things I want to do. I don't want to look at like six weeks worth of accumulated stuff when I know I have like two free hours on a given day. So that's exactly that activation energy. I haven't heard it described in that way, but I think you're right. For me, it's so much less stressful to be like, okay, what's on today? Oh, look, today's really crowded. Let's only look at that weekly list. We're not looking beyond that. And then like selecting maybe one thing, if that's all I have time for creating my new list for the day, and then never looking back for the rest of that day until I, you know, maybe when it's time to do monthly planning, I'm going to go larger scale. But I designed this system in part because I am, like you, stressed out by the idea of seeing everything I need to do more often than I actually need to. And things that are non-trivial in terms of time but are still in that task category. I mean, in my experience, the way those things get done is they're on your calendar for the day. Yes. Like that's how it happens. It's like, no, this is what I'm doing at 12 is I'm going to the dry cleaner and then calling like whatever. Information that exists in list is not very – it's much less actionable. but okay so are you also here's the other idea that i'm just thinking about ideas that are catching my attention is like oh wait a second yes i think there's there's there's something here that's like explaining an issue that i want to solve because when i'm thinking about my task vessel i'm using primarily things three right now one of the things i do is like i'll often there'll be like a bigger project and i'll i'll generate as i come up with like steps and tasks related to that project i'll be adding them to this list and i'm like okay i can't have I couldn't put all of these onto my calendar. I have hundreds of tasks in there. But it sounds like until if I have this right, what you would say is you shouldn't be – you're expanding too much of the goal and the practicality too early. Like that project should exist as a goal. And when we get to your goals setting system, which we'll do next, there's a cadence in which those goals or projects generate tasks for the near future. and that like probably you would say if I have this right like yeah your lists are too long because you're you're unfurling too much from these things you're working on you don't need to do that in advance you need to see what the projects are look at your week and figure out what am I going to try to make progress on this week with these projects and what does that actually look like practically and let me put those tasks for the week or for particular days is that yeah and there's nothing bad I don't think about keeping future potential project steps somewhere convenient. Like for you, it might be things for me. I love using my list while you talk, by the way. Now, now I'm thinking, we can experiment with like an actual thing that you wanted to do. Um, like there's nothing wrong with having a receptacle for ideas. Like, um, I'm imagining maybe you have like a renovation list and there's a whole bunch of things on there, but the truth is you're not assigning yourself all of those things at once because there's no way that fits in Cal Newport's lifestyle when he's also working and dealing with kids from day to day. so that's exactly right you might have that as a reference but you're not like putting on your plate all those things until you've decided to put one of them on your plate if that kind of makes sense and that might happen not to skip ahead at a higher level goal setting system like maybe you're planning your summer and you're like you know what now is the time I'm ready to tackle that bathroom reno and um maybe I'll just put like begin bathroom reno on the list and then on the monthly level you think about, well, what piece am I going to do first? I'm going to get quotes. And then again, that kind of generates more smaller tasks at the weekly level where you're like, oh, let me text my friend and find out which contractor he used or whatever. So things will trickle down. But the idea that you kind of need to have all of them assigned you as tasks when they're not really happening yet, I find that stressful. And again, I think that's partly why I built the things the way that I did. Well, I just noticed looking at my list now that there's like multiple pretty technical task related to one of the courses I'm teaching right now. Because, you know, at some point, I was like, this needs to get done. I need to post the syllabus for the second half of the year. And I need to, you know, check in with the TAs on this or that, right? I'm kind of like putting these things down so that it's not just in my head. But there's also a notion of like, well, if you trust yourself that there's just like a standing project for the semester, which is the course. And like part of if I just at the beginning of each week was like, where am I in the course? What's coming up? What needs to get done this week? I'm not going to forget that. I mean I will be able to generate those things as the time comes up most likely, right? I said, okay, I'm looking ahead at this week. You know, like I need to – the rest of my syllabus should probably go up. Like we're getting towards the end of it. So let me schedule that for this week or I don't need to – the TA thing maybe is relevant when there's an exam to grade or something like that. So there's some interesting balance here. Well, hopefully you have some sort of system and I'm sure you already do something like this where you're like looking ahead at your week. And that's often going to generate tasks that kind of like make sense for what's coming up. So, you know, part of planning at every time horizon, and this even includes the day, you're not just looking back at like, well, what did my previous self want to do? You're like, oh, what's actually coming up ahead? Is there anything associated? And you being Cal, you would do it. You can trust yourself. Like, I'm sure that you would look ahead of the week and be like, oh, you know, we had this coming up. And if you had to do something that's longer range, maybe you would leave yourself some kind of a note prior to that. But I feel like if these are things that are just like generally part of your job and your flow anyway, that yeah, you'd come up with them and you probably don't need to have them somewhere separate. Now, if having a list of everything is just helpful to like have a reference, I don't even know if I would call it part of your task management system, almost just more of like a collection or reference than that could make sense. But you haven't like truly assigned it to yourself. So let me tell you my goal setting system. and then I want to hear, let's do, there's a CS term, we'll do a diff. It was an old command line program. You give it to text files and it would highlight exactly where they differed. So it was like how you would tell if there's like changes to source code in a shared code repository. This is the type of stuff people come here for Sarah. They want to hear about. Yeah, this is the type of stuff where I'm like, okay, can we talk? Linux command line interfaces. All right, so my multi-scale. So now I know my multi-scale planning is what you would call goal setting system. Nested goals. Nested goals. All right, so the way I run it is So I typically have like a semester or quarterly check-in. Like what are the big things that are happening this season? I mean they roughly correspond to my academic semesters. And I write it out freehand. It's in a text file. It's like, hey, this is – I don't want this to be too structured yet. So it will be things like I'm teaching this course and here's the type of things I have to keep in mind. Where am I on like if I'm writing a book? Like I'm really looking to be done with – submit the manuscript by December, which means like I probably need to be doing a chapter a month. So it's sort of like thinking through at a high level, like what's happening at this scale. Then – and this has sort of been my secret sauce that I think you were one of the few people who actually talked about this scale as well. It's actually for me is the weekly – the weekly scale is critical because it's where I interface that plan in the calendar. And this was always – this was like a big thing for me. I look at that. OK, what are these things that are these big picture goals? I look at my task list, which now I'm learning are probably too detailed. And so this could be a lot easier. These could be like more stakes in the ground instead of like long list of things. I look at my task list and I look at my calendar, which at this point is really just going to have things that are appointments and meetings. So I can see like what's the layout of my week? When do I have time? When do I not have time? Which days are busy or not? Are there – this was a key innovation. I came – at some point I was like, oh, this is the time to look for big win changes. If I cancel this one appointment Friday at 11 a.m., that's going to free up like six straight hours. And so like I see now I'm going to be frustrated when I get there. I'm just going to move that to like another day or something like that. And this is when I start putting stuff on the calendar that's not meeting or appointment. So now I'm like, I want to make progress on this goal. I'm going to now block time on my calendar, like a meeting or appointment for that particular goal. Like I'm going to be writing this day, this day, and this day. I'm going to work on this like project this afternoon. And now I'm starting to protect time at that scale. It's also where if there's key tasks, I'll start, when am I going to get these done? And I'll start actually adding them to my calendar. So by the end of my weekly plan, the calendar is like a lot fuller. There's a lot less space in it, but only some of it is actually meetings or appointments. A lot of it's what I came up with. And then I go to the daily scale every day. I make a time block plan for the day. And what I found is if I don't time block plan, it's unless it's a writing day where it's like all that really matters is I write as much as possible. Like I'm on deadline and then it's just survival mode for everything else. Outside of those days, a lot of that day by the time I get to it, the calendar is pretty full because I've been making use of it. But I transfer that into a daily time block plan and I fill in the remaining gaps in the workday for what do I want to do during that time. And then I execute off of the daily time block plan for the day as opposed to like list react method. All right. So that's my goal setting system. What's our diff there? Where are the places where we differ? Where do I do things differently? So I would say I lean a little bit less heavily on scheduling things, which is interesting. So like when I go, I actually will also add that I love to have a monthly level as well, because I have actually figured out that I'm going to pull my little monthly out. And yes, this one's analog to my schedule is very weird and varies a lot from month to month because I have weeks where I'll be entirely on call, entirely clinical. I can't do anything for the podcast. And then I'll have other weeks that maybe I've taken like time off to do work for the podcast. So like my months can be incredibly variable. So I actually have a step in here, even on the monthly level, where I'll look to see how many like kind of work days do I have? When I say work days, I mean like how many clinical work days and how many work for myself days and how many days is the family going away, et cetera. And that's how I will kind of decide how much I want to take on from a creative perspective, because that's the lever that kind of moves the most, can go high on some months and low on other months. So month to month, it's not just week to week. you're like this month might be a clinical month. Correct. Or maybe not the entire month is clinical, but like. But like whatever, that's like the feel of this month is like I'm actually doing a lot more like in office stuff. So it's interesting. Correct. Like January, I had lots of days that I could play around and work. And then February, we had a week of family vacation. I had something medical going on and I had a week of call. So that left me like, I don't know, this is like one out of four days is today that I actually have time to do anything. so that kind of helps me take a larger overview like how much can I actually take on here do I even want to add anything kind of new over the course of the month and then that kind of informs um you know the bigger things that I'm taking on and actually do usually create a list for the month that I look uh look towards as I'm planning each week and then my link my weekly process is similar to yours but I don't tend to do as much of what you're saying which is where I'll say oh I have to write this. I'm going to like give it a specific time slot. I tend to just sort of look, okay, I have this many hours. I have this many projects. And on a day-to-day basis, as I'm planning my day, that is when I'll actually commit to like what fits where. And that's just personal preference. I don't like to feel entirely locked in. Like I think maybe it is kind of a backlash to on my clinical days, every minute is spoken for. So on my non-clinical days, I want to be like, do I want to write from 10 to 12 or one to three? I want to make that decision that day. And I do purposefully make it on that day, kind of my own version of time block planning and think about what fits where, but I don't go ahead and kind of pre-schedule it throughout the week. So my weekly schedule, um, aside from the clinical days actually probably looks less full than yours does. Um, when I'm going to the daily level and then it's on the daily level where I say, okay, which of these tasks am I selecting and where do I actually want to fit it within the day? But otherwise I think our systems are, have a lot of parallels. I think I mean I prefer that if my issue the reason why I have to do the way I do it is that if I don't protect that time like Monday morning. God everyone comes and takes it. So that's my main issue is like I'm like if I say I'll figure out Thursday when I get to Thursday. Everyone in the world wants that time and by the time I get to Thursday like the time to work on these things is gone. So it helps me basically helps me say no to appointments. But I had this conversation when Oliver Berkman stopped by earlier this year and we were you know talking about various things. He was like, here's my ideal schedule. And I agreed with him. He's like, the ideal schedule, just from like human nature, not fix a particular job, would be kind of deep work in the morning. Like you're working on something important. And then when you're done, then you're like, based on how much energy I have, like, let me like do a few other smaller practical things, more or less depending on my mood and then be done. And I was like, Oliver, I'm with you, man. Like that would be, that's my rhythm as well. Unfortunately, the world has conspired to prevent that because I'm not a full-time writer. Okay, so that's interesting, though. I get that. I also get stressed out by my calendar. And I feel like I have to do it because otherwise it's just the chess game is too complicated. I'm playing. But I think that's more a problem with the game I'm playing. Well, I think, again, you're an academic. I don't know. Sorry. I don't even know how to pronounce the word. But with certain careers, people can dump things on your calendar if they see open space. And I can see why that would really lend it to like, no, no, no, this says writing. So don't you dare put anything there. I am lucky in that. Well, my patient time is all up for grabs and that will get as filled as it gets filled. But my time for myself, I'm really the only one who could dump stuff on there. That's just how I've designed things. And I think that allows me to be a little bit less scheduled. I'll tell you my big innovation of this year now. And I can get away with this now because like I'm out of promotions to get, you know, I'm a full professor, been tenured for a decade. Like there's no there's no nothing else that, you know, for me to worry about upsetting people about. I introduced the notion of a studio day. And for me, it's Tuesdays because now that I'm doing a lot more digital ethics and not sort of hardcore computer science, I was like, look, this podcast, my newsletter, this is a big part of like my work as a public intellectual on technology, etc. So studio days, as I just tell my employer, I'm not available on Tuesdays. I don't. I don't do meetings on Tuesdays. I'm in my studio. I'm recording. I'm writing. And this is – I've consolidated it this one day, but it's like I'm reaching millions of people and this is important. And I'll ask for forgiveness instead of permission. And that's been like a huge – that's been a big boon actually. It's like, yeah, I just don't – I don't do things on Tuesday. And people grumble and then they have lives and they stop caring because it's not that interesting to them. That totally makes sense. And I feel very privileged that I'm doing this not on your studio day. But thank you for accommodating my patient schedule. Oh, I'm happy to do things on other days too. But I just don't put – like I have to go in. I have to go teach today, which I do enjoy. OK. So then let's talk about seasonality because this is something in your book, Best Laid Plans, the book, not the podcast, Best Laid Plans. There's a lot on this. And I think we're very congruent on this idea of moving away from the notion of just year round, no variation to your it's just like you're turning the crank at like a certain level of intensity. And February feels the same as June feels the same as December Talk to me about varying rhythms pace workloads over time well first of all i just love the concept of seasons in general and i don know if that partly because i live in south florida and i don't really get to experience them but i just like to really really like think about them and think about how my year makes sense divided up and i actually kind of talk about different ways that you might think about dividing up your year other than the traditional quarters or even trimesters if you're an academic. But I really do like to take a very purposeful, like almost half a day kind of planning session four or five times a year. For me, it's five because I like to divide the year up into five pieces and think about what do I want out of the upcoming season and not to assume that, you know, season C is going to be exactly like season A. For me, the first season of the year is like January 1st to spring break. And that's usually a very go, go, go season. and then we kind of have a very kid-focused season from spring break until the end of the year when we have all that like May stuff and every single kid is in every single competition or whatever. And then summer, I treat as much more like let's just be lower key, do fun stuff. And by the way, I didn't mention this previously, but I think one other place we differ a little bit is I am very passionate about not just planning my work, but planning the fun stuff, like planning the get-togethers with friends and the travel and the massage or, you know, whatever it is that I'm trying to build into my life to make it more fun. And so summer might be a time that I have like a lot of fun planned and it's just like a looser time period. Then we have back to school, which has that rhythm of like, okay, kids are going back. We're in our routines. I'm also, because I'm in the planning world, tend to be really, really busy in like January and back to school season. So that kind of makes sense. And then I have what's called reflection season from November 1st to the end of the year where I just feel like the world takes on a different pace. It's a little celebratory. Everyone's reflecting. And, um, I just like to like acknowledge that as having its own energy. So yes, I'm super, super big into a, like acknowledging the seasonal flows and be like purposefully setting time to think very hard about what you want each season to be like in advance of that season. So wait, so your quintiles are, um, so you got like new years through spring spring break spring break to the end of the school year school year yeah period which i agree with you it's kind of like i think if it's a time when it's coaching time for me too it's like i coach multiple different things um summer then back to school to like school thanksgiving and then until halloween and then november 1st to december 31st to me just feels a little bit different well but you got like holiday yeah man you have uh there's like the thanksgiving holiday there's going to be like the christmas holiday there's going to be and people wind down what i think hey i love it um and i think similarly and i think what's important here though is because a lot of times when i talk about seasonality you probably get the same thing people will push back because they'll say well like my job isn't seasonal but like this is true for you right like nothing about pediatric endocrinology changes in march versus january but i think what what's captured by the way you talk about it is so much of the feeling of your day and what you're focusing on busyness like expands beyond just what you're doing in your job is what you're doing on the weekends and the evenings on the day that you're not in the office and turning the knob on those things you do control is actually has a much bigger impact and people realize that it's not just i can't take time off of work and just you know the summer so i can't have a seasonality like well it's completely different what you're doing with your time even outside of work and then my argument you can't do that in your job i don't think this would work but like a lot of knowledge work jobs because it's a lot of, it's a little more BSE. You have like a lot of give and you can really turn intensity up and down is something that I'm often telling knowledge workers in general because the job is so amorphous and there is no just like, here's a list of things that you're working on and here's your progress. It's all like email and meetings or this or that. And you can often get away with like, oh, I want to turn things down in the summer and you can do it for a couple of months and no one will notice. If you do it for a year, they'll eventually notice, but you're just like taking on less things and moving slower and then you speed up in other times. So I think people have way more control over the rhythm of their life. If you have a totally structured job for me, I get around that by taking more vacation in the summer. So, you know, many jobs, even if they're extremely structured and yeah, I can't get away with, Oh, let me see 75% of my patient volume in July. Like that wouldn't fly, but I can take two weeks off and like save my vacation time for those times when I want things to be slower and then maybe take on a little bit less on the creative side and then kind of create that slower rhythm for myself. Isn't this like the, the people who do this to the most extreme, do I have this right? There's like, it's like, uh, ER doctors who sort of travel, right. And it'll be like, okay, I'm going to come spend three months at this hospital in Boulder so that I, and then I'm going to ski for three months. And they really got that locked in, right. Because it's shift work. There are definitely certain professions who either have tons of vacation time or tons of flexibility or there are a lot of doctors these days that will do like locums work. So they could decide that like, they're going to work their butt off in March and April and then like not at all for two months. So that would be the extreme version. Yeah. And it's all like the pit. It's all, yeah. Everything I do all day, it's just like that. Everyone is super reasonable, like on the pit, right? That's just every doctor's experience where people just talk slowly and quietly and are just very reasonable. It's never chaotic at all in the ER. It's very peaceful. Yeah, it's very peaceful. Okay, I like that then. Okay, so we agree on the seasonality. All right, so pull this together for people. I want to build an on-ramp. So like for a typical member of my audience might be they've messed around with individual type of tools you might use in this conversation. They've had a to-do manager. They have a calendar that they sometimes use. They've used a time block planner and then stopped using a time block planner. They have a test list they haven't looked at in a month because it stresses them out. But they're liking what you're saying. Like, OK, I think I'm going to be less susceptible to being pushed around by big tech and distractions and numbing if I can take more intention about my life, knowing now, as we talked about it, intention might be like I'm intentionally slowing down and then speeding up here. And it's not just it's not productivity. It's not trying to increase the amount of work. How do we on ramp? Because we talked about a lot of things. How do we on ramp someone beyond the obvious answer is read Sarah's book. I was going to say you buy best laid plans and you read it. No, I'm just kidding. Which I've learned and it's a great book. I mean, it really walks through all these details, lots of examples. And you can kind of pick and choose. I feel like in your book, there's, you don't do it explicitly. There's sort of like, here's what's key. And then here's like a little bit more advanced things you can add on. And so like the reader already has a system, can plus it up, but like the new reader. Yeah. So how do we onboard the new, the new reader planning? So I would just focus on those three things that I talked about. Like, do you have a calendar that makes sense where you're really able to see what you have to do each day in a way that makes sense to you? Do you have a task management system that works and it enables you to see what you need to see at the right time? And are you checking your various inboxes in a thoughtful manner versus a when things come at me manner? And how are you organizing your goals, both larger scale and smaller scale and adapting some sort of, it could be a bare bones version. And by the way, the tools really truly don't matter. I could do all of this in a binder, in Apple notes, on paper, on like a really notion in a really fancy system. Like there's no specific tool, but to have somewhere to have rituals around setting larger scale goals, whether you're doing the yearly or seasonal level, and then also ways that you're going to bring that into the more practical timelines. So a way of looking at your seasonal stuff every week, maybe incorporating monthly in there and then day to day assigning yourself the tasks that make sense. So I think that would be my sort of like bare bones minimum calendar, understand your task management and have some kind of larger and smaller scale way of looking at your goals on a, you know, daily or weekly level plus seasonal or yearly. That would be that would be the most bare bones version. And that latter piece requires a thing to write the things down in. Right. So there's the latter piece of like I want to look at the monthly scale and the seasonal scale. For you, that's a notebook and it's a separate notebook than your planner. but you need somewhere where you're, and it could be a Google doc. It could be a text file. You need somewhere where you're taking notes. So many people have done, like a lot of people that I've worked with have had really cool systems and even just like Google Sheets where things are actually very much like, you know, they'll have a whole page for the year and then you can actually tab it and separate by seasons and they have different categories of their life, all color coded. So yes, you do have to capture all this stuff. The medium in which you do that doesn't really matter, but you're going to have to commit to something and continue to use it and to look at it. And I usually also talk about creating rituals that make sense for the timescale. So if you're planning the year or the season, you want to dedicate like a good amount of presence and time to that. So you're going to really want to clear out an afternoon or for the year. Laura Vanderkam, who has been on this show before, I believe as well, she and I host a like live planning retreat that lasts two days. And I'm not saying everyone needs to come to our retreat specifically, but we do not run out of things to talk about with our participants in those two days for planning the year. So really giving yourself the gift of space when it's a larger time frame to think about what's coming up and what do you want out of that time frame makes sense. And then when you're going to the day, you want something very, very quick. Obviously, we can't do a two-day retreat every day, right? But we should have things kind of laid out so that you can look at your calendar, which is organized, look at your week, which has already been thought through, and select your task for the day in like five to 10 minutes and be done with it. And then let me finally, I have to rope you in as I do with all guests into some sort of AI realism rant, because, you know, this has been been my correcting the narrative on AI has been a big part of my work recently. I want to rope you into my side on this, the intersection of AI and productivity, because I feel like there's this, you know, tech people aren't the best people to talk about organizational systems, because what makes a tech person happy is like complexity and pieces fitting together and whatever. But they've really been pushing this idea that, oh, the missing piece in people being organized could be solved by AI. And it really doesn't seem to be the issue based on like our whole conversation. The issue is not when I am looking at what I need to do, understanding it, figuring out priorities, figuring out what I should work on today. We're really good at that. Like our brains have embedded in it all of the relevant information, what's coming up, importance, how you're feeling, health, other things that's happening. That's not hard at all. What's hard is consistency and capture. It's sticking with a system, maintaining intentionality instead of just falling back into like, let me just be reactive because like I'm exhausted. And none of that's helped by AI. So I don't know. Can I rope you into my rant on this? I am always up for an AI rant. So that totally works for me. Yeah, I just don't want to give some large language model like that control over what I do all day. I mean, I want to be the one selecting my tasks. One of my biggest, and again, I'm not a techie, so I don't understand the inner workings like you do. But one of my biggest concerns about AI is that it's giving power to someone else that I, you know, I'm not consciously giving. So even like as simple as, oh, let me have AI plan my vacations for the year. Then, I mean, who's not to say that like various places haven't like paid the model to suggest some things versus another, or if we're not there yet, we're gonna be very soon. So, I mean, for me, life, the most precious thing of life is our time and our relationships. And I would like to maintain control over that myself. And so I wanna decide what goes on my calendar. I haven't, I'm not saying that AI tools might not be helpful for some people. Like, you know, there are things like the Skylight Calendar. And I think some of these apps where you could take the soccer schedule and it will, you know, scan it and add those events to your calendar. Like those kind of rote tasks to see being helpful. But in terms of selecting what I want to do with my time, I would like to leave computer algorithms out of that personally. And I think most people probably don't want to live a life that was just suggested to them. They want to actively choose what they're going to do. That's kind of the planning in the first place. I've never seen someone be stumped by looking at their calendar and their to-do list and be like, I don't know what to do next. I need someone else to come tell me. I've never seen someone stumped on that. That's not that hard of a decision. All right, sir. This has been fantastic. I want to make sure people know where to get more of this information. So you have two podcasts. Tell us about both. I do. So the first one is the one that's more planning adjacent. It's called Best Laid Plans. And I literally describe it as all things planning and planning adjacent. That one is just me with the occasional guest. Cal has been on it before and I will be having him on again. The other one is called Best of Both Worlds. And that is done with Laura Vanderkin. We co-hosted together and that's about making work and life fit together. She's an awesome writer and time management guru. So we make a fun team there. And your book, Best Laid Plans, Was that coming out in the fall? Not too long ago, right? No, December of 2025. It's called Best Land Plans, A Simple System for Living a Life That You Love. One of Amazon's best nonfiction books of the month, right? Yes, it got chosen for December. It was like a big shock. People are like, did you pay for that? I'm like, no. So, but that was a really fun honor. And it says like editor's pick on there. Of course, you can get it at anywhere other than Amazon as well. But that was kind of a fun thing. Excellent. All right. Well, Sarah, always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for getting the weeds with us. I think this type of thing is going to be helpful for a lot of my listeners who you got to take control of your time. If you don't, big tech will happily take control of it for you. So this is the first step. I'm sure we'll be talking again soon, but thanks as always for coming on. Oh, thank you so much for having me on. And I very much enjoyed talking about the pit. All right. So that was my discussion with Sarah Hart Unger. I looked it up. I was on the show, Jesse. So it's worth people going back. also years back i think we had sarah on our show yeah we did yeah so sort of a long-term front of the show i love geeking out about planning systems to me the key point that prefaces the whole discussion because i think her advice is spot on actually picked up some ideas there that i think are important but the key point that i think ties together the whole conversation is that sarah did not like to associate the word productivity with planning she's like that's two different things productivity is about i don't know professionally you're trying to increase the amount of something you produce and like that's that but what she cared about what's controlling your time how do you have a say over what you're doing with your time so you have control i often use the term internally attention shaping how do you shape your own attention so other services don't and i think that's really useful if we separate planning from productivity we realize like oh this is one of the tier one skills not just for living a deep life but for pushing back on the digital distraction So, very good. It was good to have Sarah on the show. Let's take another quick break to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. March is here, a month that includes International Women's Day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and progress while also recognizing how much they carry every day. Now, as someone who writes about time management and organization, I've heard from countless women about how much harder these goals can be for them as compared to men, right? They have to deal with more household labor at home, more non-promotable activities at work, and play the role of listener-in-chief and problem solver for so many different people in their lives. And this can be a lot. So for anyone who feels like you have a lot on your plate, this is a good time to remember that therapy offers a space to take care of yourself in the way that you deserve. And if you're going to consider therapy, consider BetterHelp. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. And it works. They have an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Your emotional well-being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash deep questions. that's better help.com slash deep questions i also want to talk about our friends at shopify starting a new business is hard i remember what it was like starting up the media company that produces this podcast here's what i learned don't reinvent the wheel if you can avoid it trust industry leaders where you can this is where shopify enters the scene if you need to sell something, you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including 10% of all e-commerce in the US. We're talking big names like Allbirds and Mattel to new brands just getting started. You want to sell online? They can help you with their design studio that features hundreds of ready-to-use templates. You need help spreading the word. They can help you easily create email and social media campaigns. Look, if we ever start selling products on this show, I know exactly what platform we'll use. It will be Shopify. So it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash deep. Go to shopify.com slash deep. That's shopify.com slash deep. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so you've heard me talking with Sarah, And now I want to hear from you. Let's move on to the part of the show where we check our inbox to see what you have to say. All right, Jesse, what interesting emails or messages have we gotten recently that's worth reviewing? The first one's from Sandra. Here's an email from her who is wondering if our dopamine addiction is changing how they make TV shows. Okay, let's see. I got this. This is a good one because we are – it's going to be not until later in the spring, but we are having Anna Lemke on, who is the researcher who wrote Dopamine Nation, like the leading – the world's leading experts on dopamine and how it affects us. So we're going to get – I'm learning a lot about dopamine now, so I'm glad to have this question. All right, so let's see here. I got Sandra's email here. Here's what she said. have you noticed that in TV programs such as the Great Pottery Throwdown, when the program finishes, they say next time, and then they show you the highlights of the next show like a trailer. I hate this as I don't want to know what happens next time I want a surprise. They also do this at the start of the next program saying this time and then show the trailer which highlights the show again. Is this an effect of dopamine? There is no delayed surprise. Basically, you don't have to watch the whole show. You can just watch the first five minutes and decide if you really want to see the full detail. All right. So first of all, Jesse, I assume you are a great pottery throwdown completist. You've seen every season of that show. I have. Do you think that's literally people just making pottery? Probably. So when they're like, all right, next time next time on the show and it just shows people very quietly at the pottery wheel and then there's all this drama if like something's ready to topple over well yeah like it wobbles a little bit and then they straighten it and it kind of sticks on that for a second and then one of the contestants comes in the frames stabs him the neck see that's where the drama is that's why you got to watch is this going to be a stabbing episode or just an episode where they make pottery all right there's a couple interesting things here because you know what this reminded me of jesse is the advice that we heard from professional YouTubers about how you have to build a YouTube video to get big viewership on YouTube. And remember like the various YouTube people we work with have told us like, oh, the thing is like, watch a Mr. Beast video. You'll see this. You have to show the people, the audience right off the bat, this is what's coming. And you show quick clips of the biggest exciting things that's going to happen. So like a Mr. Beast video, If they're crashing a train into something, you'll see the train crashing into something. They just show you, here's all the things that are going to come. And then you go and you deliver the things you said you're going to come later in the show with very limited friction. So quick cuts, moving, moving, moving, moving to the things you already showed that was going to come. That sounds like it's exactly what's happening on these TV shows as well. I don't know the role of dopamine because we haven't had Anna on the show yet. But there is a bigger phenomenon here that may or may not be tied to dopamine that we need a good name for. Jesse, we've got to think about like a good name for this. But there's something about the abundance of choice in media where now if I go into a streaming service, there is endless things I could choose. That makes it hard to choose and commit to something to watch because your brain is always thinking there might have been a better choice. And I hear this a lot. I think we see this in our letters sometimes, right? Like young people in particular will be like, I have such a hard time like choosing and sticking with a movie. I think we got this in response to last week's episode because a lot of people wrote in about movies. And a lot of people like, yeah, even people who don't use their phone a lot were like, I just have a hard time sticking with the movie. And so I wonder if there's something like this going on is the abundance of choice makes it really hard for us to commit to something because our mind is like there is other options. In a way, there wasn't if you were just turning on TV and you flip through the channels like this is the literally the only thing on right now that's like a little bit interesting to me. I have no other option. Your brain is like let's watch it. Or if you're at the movie theater, you're like there's no other place for me to go, so I might as well watch it. But if you have one click away from those horizontal carousels on Netflix, like my god, there could be something better. So maybe that's what these TV shows are recognizing. We have to show them the audience. Here's all the stuff that's coming. You're like, OK, I want to see that, that and that. All right. This show is worth me watching. I hate that as well. My kids hate it. They're always like, don't fast forward, fast forward, whatever we're watching a show that has a next time. All right. What else do we got here? Next up is from Kendra. We have an email from Kendra with a reaction to your discussion last week of film students who couldn't make it through entire films. We got a lot of reaction for that one. Yeah. Because people like it's something a lot of people have personal experience with. All right. Let's see here. Kendra says, what I don't see mentioned here or most other places is that the length of movies has actually increased over the last 10 plus years. It used to be that a movie was between 1.5 hours and two hours, but that time is creeping up. It seems like most of them are over two hours now. In personal opinion, it doesn't always make the movie better. Intuitively, I guess I've had that same effect. My wife and I started last night Train Dreams, which is one of the best picture nominees. It's out of Netflix studios. and we noted, like it actually caught our attention, that it was an hour 47. So this must be a fact. Like that felt short, notably short. I found an article. I haven't really read this yet, so we're going to kind of do this on the air. I found a Vanity Fair article about exactly this phenomenon. I'm a little bit curious about what's going on. So let's look at this. I'm going to see if there's any interesting stats in this piece. I like this ad of James Cameron wearing a Rolex Why is James okay I sorry to go do a divergence here if you james cameron why are you agreeing to do a rolex ad you get free watches he so rich he's so rich he's i think his net worth is like a billion dollars is it really yeah i mean he's the he's the director and producer with significant profit participation in three out of the top five highest grossing movies of all time i think with those watches they don't have to do much and they just get cool watches in cool places somebody just wants to do that i don't but i mean a billion dollars right so like i'm just let's make this relative right like so for us like what would be the the cost of a rolex to james cameron what would be the equivalent for like us and the money we have that would be like i think if someone is like come do this photo shoot and like i'm going If you do it, I'm going to give you a tall coffee from Starbucks at 50% off. Like you only got to pay like $1.25 for it. Like I'm not going to go do an all-day photo shoot. Like I could just buy a cup of coffee. The only thing I can imagine – I'm sure this is fascinating for our audience. The only thing I can imagine is the diving, deep-sea diving aspect. They sponsored the documentary. I think they sponsored the documentary he did where he went to the bottom of the Mariana's – It might make more sense because if you were – do you ever see a documentary where he goes to the bottom of the Mariana's Trench? No, I haven't. It's really interesting. But they have an arm coming off of the submersible that's just holding – I think it's a Rolex watch. The show that like, look, this diver watch at the bottom of the Mariana's Trench is still working or something like that. Okay, so that's probably just part of the deal. Yeah. Yeah, because he didn't want to pay for that documentary. All right. We figured it out. All right. Anyways, here we go. Here's some stats about the – let's see if Kendra is right about this. Here's what Vanity Fair says. In 2002, even as two nearly three-hour Lord of the Ring movies dominated theaters, the average length of the top 20 box office performers was a breezy one hour and 59 minutes. Twenty years later, moviegoers had to sit through an extra 13 minutes of footage on average. Okay, so we went from hour 59 in 2002 on average to, if I'm doing my math right, two hours and 12 minutes in 2022. All right, so movies did get longer. Is there a reason? I skimmed some of the rest of this article. Here's what's interesting about it is they have a lot of people saying, all right, here. Let me read this quote here. The studios are definitely not encouraging three-hour movies. that I can guarantee, says a senior movie executive. As a consumer, speaking for myself and on behalf of many other people like me, enough already. All right, so if the studios aren't encouraging this, why are the movies getting longer? It seems like it's just the filmmakers want to make longer movies. Why do you think that is? They like them. Like, here we go. Well, let me read you from the article, Jesse. Cinema purists might see a long film as a sign of a director with something to say. So yeah, it just seems better. I have another theory for this as well, though. All right. So yes, the studios don't want it. The audiences don't necessarily want it. The directors want it, but they've always wanted long movies, right? I suspect the difference is there's fewer movies. They mentioned like, oh, 2002. Sure, the Lord of the Rings movies were three hours long, but the average movie was short. But in 2002, you probably had a lot more movies in the theater, and you had a lot of mid-tier movies because there's just a lot more movies coming out than there are now. And the mid-tier movies, they were not going to allow to be long, but it seems now there's fewer movies and the movies that are made, they tend to be more like big event movies. It's going to be like a Chris Nolan movie. It's going to be Martin Scorsese, Killer of the Flower's Moon, right? It's going to be these big event movies. Maybe those have always been long. We just don't have shorter movies to pull it down. Do you think that's true? There's less movies now? Yeah. Because you always talk about – There's many fewer. Why is that? Post-pandemic. They're still recovering from that? The global box office is – never came. It has not made it back to 2019. It hasn't come close. But in terms of book sales, books. Books are okay. Interesting. But even that, it's a little bit misleading. Book sales industry-wide are doing fine. They've continued to like rise at like a reasonable pace. But what's really happening is nonfiction sales are down, which is bad for me. But it's being compensated for because of these massive hits, especially in like women-oriented fiction and fantasy fiction. so you have like the dark fantasy uh books where like people are marrying dragons and books like uh colin hoover books that come out of uh book talk and they're selling huge numbers you know 20 million copies of a book like just huge numbers mainly among more among female readers than male readers nonfiction is not doing as well and in part that tended to be more of where you had male book readers and they're not reading as much so books are doing fine but uh it's a little bit uneven but movies are not doing nearly as well they just and even the biggest hits aren't as big of hits as they were sort of pre-pandemic um because yeah i mean think about all the movies like we talked about it last week like the probably the the greatest movie of that decade came out in 2002 which was the britney spears vehicle crossroads but there's a lot of movies like that in 2002 there's not as many of those today and those are all short because they're like no you can't make it long we want to like move as many movies through but then when peter jackson came along he's like i'm gonna do lord of the rings he was like i'm gonna do three hours like i guess sure and now it's like all peter jackson movies that's my theory all right um do we have another email yep this is from an anonymous person it's a comment saying that extends some of the issues you discuss about attention span last week from the context of movies to the workplace All right, Anonymous. Let's read this note here. Anonymous, that's an interesting point. It's become a bigger issue. These used to be separate magisteria for me in my writing, and I'd have to always make the point when I would do interviews, et cetera, like these are two separate issues. Distraction in the workplace is driven by workplace communication tools like email and Slack. Distraction at home is being driven by attention economy platform tools on your smartphones like social media. And I said the effects are similar. Your attention is fragmented, but the causes are different, and therefore the solutions are different. The issue in work has to do with the way we collaborate because we collaborate with this hyperactive hive mind approach of everyone just talks to everyone on demand as you're needed. It creates a situation in which you have to constantly monitor communication channels, not because they're super addictive or super sticky or because you have bad work habits, but because that's where the work is happening. And if you don't monitor it, you fall behind, and that's what's distracting you. Whereas on your phone, outside of work, the reason why you're looking at that phone all the time is because it's engineered to be hyper-engaging and it's creating a reward loop within your short-term motivational system. And then those neuronal bundles are voting for the phone whenever they see it, and it wins out over other activities most of the time. Two separate problems. But what Anonymous is saying is something that I've seen to be increasingly true, which is that the distractions from the phone have gotten so good that as we talked about last week, they're overall reducing people's cognitive patience. they're overall reducing people's comfort with any sort of sustained attention even when they're in a non-phone context. Like they're in a meeting and they can't pick up their phone, right? Because if you want to look inside the brain, the short-term reward system, you have these neuronal bundles that vote if they feel like the expected reward of a behavior is going to be high. They're not going to vote for picking up the phone if you're in the middle of a meeting with five people with your boss because it's measuring the benefit you'll get by seeing something interesting. With the massive negative impact of your boss being like, are you looking at your phone like right in front of me while I'm trying to talk to you? So in a meeting, we're not being drawn to pick up our phone because our mind is saying this is not – there's a low reward to that. But we're still, as reported by Anonymous, having a hard time paying attention, drifting aloof, like can't keep our mind focused. this is becoming this is a sign i guess i would say of the cognitive impacts of consumer non-professional consumer digital attention economy tools moving to a new level of magnitude of pain a new level magnitude of negative impact that it's not just now it's hard when i have my phone not to look at it like when i'm out to dinner with my friends it's i'm beginning to permanently lose my ability to be comfort, sustaining focus, delaying gratification. Even if I can't look at the phone, I just can't do it anymore. So these worlds have now come together. So both of these, again, we have two different problems. The solve the phone problem, really the only solution is you have to stop participating in the attention economy. I'm so tired. It's been a decade now of people trying to convince me that this is the, it's inevitable. It's the digital town square. We still hear these arguments today. You know, that if we don't let 12-year-olds in Australia be on TikTok, they won't be able to know about world events and all these type of things. But that – I'm so tired of that argument. It's just a giant money-making scheme that strip mines your mind. They're like allow Mark Zuckerberg to buy the second half of Kauai. So we have to stop participating in that economy and you'll eventually gain back from that cognit patience. But then we still have to solve the email and Slack problem at work, which has to do with collaboration style. So it's a hard – oh, God, Jesse. There's a lot of hard challenges out there, but I guess it gives me something to do. All right. So also as always towards the end of the show, I like to discuss what I have been up to recently in my own quest to cultivate a deep life. So I'll give you my update. First, people have been asking about this AI programmer project. So I'm not sure if you saw this, Jesse, but last – well, I guess it would be two weeks ago now when this comes out. I sent out an email to my newsletter list saying, if you're a computer programmer, I want to hear how you're using AI. The good, the bad, what you love, what you hate, whatever it is. You're not using it at all. You use it every day. I just want to hear about it because there's a lot of discussion right now about cloud code and agentic AI. And a lot of discussions a little bit for someone like me who follows the industry closely and for a lot of people like programmers, it's a little confusing. confusing the sudden attention because these sort of AI tools for programming have been big since before ChatGPT came out, the sort of autocomplete, tab complete. You know, we go way back. We go to Cursor, these sort of pre-ChatGPT products. And then as I reported in January for The New Yorker, I did a lot of interviews with people who work on these programming agencies, command-light interface agents like Cloud Code. Those really started showing promise in 2024. and that's what allowed at the beginning of 2025, this was the article I published in January, at the beginning of 2025, it led to all these tech leaders to say, we're gonna have agents in all parts of your life this year. 2025 will be the year of the agent because we're seeing how good these are already working in programming. And then what happened is, it turns out non-programming agents are much harder and nothing really happened in 2025, but the computer programming agents continued to get better. And about six months ago, I guess, it's just like a tipping point thing. There's a lot of programmers using these agents because they're really, they were good. It was the only thing, agentic thing that was really working well in AI. But there's more people started using them about six months ago with some of the latest updates, cloud code switching from Opus to Sonnet. There's like these little things got just good. Nothing big happened. No new technology was introduced, but just like these little changes happened where I think it became just easy enough that in more context, people used them. And also I think it's just a reporting thing. people started talking about yeah i'm using these agents they're pretty cool and then that got a lot of other people that who hadn't been using them to use them so there wasn't really a technological breakthrough six months ago but there was a awareness breakthrough within the the wider world of these tools which have been like steadily you know they've been around for a while anyways i wanted to know what's really going on so i've heard from i'm never gonna get through this just 350 people have sent me in detailed briefings and i'm trying to go through them in detail take notes and i'm also coding them like this is coding them uh i'm coding the ai use of the person so is it like uh from one extreme like doesn't basically uses rarely or only occasionally uses any ai um agentic uses rarely all programmers now people understand ai completely changed programming in like 2022 like everyone tab completes all sorts of things that tab complete is where the it'll finish the code that's like right in front of what you're doing because it's It's like, oh, you start writing a function name and press tab and it'll finish the calls for you. And so like everyone does that. But with agentic coding, it's like rarely uses it, uses it for some types of situations but not for others. Like there's just – it depends. Uses it for the majority of their coding and then vibe coding, which is – so use it for the majority of their coding but closely supervised I should say. And then vibe coding, which is like the way Matt Schumer talked about in that article we talked about last week where you're like, build this app and you come back later and it's built it and tested it. So I'm also like coding so I can keep statistics and just trying to keep track of notes. And God, I'm through like 50. I've made it through 50, up to 350. Because people probably write a lot, right? Yeah. And I would say a good portion of them are written by AI, which is interesting. I mean, the people disclose it. They're like, I'm not a very good writer. I wrote this by AI. So it's interesting. I much prefer the non-AI written reports though because AI like you can see where it's just it's so bland and just like summarizing like it's almost like vibey. So I get better reports when they don't write the report by AI. Anyways, that's ongoing and I don't know what to do with it. I just want to be more informed about it so that when we talk about these issues in the future, I know exactly what people are doing because there's so much room for hype and vibes as well as fear, dystopia and utopian rhetoric here that I want to be super grounded. It's really complicated though, so I don't have my arms around it yet. The main thing I can say is I think you have to think about – there is for sure a new style of programming that is significantly spreading. Fifty percent of the first 50 reports I've gone through are now largely using agents to produce code under close supervision. Almost no one's Vibe coding. That's not really a thing. Vibe coding is fine if you're not a programmer and you need to build a quick web application to help organize your team. But that's like a separate thing. And these are all serious programmers. There's like four of them so far doing anything that looks like Vibe coding. But half of them are – and the other half aren't because it also turns out that like it has to be a language and a type of thing on which it's trained a lot for it to be good. So if you're trying to write like advanced Rust code or something, it doesn't work well with that. It doesn't work well with Go. And it's a really new type of work where it's very interactive, a lot of like – okay, you're trying to converse with the agent. You're writing specs and it checks the spec and doesn't understand what – like all this like specification. You do all this work and then finally like, okay, now build this piece and then it builds that piece. And then you test it and you let it write tests and you have it look at your test and then you fix things. You try again. And you kind of have – it's like supervising. Someone told me it's like supervising like a junior employee who's like a pretty good coder but like super literal and you have to like really be on them. That's like what it is right now. I think it's like a beta. We're in the beta phase of this. I think there's a core in here that's going to stick and increase the speed with which senior programmers make progress on what they're doing. I think there's a lot of other stuff that's surrounding it that's probably unnecessarily wasting time. And I think there's going to be new processes and procedures. There's going to be some things where we strip this back away from and other things where we keep it. So my main thing I can say now is the way a lot of programmers are experimenting with this. A lot of programmers are spending most of their time experimenting with it and not actually doing their work. And it's a beta phase. And I think it's going to take six months until this shakes out. And then we see how this more permanently changes how certain types of programming happens. So I don't know. That's what's going on. I listened to your Zitron interview. Oh, me on his show? Yeah. Yeah. On his hater season? A couple days ago. Yeah, what did you think? I liked it. I liked how you explained some stuff because I was confused and you explained it. I've been doing these videos. I might record another one today with my friend Rob Montz. We record him here in the studio. And he's like a philosophy brown Ivy League guy. So he plays the role of the smart person who doesn't understand technology. And then he sort of interrogates me on whatever's going on in AI. So you should check those videos out as well. Yeah, so I like those. Quick question before I get into what I've read and watched recently. Quick question for the audience. If you want to send this in to interesting at calnewport.com. I'm thinking, I'm scared of this idea. I hate new commitments. But I'm thinking because I'm under some pressure about this, about maybe having a standalone short podcast and newsletter just to do the AI reaction. so they keep this show and the newsletter kind of focused on what it's meant for which is like helping individuals in their fight for depth in a distracted world and then have a maybe on this feed or on its own feed it's sort of like here's like what's in the news on ai this week let me give you my ai realist take and then maybe like a newsletter version of it i'm terrified of that work but also i feel like i have a voice in this that's important right now i don't know so if you have feedback sent to interesting at calnewport.com. All right. What did I read or watch? So we're recording this, Jesse, confirm. We're recording this on February 24th. Plenty of days left in February. I have completed my fifth book for February. Yeah, baby. I read The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fisher. My wife gave it to me. Again, I've mentioned, maybe I mentioned this before. This is a book that was basically like invented in a lab to be exactly what I want to read. the rise of spielberg lucas and coppola so obviously obviously i love this book all right so that's my uh fifth book for february i would go through them all but i don't have the list with me i forgot lost island intensity last kings of hollywood lost book of the bible the hidden book in the bible and potensify i said that there's one there's one just one other one i'm forgetting um whatever oh lost oh you said lost island yeah i said lost island speaking of lost island i did see in the podcast last week uh when i was talking about lost island i don't know what the hell book cover you found i guess it was a book with the same name is that a different one oh yeah so i looked it up you put up a book cover for it it's a children's book so the audience is like what the hell there's a there's a book called the lost island that's aimed it said for the like nine to twelve year old market and it's like kids exploring or whatever so the other one must not be popular at all it's old it's like a decade old yeah yeah um so no i didn't read a kid's book uh in case people are wondering i'm also watching things um people want to hear about movies after last week's episode i watched the smashing machine which starring dwayne johnson dwayne johnson was great the filming was in that like really confident impressive like standard safety style naturalism which i think it's like really impressive out to your filmmaking uh the movie though they couldn't they couldn't find a core of the movie in the script it was at least my opinion is it was like episodic and impressionistic uh but you they they struggled to actually have an arc or attention or you just kind of felt like you were in this person's life and then they added in the sort of emily blunt sort of like very cliche not very interesting storyline of like there's his wife she'd be crazy and it's a real problem for him and but then they like make up again after they fight and like i guess that's his main villain was like overcoming his wife's craziness like there was no it's like a beautifully crafted acted movie that they didn't have the core and i think that's why otherwise the pieces were great but it didn't i don't think it came together i'm gonna watch that soon actually uh yeah it's worth watching john rock is great it's really good acting um i also say he's huge he's a monster monster he's like what 85 years old what does he You know, monster. We also watched Song Song Blue, which was starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson about dramatizing the life of a Neil Diamond husband wife tribute band from the 90s and 2000s. You know, it was like parts of it were like a jukebox musical, right? Like it's very like good hearted and they're just like super happy and they're great singers and like singing Neil Diamond. and it's shot like a concert film those parts and it's really nice it was fine um it had to be edited the problem is is not to spoil too much there's multiple tragedy beats in it so it's like things are going well tragedy things are going well tragedy and it's like they they have to cover too much ground too quickly and they're like you're just as you're getting started like i kind of like this it's kind of feel good infectious tupac musical you get to that tragedy beat pretty quickly and you're like i don't think i'm bought in enough into these characters to care and then And so, again, it's one of these movies like good, not great. Good components, but didn't all come together. All right. So that's what I was up to. I think that's it for this week. You and there's a note here about you're finishing up the Best Picture nominees. Oh, yeah. So that's why we watched. That's why we were watching Train Dreams. Yeah. So my wife and I are trying to finish. That's the one where he's a tree cutter, right? Yeah. I saw that. that was good yeah okay i'm about halfway through yeah beautifully shot um so we try to watch all the best picture nominees we're pretty close we are doing one exchange where there's one movie she saw i didn't and one i saw she didn't we're going to count it for both she didn't want to see frankenstein i don't want to see hamnet and so we're kind of we're still counting it so we've got to see train dream still secret agent um which i'm looking forward to and i think there's only one Oh, sentimental value. All I can think about with the movie watching and our theme the last couple weeks is when you're talking to take 30-minute breaks and read an article with three-hour movies. I'm like, that's going to take a long time. It takes five minutes. No, no, I think it's fine. Yeah, you're right. The movies are pretty long. That's what I do. I've never tried it, but I want to try it eventually. Yeah, like re-energizes you. It really makes a difference. And then you learn a lot of film stuff. All right, anyways, enough of this nonsense. So let's, we'll call it for now. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.