Time Blocking: A Productivity Strategy for Deep Work

Structured around fixed schedule productivity, Cal Newport optimizes his day, emphasizing deep work and long-term goals over to-do lists and hustle culture.

### Cal Newport on Time Blocking and Slow Productivity
* ⏰ Cal Newport is a proponent of "**time blocking**," where he allocates specific tasks to specific time slots in his day, rather than relying on to-do lists.
* 📚 He practices "**fixed schedule productivity**," setting work hours and not working outside of those hours, which has been a guiding principle since his early 20s.
* 😴 Newport's struggles with insomnia have shaped his approach to productivity, leading him to adopt a "**slow productivity**" mindset that focuses on **longer time scales**.
* 🏋 He incorporates exercise into his routine, with **weight training before dinner** and **plenty of walking on non-teaching days**.
* 🧠 Newport aims for at least **60-90 minutes of deep work**, at least **five days a week**, with more intensive deep work periods during **less busy seasons**.
* 📅 He thinks about productivity on a scale of decades, focusing on **what he wants to achieve in his 20s, 30s, and beyond**, rather than fixating on **daily hustle**.
* 🎯 Newport's approach emphasizes **consistency and focus on important tasks**, rather than trying to **cram in extra work** on any given day.
* 💡 The interview highlights the importance of **adapting productivity strategies to individual challenges and long-term goals**, rather than striving for **constant optimization**.

Are you a list maker? Like, do you wake up in the morning and make lists and cross things off, and then decide what are the key items on that list? No, I'm a time blocker. Time blocker, okay. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm not a big believer in to-do lists. I like to grapple with the actual available time. Like, okay, I have a meeting here, I have to pick my kids up from school here. Here's the actual hours of the day that are free and where they fall. All right, what do I want to do with that time? Well, okay, now that I see that there's a lot of gaps in the middle of the day here, they're short, maybe there I'm going to do a lot of small non-cognitively demanding things. Oh, this first 90 minutes in the morning is like the main time I have uninterrupted.

Okay, so this, I'm going to work on writing. So I've been a big believer of this since I was an undergrad. Like you give your time a job as opposed to having a list, which is somewhat orthogonal to what's actually happening in your day. And then just as you go through your day saying, What do I want to try to do next? Which I think is a lot less efficient. I'm going to try your method. I try and structure my days as much as I can but it just never quite works. Do you work late into the night or you, no? No, I'm a 5:30 man. Okay. Yeah. So 5:30 p.m., that's it? Yeah, more or less, that's my cutoff. Now one exception is if I'm writing on deadline, I'll sometimes, like if I need to get more writing done, I can do an evening writing session.

which I got used to through long experience of, I used to write my blog post at night after like my kids went to bed. Now they're older and they don't go to bed as early. So it's like the one thing I have left that I'll do after 5:30 is like every once in a while I'll do like a 90-minute evening writing block. But I call this, by the way, this whole philosophy, I call fixed schedule productivity. And I've been doing it since I was a grad student, fix the work hour schedule, that's my commitment. I work in these hours and then work downstream from that for everything else. So like this controls like even what you decide to bring into your life 'cause you know I can't go past the schedule and it drives you to be more innovative in how you deal with your time and schedule. You have to be efficient because you only have these hours here.

That's been a signal for my life since I was in my early 20s. Fix the schedule and don't
work outside of that schedule. Now it's your move to figure
out. Anything you want to do, you have to make that work. You want to become a professor, figure out how to make that work. You want to write books while
you're being a professor, figure out how to make that work. You don't have the option of
just throwing hours at it. And you innovate a lot, I think, when you have the constraints. Where do sleep and exercise
fit into your schedule? What's your typical bedtime, wake-up time? What's your typical exercise routine? And the reason I ask about this
is because I think nowadays, we hopefully, people
understand that exercise and cognitive function
are inextricably linked. Yeah. And we're all going to live longer lives and be sharper mentally by doing exercise. Yeah, so, I mean,

my main like actual working with weights. I do this pre-dinner, right. And this was an innovation
of the last couple of years. It's fantastic psychologically for me. This is a transition from work to like family time after work. So I'll do like 45, 50 minutes garage gym that we built during COVID after I'm done working before dinner. And once you get used to that,
like it also forces you like, I got to finish work 'cause I got to get this in before dinner. But then I'll do also
quite a bit of walking if it's not a teaching
day so I'm not on campus. I do a lot of thinking on foot, walking my kids to the bus stop which isn't particularly close and back. So I'll do a lot of walking. But my serious exercise
now is always pre-dinner. Then I want to be up in our room by 10. And then at that point I don't track

so I have insomnia issues, which actually has been like key driver of a lot of the things I think about, especially with slow
productivity. I'm very wary because I can, without
any control on my own, just find myself unable
to sleep sometimes. Fall asleep or stay asleep? Fall asleep, yeah. I mean, I used to get it really bad. Not so bad now, but you
know, it comes and goes. That really affected the way
I thought about productivity because it seemed like
to me the definition of just I get after it
with a bunch of stuff wasn't really on the table because if my notion of
productivity depended on me like every day being
able to just like hammer on a bunch of stuff. I'm very busy. I have lots of commitments. What would happen if I couldn't sleep? I wouldn't be able to do
that, so I drifted naturally towards a definition of
productivity which was

it doesn't really matter
if you work tomorrow, but it is important that
like this month, you work like writing a book. It doesn't matter if you work on your book chapter
tomorrow in particular, but like this month, you have to spend a lot
of time working on it. So it was like an
insomnia-compatible definition of productivity was sort
of morphed into this idea of slow productivity,
taking your time with it. So it's interesting. So like sleep issues really shaped the way I thought about work and put me on these much longer
timescales of productivity. Try not to be dependent
on any particular day being critical to what you do. I don't want the high-stress situation. I don't want the like I'm just going to, 10 hours a day for the next 10 days, we're going to make this deal happen. Like I can't operate in that
space 'cause I worry about it, anytime my brain could betray me.

and I could like lose
sleep for a couple days. I think it's really important
that you're sharing this because while people's challenges differ, I think oftentimes people
hear the content of my podcast or other podcasts and think, Oh, gosh, I have to have
everything dialed in just right. When in fact, most all of
the tools and protocols that have been discussed
on the Huberman Lab podcast are in response to a particular
challenge that I've had or that others close to me have had. And I love this. Well, I'm sorry that you
suffer from insomnia, we have a series on sleep with Matt Walker in which he lays out some great tools that we haven't yet
discussed on the podcast. I'll just send you, I'll
text you, I'll call you with a short list of those,
and hopefully they'll help as we do cover insomnia in some depth. But I think it's important
that people realize

that they can be very productive with the hours that they
have, and the moments or hours of high focus
clarity that they have, even if they're not sleeping great, even if they're raising small children, because that's the real world, and certainly that's the
real world of deadlines and academia, but family and
colds and flus, and travel, and jet lag, and arguments,
and all the happy stuff too. Vacations. So, it sounds like
you're very good at adapting your day to what's going on around it, but that you have a certain
sort of committed time. Am I correct in assuming that
you have at least one period of, say, 60 to 90 minutes of real, what you would call deep work, let's say at least five days a week? I know that might be an underestimate, but it seems like that's what. That's the goal. That's what I'm extracting from this. That's the goal, right? So to me, depending on the season,

is how extreme that can get. So the busiest season would be like a teaching semester, right? But even then, I'm going to make sure that five days a week I'm starting with deep work, and the non-teaching days are more than the teaching days. Compare that to the summer, for example, where like all I do for the most part is deep work. No meetings on Mondays and Fridays, all admin stuff is midday to early afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Everything else is deep work, you know? Just locked in, hours at a time. But I want, if I'm not getting five days, five days of starting the day with deep work, I'm unhappy, right? Because I mean, I keep coming back to this is okay because I'm not going to be able to, I mean, fortunately, the insomnia hasn't bothered me in years, but the threat of it like completely shaped the way I think about things.

and because I know I'm never going to be, have a sort of like an Elon
Musk style energy of like, I can just take on seven companies and make it happen, right? I just don't have that ability. I've always focused on the long game and to me, the long game plays out with get your deep work time in, you know? Just keep working on the stuff you do best and get better at it, you know? Tomorrow doesn't matter. But if you're doing this most
days for the next four months, like that's going to matter, you know? And so I often think about
productivity in my own life at the scale of decades. Like what do I want to
do in my 20s, you know? Okay, what do I want to do in my 30s? You know, what do I want to do in my 40s? And that helps. Like in my 30s, I had a lot
of young kids like it's

yeah, I mean, the amount of
time I could spend total working is much less, right? But I could still think about
what do I want to do in my 30s? How do I make that happen? Let me make sure I'm pushing
like on those things. Then everything else I can adapt to, I can give here and there, you know? It allows you to be very adaptable when you're thinking
about what do I want to do for the next 10 years. It also means you're
not on a random Tuesday chiding yourself because like, why didn't I get three
more hours of work in? And that becomes sort of
a nonsensical question. And what you care about
is like what happens in the next decade, which
is, that's the long game. It's not about hustling today. It's about, I came back to deep
work day after day after day when other people got
distracted by TikTok.

Like I got to, yeah, whatever, it's that coming back to,
what matters again and again. Thank you for tuning into the
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Maximize Productivity With These Time Management Tools | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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Huberman Lab Clips

Maximizing Productivity Through Time Blocking

The speaker advocates for time blocking over to-do lists, structuring the day around available time slots.

He emphasizes giving each block of time a specific task and is a proponent of a fixed work schedule, which drives efficiency and innovation.

The only exception to his 5:30 pm cutoff is for evening writing sessions when working on a deadline.

Balancing Work, Exercise, and Sleep for Optimal Productivity

Finding a way to make your goals work within a set schedule is crucial, whether it's pursuing a career as a professor or writing books.

Incorporating exercise into your routine, such as weightlifting and walking, can have a positive impact on cognitive function.

Struggling with insomnia can significantly affect productivity, leading to a shift in the definition of being productive to accommodate unexpected sleep issues.

Embracing Slow Productivity and Adapting to Challenges

The speaker's definition of productivity is influenced by struggling with insomnia, leading to a more relaxed and long-term approach to work.

They emphasize the importance of adapting to challenges and being productive despite obstacles like poor sleep and family responsibilities.

The focus is on finding dedicated time for deep, focused work, at least five days a week, while being flexible and adaptable to the demands of real life.

Scheduling Deep Work for Long-Term Productivity

Prioritizing deep work for five days a week is crucial for long-term productivity.

The fear of insomnia has shaped the individual's approach to work, leading to a focus on the long game and consistent improvement.

Planning productivity at the scale of decades helps in determining the focus for each phase of life.

Planning for Long-Term Goals and Adaptability

Focusing on long-term goals allows for adaptability in daily work and reduces self-criticism for not overworking.

The emphasis is on consistent effort over time, rather than short-term hustling.

This approach enables a focus on what truly matters over the next decade.