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Introduction to Time Management Strategies
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.
The Philosophy of Time Blocking vs. To-Do Lists
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 there are a lot of gaps in the middle of the day here, they're short, so maybe there I'm going to do a lot of small non-cognitively demanding things. Oh, this first 90 minutes in the morning is the main time I have uninterrupted. Okay, so this, I'm going to work on writing.
So I've been a big believer in this since I was an undergrad. 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, as you go through your day, saying, "What do I want to try to do next?" That 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 morning person. Okay. Yeah. So, 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, if I need to get more writing done, do an evening writing session, which I got used to through long experience. I used to write my blog post at night after my kids went to bed. Now they're older and they don't go to bed as early. So the one thing I have left that I'll do after is every once in a while I'll do a 90-minute evening writing block.
But I call this whole philosophy fixed schedule productivity. 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. This even controls what you decide to bring into your life, because you know you 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. 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 how to make anything you want to do 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. I think you innovate a lot when you have constraints.
Adopting a Fixed Schedule for Productivity
Where do sleep and exercise fit into your schedule? What's your typical bedtime, wake-up time, and what's your typical exercise routine? I ask because I think nowadays people hopefully 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. So, my main actual working with weights, I do pre-dinner. This was an innovation of the last couple of years, and it's fantastic psychologically for me. It's a transition from work to family time after work. I'll do 45 to 50 minutes in the garage gym we built during COVID, after I'm done working, before dinner. Once you get used to that, it also forces you: I have to finish work because I have to get this in before dinner.
Incorporating Exercise into a Busy Schedule
Then I'll also do 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 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. At that point I don't track anything.
I have insomnia issues, which has been a key driver of a lot of the things I think about, especially slow productivity. I'm very wary because, without any control on my own, I can just find myself unable to sleep sometimes.
Fall asleep or stay asleep?
Fall asleep, yeah. I used to get it really bad. Not so bad now, but it comes and goes. That really affected the way I thought about productivity, because the definition of just getting after a bunch of stuff wasn't really on the table. If my notion of productivity depended on me being able to hammer away at a bunch of stuff every day, and I'm very busy with lots of commitments, what would happen if I couldn't sleep? I wouldn't be able to do that.
So I drifted naturally toward a definition of productivity that goes: it doesn't really matter if you work tomorrow, but it is important that this month you work on writing a book. It doesn't matter if you work on your book chapter tomorrow in particular, but this month you have to spend a lot of time working on it. So an insomnia-compatible definition of productivity morphed into this idea of slow productivity, taking your time with it.
Managing Insomnia and Productivity
It's interesting. 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, the "I'm just going to make this deal happen" mode. I can't operate in that space, because I worry about it. Any time my brain could betray me and I could lose sleep for a couple of days, that's a concern.
I think it's really important that you're sharing this, because while people's challenges differ, I think people often hear the content of my podcast or other podcasts and think, "Oh gosh, I have to have everything dialed in just right." In fact, most of the tools and protocols discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast are in response to a particular challenge I've had or that others close to me have had.
And I love this. I'm sorry 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 send you, I'll text you, I'll call you with a short list of those, and hopefully they'll help, since we do cover insomnia in some depth.
But I think it's important that people realize they can be very productive with the hours they have and the moments or hours of high focus and clarity they have, even if they're not sleeping great, even if they're raising small children. That's the real world, and certainly that's the real world of deadlines and academia, but also family, colds and flus, travel, jet lag, arguments, and all the happy stuff too. Vacations.
It sounds like you're very good at adapting your day to what's going on around it, but that you have certain 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, at least five days a week? I know that might be an underestimate, but that seems like the goal I'm extracting from this.
That's the goal, right? To me, depending on the season, it's how extreme that can get. The busiest season would be a teaching semester. 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 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, locked in for hours at a time.
But if I'm not getting five days of starting the day with deep work, I'm unhappy, right? I keep coming back to this, because fortunately the insomnia hasn't bothered me in years, but the threat of it completely shaped the way I think about things. I'm never going to have an Elon Musk-style energy where I can just take on seven companies and make it happen. I just don't have that ability. I've always focused on the long game, and to me the long game plays out by getting your deep work time in. Keep working on the stuff you do best and get better at it. Tomorrow doesn't matter. But if you're doing this most days for the next four months, that's going to matter.
Deep Work: The Key to Long-Term Success
So I often think about productivity in my own life at the scale of decades. What do I want to do in my 20s? Okay, what do I want to do in my 30s? What do I want to do in my 40s? That helps. In my 30s I had a lot of young kids, so the total amount of time I could spend working was much less. But I could still think about what I wanted to do in my 30s and how to make that happen, and push on those things. Then everything else I can adapt to, and give here and there.
It allows you to be very adaptable when you're thinking about what you want to do for the next 10 years. It also means you're not on a random Tuesday chiding yourself because, why didn't I get three more hours of work in? That becomes a nonsensical question. What you care about is what happens in the next decade. That's the long game. It's not about hustling today. It's about coming back to deep work day after day after day when other people got distracted by TikTok, and coming back to what matters again and again.
Looking Ahead: Planning for Decades, Not Days
Conclusion and Invitation to Watch Full Episode
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