Discussion Forum > Deep Work vs Long List Systems
On Cal Newport's time blocking:
On his blog he recommends scheduling every minute of a day.
He has a timeblocking notebook, and has an example of it where all the hours are filled in with activities.
On the other hand, in interviews, he tells that sometimes he schedules a whole day with one activity, or will spend a long time walking in nature doing "deep work", or has a "thinking chair" where he does "deep work". He tells that when he has a timeblock of 90 minutes, he will vary the intensity of the work during that period. Since he is a professor, he perhaps has a schedule and the freedom where he can call these activities "work". However, someone else who as a 9-5 job might not have a boss who would consider these activities "work", and they might have to do these activities in their leisure time.
In fact, I posted a list of the top 10 most restful activities in "The Art of Rest", and some of those activities, such as mindfulness, daydreaming, walking, being alone, spending time in nature, reading - Cal Newport would be doing "deep work" while engaging in these activities, while someone else would be "'resting". He might "timeblock" these activities loosely and call it "work", while someone else would say it was "unscheduled".
Cal Newport also writes against social media, yet he has his own blog, and his own podcast in which he answers questions, and appears on Youtube interviews.
I think much depends minutely the minutes of the day are scheduled. It appears that Cal Newport often uses timeblocking in a loose sense with freedom. He says he might have a theme for the week. It appears that he has a good balance in use of his time, however, others who read him might take him more literally and schedule their time in a more detailed and rigid manner than he himself practices.
On his blog he recommends scheduling every minute of a day.
He has a timeblocking notebook, and has an example of it where all the hours are filled in with activities.
On the other hand, in interviews, he tells that sometimes he schedules a whole day with one activity, or will spend a long time walking in nature doing "deep work", or has a "thinking chair" where he does "deep work". He tells that when he has a timeblock of 90 minutes, he will vary the intensity of the work during that period. Since he is a professor, he perhaps has a schedule and the freedom where he can call these activities "work". However, someone else who as a 9-5 job might not have a boss who would consider these activities "work", and they might have to do these activities in their leisure time.
In fact, I posted a list of the top 10 most restful activities in "The Art of Rest", and some of those activities, such as mindfulness, daydreaming, walking, being alone, spending time in nature, reading - Cal Newport would be doing "deep work" while engaging in these activities, while someone else would be "'resting". He might "timeblock" these activities loosely and call it "work", while someone else would say it was "unscheduled".
Cal Newport also writes against social media, yet he has his own blog, and his own podcast in which he answers questions, and appears on Youtube interviews.
I think much depends minutely the minutes of the day are scheduled. It appears that Cal Newport often uses timeblocking in a loose sense with freedom. He says he might have a theme for the week. It appears that he has a good balance in use of his time, however, others who read him might take him more literally and schedule their time in a more detailed and rigid manner than he himself practices.
November 29, 2021 at 20:43 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
Also, when Cal Newport has a theme for the week, and devotes one day to one activity, from his description it doesn't sound like he devotes every minute, but is more like "little and often", he comes back to it over and over again.
November 29, 2021 at 20:48 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
People seem to balk at the idea of having "every minute of your day scheduled" as if that means you're working every minute of the day, but no one advocates that. What they mean is that you schedule every minute of your day. In other words, you are intentional about when you will do what. It means that you have an intention for when you will do a given activity or type of activity, which usually includes play time. In other words, the idea is to carve out time not just for the "work stuff" but also to carve out as much time as needed for "play stuff" or "rest stuff". So you ensure that you block out time for you to play your video games, go for a walk, read your book, or, literally, do nothing at all.
The fundamental principle of time blocking is to create constraints on things so that some activities aren't permitted to bleed out into other areas of your life without intentional consideration.
Keep in mind that what makes Cal Newport's time blocking system somewhat unique is that he designs in an expectation of schedule slippage or breakage. Other people who are big users of time blocking tend to encourage a very draconian rigor in sticking to a schedule. Rescheduling is seen as a necessary evil. In contrast, Newport's time block planner is intentionally designed with a bunch of extra space in it for each day's schedule for rescheduling. He expects to have time blocks that don't go the way you plan, and so he designs his approach to encourage you to not be afraid of rescheduling.
The reason he does this is to reduce the fear of scheduling anything in the first place. It's his way of trying to address the resistance to having a schedule, by ensuring that you feel like you will be free to reschedule if you want.
Put another way, Newport's ideas around time blocking aren't about actually hitting a specific scheduling target, but instead to encourage a higher degree of intention about one's day by having something to shoot for, and then feeling free to move the target as necessary.
He also explicitly encourages listening to "moments of inspiration" where you find yourself utterly immersed in some sort of project or thing that you absolutely want to keep going with. He encourages you to allow yourself to do this, just run with it, and then naturally let yourself come out of that at the end and then be fine with dropping or rescheduling things that you skipped to stay "in the zone."
It should also be clear that Newport writes against the unintentional consumption of social media without understanding and clear value assessments and mitigation strategies in place. Social media is also strictly defined by Newport, and a blog and a podcast would *not* be social media, nor would be appearing on a Youtube interview. None of those are a part of "social media" as the menace that he writes against.
I think a lot of people also don't really understand what Newport is saying when he talks about "Deep Work". It is worthwhile to appreciate and understand the technical distinctions that he makes about this, because "Deep Work" is not just "space to do all of my work" or "time to get through my todo list of administrative tasks." For example, there are some people whose jobs and lives have almost *no* deep work in them, and that might very well be the way they want their lives to stay! Newport argues that deep work is the kind of work that is going to be the most valuable in future information driven economies (and valuable right now), but that doesn't mean that everyone is or should have deep work as their primary job.
As well, Newport's approach to deep work is differentiated from others on another front, one that has a lot of similarities to Mark's work in the sense of shifting the goal posts a little in your perspective.
Mark is somewhat infamous for rejecting "in the moment prioritization" as a mechanism for choosing work. The key here is that Mark doesn't just reject prioritization at all. Instead, it's by pruning commitments and controlling your vision (whether through a long list dismissal approach or through something more a priori like Dreams or SoPP) that you end up simply not working on anything that shouldn't be done. What Mark's philosophy tends to do is shift that prioritization question away from the "on the ground" point to another area of life where it might be better utilized or easier to apply or more effective.
Newport does the same thing in his Deep Work approach by first encouraging you to understand the framework of your life structure and its relation to Deep Work. He encourages you to understand your relationship to Deep Work, and especially the way in which you deal with the balance between Deep Work and other things. i think he calls this your "Deep Work philosophy" and it drives everything else and changes how you engage with your work and your day's schedule.
Newport gives 4 philosophies of deep work: monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, and journalistic. If you don't first establish your philosophy, then the rest of his ideas around time blocking don't really make much sense, because time blocking is a means of implementing your chosen philosophy.
As for what might draw someone to one system or another, I think some of it has to do with personality, to be sure, but I do think that a lot of it might also have to do with the type of work you are in, which I also happen to think is likely to be driven, over time, by personality. However, when you look right down into the core of things, I think you'll find that Mark's philosophies and systems aren't really *that* much different fundamentally than Newport's or someone else's in their underlying principles.
For example, Newport also makes use of a long list system under the hood (in the form of a type of free form Kanban board), and Mark's systems make use of "time blocking" as a strategy around them (consistent end time for work, sleep, scheduling, work/home lists). It's just a matter of where you choose to highlight the elements of the system and how you want to think about engaging with the system.
So, if you tend to "see" your work as having lots of things to track/do, a long list system might feel more directly valuable to you. On the other hand, if you "see" your work through the lens of problems, or large projects, or deadlines/timetables, or time working on things, then a time blocking system might feel more usable to you. Or maybe if you see one or the other things as the thing you have trouble with, then those systems that help you get a handle on that might appeal to you.
In the end, I'm convinced that you can achieve much the same result from either direction as long as you understand yourself and your work. I think the most important thing is to find the system that grants you the highest level of clarity and ability to understand and see.
The fundamental principle of time blocking is to create constraints on things so that some activities aren't permitted to bleed out into other areas of your life without intentional consideration.
Keep in mind that what makes Cal Newport's time blocking system somewhat unique is that he designs in an expectation of schedule slippage or breakage. Other people who are big users of time blocking tend to encourage a very draconian rigor in sticking to a schedule. Rescheduling is seen as a necessary evil. In contrast, Newport's time block planner is intentionally designed with a bunch of extra space in it for each day's schedule for rescheduling. He expects to have time blocks that don't go the way you plan, and so he designs his approach to encourage you to not be afraid of rescheduling.
The reason he does this is to reduce the fear of scheduling anything in the first place. It's his way of trying to address the resistance to having a schedule, by ensuring that you feel like you will be free to reschedule if you want.
Put another way, Newport's ideas around time blocking aren't about actually hitting a specific scheduling target, but instead to encourage a higher degree of intention about one's day by having something to shoot for, and then feeling free to move the target as necessary.
He also explicitly encourages listening to "moments of inspiration" where you find yourself utterly immersed in some sort of project or thing that you absolutely want to keep going with. He encourages you to allow yourself to do this, just run with it, and then naturally let yourself come out of that at the end and then be fine with dropping or rescheduling things that you skipped to stay "in the zone."
It should also be clear that Newport writes against the unintentional consumption of social media without understanding and clear value assessments and mitigation strategies in place. Social media is also strictly defined by Newport, and a blog and a podcast would *not* be social media, nor would be appearing on a Youtube interview. None of those are a part of "social media" as the menace that he writes against.
I think a lot of people also don't really understand what Newport is saying when he talks about "Deep Work". It is worthwhile to appreciate and understand the technical distinctions that he makes about this, because "Deep Work" is not just "space to do all of my work" or "time to get through my todo list of administrative tasks." For example, there are some people whose jobs and lives have almost *no* deep work in them, and that might very well be the way they want their lives to stay! Newport argues that deep work is the kind of work that is going to be the most valuable in future information driven economies (and valuable right now), but that doesn't mean that everyone is or should have deep work as their primary job.
As well, Newport's approach to deep work is differentiated from others on another front, one that has a lot of similarities to Mark's work in the sense of shifting the goal posts a little in your perspective.
Mark is somewhat infamous for rejecting "in the moment prioritization" as a mechanism for choosing work. The key here is that Mark doesn't just reject prioritization at all. Instead, it's by pruning commitments and controlling your vision (whether through a long list dismissal approach or through something more a priori like Dreams or SoPP) that you end up simply not working on anything that shouldn't be done. What Mark's philosophy tends to do is shift that prioritization question away from the "on the ground" point to another area of life where it might be better utilized or easier to apply or more effective.
Newport does the same thing in his Deep Work approach by first encouraging you to understand the framework of your life structure and its relation to Deep Work. He encourages you to understand your relationship to Deep Work, and especially the way in which you deal with the balance between Deep Work and other things. i think he calls this your "Deep Work philosophy" and it drives everything else and changes how you engage with your work and your day's schedule.
Newport gives 4 philosophies of deep work: monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, and journalistic. If you don't first establish your philosophy, then the rest of his ideas around time blocking don't really make much sense, because time blocking is a means of implementing your chosen philosophy.
As for what might draw someone to one system or another, I think some of it has to do with personality, to be sure, but I do think that a lot of it might also have to do with the type of work you are in, which I also happen to think is likely to be driven, over time, by personality. However, when you look right down into the core of things, I think you'll find that Mark's philosophies and systems aren't really *that* much different fundamentally than Newport's or someone else's in their underlying principles.
For example, Newport also makes use of a long list system under the hood (in the form of a type of free form Kanban board), and Mark's systems make use of "time blocking" as a strategy around them (consistent end time for work, sleep, scheduling, work/home lists). It's just a matter of where you choose to highlight the elements of the system and how you want to think about engaging with the system.
So, if you tend to "see" your work as having lots of things to track/do, a long list system might feel more directly valuable to you. On the other hand, if you "see" your work through the lens of problems, or large projects, or deadlines/timetables, or time working on things, then a time blocking system might feel more usable to you. Or maybe if you see one or the other things as the thing you have trouble with, then those systems that help you get a handle on that might appeal to you.
In the end, I'm convinced that you can achieve much the same result from either direction as long as you understand yourself and your work. I think the most important thing is to find the system that grants you the highest level of clarity and ability to understand and see.
November 30, 2021 at 3:11 |
Aaron Hsu
Aaron Hsu
Aaron:
<<I'm convinced that you can achieve much the same result from either direction as long as you understand yourself and your work.>>
I agree with much of what you typed above. Hell, I've given time blocking the ol' college try. It doesn't work for me. So your final point is what I'm most curious about.
In my practice, some people raise the issue of productivity (or lack thereof) and how it impacts their ability to be accounted for at work and home. It would be good to have a better understanding of which approach - long list systems or time blocking - is best suited for which person.
My hunch is that the answer lies in a trial and error approach.
<<I'm convinced that you can achieve much the same result from either direction as long as you understand yourself and your work.>>
I agree with much of what you typed above. Hell, I've given time blocking the ol' college try. It doesn't work for me. So your final point is what I'm most curious about.
In my practice, some people raise the issue of productivity (or lack thereof) and how it impacts their ability to be accounted for at work and home. It would be good to have a better understanding of which approach - long list systems or time blocking - is best suited for which person.
My hunch is that the answer lies in a trial and error approach.
November 30, 2021 at 12:29 |
avrum
avrum
Avrum:
I think it's a matter of friction. Some systems make it easier to approach things from one angle than from another. That means that if that one system may feel like it has less friction than another system if you are given "freedom of choice" to pick and choose your system freely enough.
On the other hand, I think that the "default lane" of a given system isn't really the full potential of any system. It's how you engage with the system that makes it useful or not. So, you could almost get much the same effect of time-blocking with one of Mark's long list systems if you let yourself work with the long list system enough and tweaked how you engage with it enough to eventually home in on a time blocking mode of using a long list.
But what usually happens is that a given system starts to feel like it has lost some of its identity if you take it too far like that, and you're more likely to just switch a system if you are given that opportunity than work with an existing system to massage it. So, for instance, if you were using a long list system, but then discovered time blocking, and it somehow felt more intuitive to you, then you might just switch to that. But the opposite is also true. There are lots of people who see some aspect of a new system and rather than abandoning their old system they incorporate that into their old system in some way to make the old system a little more usable for themselves.
Just to take the time blocking and long list systems as an example, let's say that I get enamored with this idea of blocking out time for myself, but I really like the idea of using a long list system and don't want to just go to using time blocking. Well, I might take a long list system, say, FV, and begin using it differently to incorporate the concept of time blocking into it. So, I'll start the day preselecting a set of tasks, but I might also add a little annotation of how much time I want to spend on that thing as well. I'm following the FV algorithm, but now I'm also adding that little step of thinking about how long I want to spend on each item.
I don't think this technically runs afoul of the little and often or the standing out or the "as long as you feel like" principles. After all, in keeping with a Newport style time blocking, I can blow my time block if I want to, and I can reschedule if I need to. I'm also just letting myself run through the list at what I think is going to be roughly once a day, and letting my tasks reflect that sense.
So, at that point, I'm essentially doing a form of time blocking, and I could even make it work almost the same. But it would *look* like a Mark Forster long list system, and it would technically still obey most of the rules, just with the shape of things informed by a time blocking approach.
I'll bet that Newport could probably do all of what he currently does from within such a long list system. It might not feel as nice to him, and he might not like it visually as much as he likes laying things out the way that he does, but he'd still be able to implement pretty much the whole system from within a Mark Forster system. The same thing goes in the opposite direction, too. You could basically implement a Mark Forster style system from within Newport's system if you wanted to do so.
That's my point about how the same result can be achieved from either direction. In a sense, to use a computing analogy, these systems are all "Turing complete" in the sense that they can all express pretty much any form of time management principles and expressions that you want from within them, even though they might all look a little different.
That doesn't make them all equivalent and interchangeable, of course, because the ease with which you can do work in one way versus another is greatly altered by which system you are using. It's just that if you wanted to work one way with one of these systems, you could probably do it and still remain largely faithful to the constraints of the system.
I think it's a matter of friction. Some systems make it easier to approach things from one angle than from another. That means that if that one system may feel like it has less friction than another system if you are given "freedom of choice" to pick and choose your system freely enough.
On the other hand, I think that the "default lane" of a given system isn't really the full potential of any system. It's how you engage with the system that makes it useful or not. So, you could almost get much the same effect of time-blocking with one of Mark's long list systems if you let yourself work with the long list system enough and tweaked how you engage with it enough to eventually home in on a time blocking mode of using a long list.
But what usually happens is that a given system starts to feel like it has lost some of its identity if you take it too far like that, and you're more likely to just switch a system if you are given that opportunity than work with an existing system to massage it. So, for instance, if you were using a long list system, but then discovered time blocking, and it somehow felt more intuitive to you, then you might just switch to that. But the opposite is also true. There are lots of people who see some aspect of a new system and rather than abandoning their old system they incorporate that into their old system in some way to make the old system a little more usable for themselves.
Just to take the time blocking and long list systems as an example, let's say that I get enamored with this idea of blocking out time for myself, but I really like the idea of using a long list system and don't want to just go to using time blocking. Well, I might take a long list system, say, FV, and begin using it differently to incorporate the concept of time blocking into it. So, I'll start the day preselecting a set of tasks, but I might also add a little annotation of how much time I want to spend on that thing as well. I'm following the FV algorithm, but now I'm also adding that little step of thinking about how long I want to spend on each item.
I don't think this technically runs afoul of the little and often or the standing out or the "as long as you feel like" principles. After all, in keeping with a Newport style time blocking, I can blow my time block if I want to, and I can reschedule if I need to. I'm also just letting myself run through the list at what I think is going to be roughly once a day, and letting my tasks reflect that sense.
So, at that point, I'm essentially doing a form of time blocking, and I could even make it work almost the same. But it would *look* like a Mark Forster long list system, and it would technically still obey most of the rules, just with the shape of things informed by a time blocking approach.
I'll bet that Newport could probably do all of what he currently does from within such a long list system. It might not feel as nice to him, and he might not like it visually as much as he likes laying things out the way that he does, but he'd still be able to implement pretty much the whole system from within a Mark Forster system. The same thing goes in the opposite direction, too. You could basically implement a Mark Forster style system from within Newport's system if you wanted to do so.
That's my point about how the same result can be achieved from either direction. In a sense, to use a computing analogy, these systems are all "Turing complete" in the sense that they can all express pretty much any form of time management principles and expressions that you want from within them, even though they might all look a little different.
That doesn't make them all equivalent and interchangeable, of course, because the ease with which you can do work in one way versus another is greatly altered by which system you are using. It's just that if you wanted to work one way with one of these systems, you could probably do it and still remain largely faithful to the constraints of the system.
November 30, 2021 at 14:49 |
Aaron Hsu
Aaron Hsu
After all these years, my view on this boils down to:
1. Any system is better than no system.
2. The best system is the one you can stick to.
1. Any system is better than no system.
2. The best system is the one you can stick to.
November 30, 2021 at 22:51 |
Mark Forster
Mark Forster
I have thought that there is a difference between timeblocking and timeboxing.
Timeblocking is assigning a clock time (12 noon) and time length (30 minutes) to an item, while timeboxing is only assigning to a time length (30 minutes) to an item.
I think personality and the type of work must play a big role in what system one chooses.
If one has a largely structured work environment, with many appointments of fixed length, one might not want more timeblocking added to it. Or vice versa, if one has little structure, timeblocking might provide more.
Timeblocking is assigning a clock time (12 noon) and time length (30 minutes) to an item, while timeboxing is only assigning to a time length (30 minutes) to an item.
I think personality and the type of work must play a big role in what system one chooses.
If one has a largely structured work environment, with many appointments of fixed length, one might not want more timeblocking added to it. Or vice versa, if one has little structure, timeblocking might provide more.
December 1, 2021 at 5:13 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
* S. Covey: Weekly Planning
* Cal Newport: Time Blocking
* David Sparks: Hyper Scheduling
Long List Systems/thinkers:
* M. Forster: Simple Scanning, AF, etc
* GTD: Context driven lists
* GSD: Bill Westerman's pen/paper system
I wonder if there's something unique to an individual's background that "primes the pump" for one method over another. I've tried both, and long list systems are my preference. In fact, the contrarian in me balks at any appointment that isn't hard landscape in nature.
In other words, what might draw someone to Mark's long list systems, vs Cal Newport's "Deep Work" approach?
Curious to read your thoughts.