Ep. 6: Balancing the Personal and Professional, Unreasonable Email Expectations, and Avoiding Hard Creative Work | DEEP QUESTIONS
Jun 28, 2020
01:07:44
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Quick takeaways
Balancing work and personal life involves time block planning during working hours and allowing flexibility in evenings and weekends.
Fostering a sense of urgency involves adopting a 'craftsman mindset' focusing on offering value in work rather than seeking personal fulfillment.
Transitioning to graduate school with deep work strategies entails leveraging early adoption of efficient study habits for significant academic gains.
Deep dives
Balancing Work and Personal Life
Balancing work and personal life involves time block planning during working hours, where every minute is allocated a task, while allowing flexibility in evenings and weekends. Weekly planning integrates both professional and personal objectives, and distinct task management systems are used for work tasks and personal to-do lists.
Inducing a Sense of Urgency
Fostering a sense of urgency involves adopting a 'craftsman mindset' over a 'passion mindset,' focusing on offering value in work rather than seeking personal fulfillment. By prioritizing becoming valuable and excelling at tasks, individuals can generate career capital and open up diverse opportunities.
Transitioning to Graduate School with Deep Work Strategies
Transitioning to graduate school with deep work strategies entails leveraging early adoption of efficient study habits for significant academic gains. The focus on concentration and effective systems in one's twenties can lead to compounding benefits, shaping a fulfilling and successful career path. Implementing structured study habits can enhance academic performance and productivity.
Building a Blog Readership Without Social Media
Creating a successful blog with a substantial readership involves offering valuable and inspiring content that cannot be ignored. The key lies in producing high-quality, compelling content that resonates with the audience, showcasing a unique perspective or experience that engages readers. While social media can be a tool, relying solely on it for blog traffic is insufficient. By focusing on creating exceptional content, blog writers can attract dedicated readers who find their work compelling, ultimately leading to organic growth and audience engagement.
Cultivating Concentration Skills in Education
In modern education, there is a critical need to prioritize and foster concentration skills, as sustained focus on cognitively demanding tasks is deemed crucial in the 21st century. Educational institutions should emphasize training students to concentrate effectively, considering it an essential skill analogous to physical fitness in ancient cultures. By integrating concentration training into the curriculum from primary to higher education levels, schools can cultivate a generation adept at intense cognitive work, enriching individual productivity and societal progress.
In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on balancing the professional and the personal, unreasonable email expectations and using the internet to escape hard creative work. I also play some question roulette and attempt a lightening round in which I answer as many question as possible in a single minute.
To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com (I send a survey to this list soliciting questions on a semi-regular basis.)
Full list of topics tackled in today’s episode:
* Separating personal and professional when planning. * Inducing a sense of urgency. * Balancing work and relationships in lockdown. * Getting into graduate school with bad grades. * Starting a productivity journey. * Resetting expectations about email response time. * Tracking health metrics. * Finding blog readers without social media. * Lightening Round: - how much deep work can fit in a day? - what is minimum deep work block length? - what are tips for overcoming resistance? - what do you do during your downtime? * A pastor seeking depth when on call. * The origin of my discipline. * A novelist struggling to work. * Managing reading. * On schools and the deep life.
As always, thank you to listener Bit Holiday for the original theme music and transition sound effect (bitholiday.net).
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