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Your work matters – Build your schedule accordingly
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Swizec 4y agoA quote I’ll never forget: “Productivity is for people with no leverage” The correct way to optimize your schedule is to do less
- Ancalagon 4y agoPropose changing the title: "Your work matters (probably mostly for someone else) ..."
- dangarbri3 4y agoHow to get leverage
- extrememacaroni 4y agoreduce dependency on other people
- manholio 4y agoLeverage, by definition, is having others depend on you.
- jasonjmcghee 4y agoGain experience, conviction, credibility, and wisdom. Make decisions. Drive initiatives.
- teucris 4y agoBe the one holding the purse strings.
- skadamat 4y agoOne of Cal's earlier books is ALL about this: https://www.calnewport.com/books/so-good/ https://www.calnewport.com/books/so-good/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bot41 4y agoThat's a great quote!
- jcowdy 4y agoI’m a big fan of Cal Newport. His overarching theme is to be intentional about how you use your time. If you aren’t specifically planning and blocking your schedule, it will turn into a fragmented mess and not allow you to get in the deep thinking periods that many projects require. This is a good reminder that you may need to advocate for yourself (and work with your partner) to establish these slots in your schedule.
- skadamat 4y agoCal's key ideas for the uninitiated: - Deep Life: Kind of like essentialism / minimalism: Be intentional & focus on results / remove what matters. Create 5 pillars for your life, and work fits into it: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/04/20/cultivating-a-deep-life/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/04/20/cultivating-a-dee... - Deep Work: do one thing at a time, in a focused way. Context switching is expensive on the brain and stressful / anxiety inducing - Career Advice (So Good They Can't Ignore You book): become great at a skill or the intersection of multiple skills. When you become good, you'll learn to love it and you can trade in your expertise for more lifestyle traits (more pay or less hours or no boss) His podcast is awesome too: https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/ https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/
- molsongolden 4y agoAny favorite podcast episodes you'd recommend for someone listening for the first time?
- sorry_i_lisp 4y agoI think using the Core Ideas Playlist and starting there would be good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8xK8kBHHUX43VVxO3b7so_HXS72rf6eg https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8xK8kBHHUX43VVxO3b7s... I have never listened to a podcast, just the cut out snippts on the youtube channel.
- skadamat 4y agoGood question! 1. Deep Life Principles: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-204-deep-life-principles/id1515786216?i=1000569523350 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-204-deep-life-princ... 2. Decoding the Deep Life: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-200-decoding-the-deep-life/id1515786216?i=1000566223960 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-200-decoding-the-de... 3. Quieting the Ambitious Brain: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-199-quieting-an-ambitious-brain/id1515786216?i=1000565957798 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-199-quieting-an-amb... 4. Fun experimental episode on Shop Class as Soulcraft: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-116-re-reading-shop-class-as-soulcraft-with-brad/id1515786216?i=1000530036398 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-116-re-reading-shop... Also as the person below me pointed out, the Core Ideas playlist is great: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8xK8kBHHUX43VVxO3b7so_HXS72rf6eg https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8xK8kBHHUX43VVxO3b7s... Most of them have the same format (except the last one above): - Deep dive into a topic he's thinking about - Listener questions - Once a month update on books he's read
- fhrow4484 4y ago> Your work matters. It’s okay to fight for it in your schedule. Nice conclusion, but half of the solution in this article is to work "12:00 to 4:00 every Saturday"... Does your work matter that much that you have to sacrifice every weekends? My 2¢: fight harder to carve time during weekdays instead
- mgkimsal 4y agoIf... you're being intentional about your time/schedule, do 'weekends' matter as much? EDIT: I can understand 'kids' aspect. Outside of that, if I'm doing the things I want to do at the times I want to do them, the notion of 'weekend=do_what_i_want' isn't as compelling. I try to schedule in things I want to do when I want, weekends be damned.
- drainyard 4y agoIf you have children weekends are incredibly important.
- manmal 4y agoOnly if you are unavailable on week days.
- cgrealy 4y agoEven if you’re available weekdays, the kids are not (they’re in school)
- manmal 4y agoMy kids are home at 1:30. When they are older, 3:00 twice a week, and 1:30 thrice a week. No homework. So there’s a sizable amount of hours every day to spend time with them. Blanket statements like GP made are not true for everybody.
- 4y ago
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoI like a lot of ideas from Cal Newport but there is something wrong with our work culture when working on the weekend is now seen as a productivity hack.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoI didn't realize this is where Newport was going. Most of what I've read of him in the past advocates for getting off of social media to gain control over your time - which I think is good advice. I'd recommend Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals as it's very different from the productivity-oriented time management books that tend to dominate the genre.
- DoughnutHole 4y agoIt's always worth remembering that Cal is an academic - a culture in which it is considered virtuous for your work to be your life, or at the very least the defining element of it. This is a source of a lot of the ongoing exploitive or outright abusive behaviours and treatments of those on the lower rungs of the academic totem pole that are frankly endemic in most institutions.
- phist_mcgee 4y agoAcademia is feudalism with an intellectual veneer. Source: Academic for 5 years.
- cjpearson 4y agoHe is an academic, but in Deep Work he argues that excessive working hours are not necessary for success in the field, using himself and a few other academics as examples of successful academics who've achieved both a work-life balance and tenure. I assume that the weekdays which Elizabeth spends caring for her children are not spent working at the same time. She has an unusual schedule, but I doubt she works excessive hours. A big part of Deep Work is quality over quantity.
- skadamat 4y ago
- LesZedCB 4y agoi would prefer not to this whole story sounds like the "before" segment of an article on burnout.
- voxmatt 4y agoPlug for https://www.getclockwise.com/ https://www.getclockwise.com/ Cal's writing has been a key source of inspiration for what we build.
- cgrealy 4y agoEh, I’m at the point in my life where a more relevant title would be “your life matters - if some work happens to get done, that’s a bonus”
- tobyjsullivan 4y agoThis is an appealing sentiment, but I have so many counter-examples it's laughable. Including: - Senior citizens who are homeless because they were too busy "living life" to hold a job (read: life-long hippy types living on mexican beaches) - Middle-aged friends who are waking up and realizing they don't have careers, just a string of jobs that paid for the weekend getaways. - Colleagues (across multiple jobs) who show up with this attitude and, quite clearly, do absolutely nothing on average. Nowadays, I push them out if they land on my team. Don't worry, they usually pick up another gig fairly easy.
- kredd 4y agoEveryone has their own priorities in life, so people who have “wasted their younger years” might have been happy during that time. From my years of meeting random people, I’ve been more fascinated with people who took a lot of time offs and didn’t grind for the career. Especially people in their 60s/70s with a lot of life experience sounded like they feel more “fulfilled”, than some career chasing SVPs. Even with those, they’d mostly talk about non-work stuff. Long story short, life is fairly different for everyone, thus min/maxing DPS like you’d do in an RPG probably won’t work. Everyone has retroactive regrets, but we can’t really say whether throwing money on weekend getaways or working on a side project over a weekend is objectively better.
- cgrealy 4y agoThere is a middle ground between being homeless on a beach* and deciding to work 4 hours on a Saturday just to get stuff done. My point is that the reason I can take this attitude now is that I have spent 25 years getting to the point where I am paid well and I can negotiate my time so that I don't have to work evenings and weekends. * if I was going to be homeless, living on a Mexican beach sounds like a pretty good option.
- 4y ago
- WesleyLivesay 4y agoI think the theory of this article is fine, but the solution of sacrificing weekend time with family to eek out some time for work goals feels bad to me. It also involves pushing more child care onto the partner in the relationship, when it sounds like they are already sacrificing large chunks of their time on a commute so that the family can live close to the researchers place of work.
- musicale 4y agoReplacing non-work time on the weekend (especially time with children or a partner, or personal time) with work seems like a bad idea. Moreover, from years of personal experience, I have found that working on weekends doesn't seem to improve productivity and is harmful to health and happiness.
- anothernewdude 4y agoWhat I do, is schedule work tasks on the weekend that I know won't matter if they're not done, and then not do them. Works out great.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoI don’t know about this attitude. In my experience, family is all the time. Sure, it’s great when we do special trips together. But “weekend time with family” is not necessary a recharge for oneself or for the kids. We shouldn’t feel guilty about making time for deep work on the weekends. Often, two parents and kids on a weekend day are worse than one parent—more conflict, less flow, less fun. Take turns, get “me time!” My wife and I have recently come up with a series of agreements on time that have substantially improved both our work and home life.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> Turning her attention to the weekend, Elizabeth arranged for her husband to take the kids from 12:00 to 4:00 every Saturday, freeing up another four-hour research block. Being deliberate about schedule management is great. However, my goal with schedule management is to get work done during the work week so I can spend more time with my kids, not carve out a large chunk of the weekend to avoid the kids while I work more. There were some decent points in this article, but it really needed some better examples. Obviously parents can get more work done if we conveniently have our spouses watch the kids alone every weekend while we work more on Saturday, but I didn't really need a long blog post to tell me that. Nor do I want it. Realistically, I've found a lot of success in being more ruthless about my own schedule management: Withdrawing from meetings I don't need to be in. Requesting smaller 30-minute time slots where people unnecessarily schedule 1-hour meetings. Leaving meetings entirely if the scheduler doesn't show up within 5 minutes of the start time, sending them an e-mail asking to reschedule when they're available. Forcing meetings into e-mails when they don't need to be a meeting. Requesting agendas and pre-work before meetings so we avoid design by committee. Implemented tactfully, these can squeeze out a lot of the time wasters that happen during the course of a week. I'd much rather do things like that than to give up and work weekends.
- cgrealy 4y agoMy other favourite tactic is block booking my own time. When I was doing more dev, I'd quite happily block 4 hours out of my calendar to do some coding, and if you're booking a meeting during that time, the world better be exploding.
- Helmut10001 4y agoAbsolutely agree. Having finished my PhD 7 years ago, now with a child of 4 years, more work does not work if you look at your life holistically. My strategies evolve around: Gradual, incremental, consistent and focused steps, instead of bold deadlines, weekend work, and trying to press in more. While having a family is great, I still want to deliver quality at work. In the past, weekend shifts have always resulting in quality deteriorating. Skip what is not necessary, decline what is impossible within the given time frame, ignore requests to deliver more in less. It will look as if your chances of staying employed decline, but the opposite was the case for me: People seem to expect that things cannot be done as fast as they wish and will trust you more, if you deliver consistently but slighlty beyond schedule.
- whatever1 4y agoWhy do we celebrate working in the weekends ?
- di7rdd4rdy 4y agoLaura should join a union. if she's teaching so many classes she can't do any research it's her employer's problem not her weekends with her kids problem. that's why usa academia is dead since the 80s.