Things Learned From…
Courtney Weaver — How Cal Newport Rewrote the Productivity Gospel
Divide Your Day into Two Sessions
On days when Newport is not teaching, he likes to divide his day into two sessions.
The first shift is for deep work, that requires his highest cognitive attention, and the second for work that is slightly less cognitively intense.
The shifts rarely focus on the same project, a distinction that is key and allows him to make incremental progress on multiple fronts.
He usually ends his day around 5:00 pm and tries to avoid looking at email outside his normal working hours.
In the morning, after dropping his kids at the school bus, he takes out his physical planner to “figure the day out.”
“If I don’t do that, I lose 50% of my ability to produce things,” he said.
Resume-centric Approach vs. Calendar-centric Approach
“The resume-centric approach is: Oh, it’d be really cool to have this degree to be really useful. It’d be really cool to have written a novel. So why don’t I do this? Oh, I want to run a marathon. That would look cool. Let me start training for a marathon.”
By contrast, Newport continued, “The calendar-centric approach to your life is looking at the time you have available…[asking yourself] does that seem sustainable?” […]
Newport continued: “That’s, by the way, how I approach my life.
I get that exact same sinking feeling in my gut when I’m staring at my calendar and it’s not working.
My wife knows this. This is what she thinks of as Monday morning syndrome: when I’m doing a weekly plan Monday morning in a period where my schedule has got too complex, I just feel terrible, because I’m forced to stare at the calendar, and it doesn’t fit. And nothing makes me more unhappy. […]
We’ve got to trust that gut.”
Imagine Your Ideal Life as a Whole
Think deeply about your future, imagining what your ideal life would look like in 5-15 years — not just in terms of job, but as a whole.
Newport: “Smell it, see it, taste it, as we like to say. Then look backwards and say: how do I get there?”
Thanks for reading! Hope you have an amazing day.
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