Cal Newport tracks his days in a weekly Moleskine notebook, recording deep work hours and health metrics, checking it each morning and evening to ease his mind. For building habits, he uses if-then rules, state-driven matching, and loops rather than day-by-day planning.
What are you tracking on a consistent basis?
Well, let's look at it. I have my notebook right here. So I'm literally looking at my metrics space. I won't actually show you my metrics. So this is the weekly molesk on one page. It has a space for each of the days of the week and. And then a generic note page looking at it. So it's just enough space to actually write down metrics for each. Especially if you have. I'm getting microphone messages. You can still hear me okay?
Yeah, I can hear you. It's gone out back and forth but it's fine.
Yeah, I was getting. Sorry about that. Messages on my screen about my microphone switching. So I do track deep work hours. I track. There's a couple of productivity metrics I track. So checking in on my task system, I track that. I actually did that first thing in the day and near the end of the day once I start to slack off on doing that, then I fall back into leaving myself reminders, you know, in different places which I think is completely inefficient. There's I track my tech rules. I have particular rules about in particular like what I can access, you know, what I use my phone for, what I access on various times of the day, I check if I actually did that. And then everything else on here I would say is probably health related. So those are the metrics that I have.
I'm going to incorporate this check in with productivity system first and then at the end of the day too is just a way to hold yourself accountable.
To that also it relieves a huge amount of mental anxiety because when you don't trust yourself to check it first thing in the morning, check it last thing in the morning, you start using auxiliary systems to remind yourself. You send yourself emails, you leave notes by the sink and you never really trust, you know, am I going to remember to do this? Am I going to see to do this? But if you know for a fact I will see it in the morning. I'll see at the end of the day you can trust that one system to hold everything. It relieves a lot of stress.
I think my Apple notes is something like over a thousand now and 20 of them are probably make sure this happens. I totally get that. Yep. We do in the coach program we work a little bit on installing habits. We use algorithms. So use our finite willpower wisely to install habits around autopilot. Being a professor of computer science and a master of the language of algorithms, we typically use if this then that as like our default algorithmic structure, if blank, then blank. I was wondering if you had any other kind of algorithm structures that might be useful when trying to install a habit and loops for loops, Anything that you think like top of mind. This would be a great default when you're working on installing a habit. Here's some kind of protocol you could consider following.
Oh yeah, that's an interesting question. So, yeah, what do what. How do I think about it algorithmically? Well, I mean, I think certainly state driven thinking, which is similar, maybe a generalization of if, then that type thinking. But this is very, very. It's a way that computer scientists sometimes think about various programs, especially the distributed algorithms I work with, which is if in this state, then do this. So state matching. So if these circumstances are all true, then this is the particular action. So that, that's something I think that comes up often. Maybe looping structures. Keep doing, do this this many times, do this until this condition is met as a way of actually trying something out for a while. I think that's common. Also debugging thinking. All right, do this, keep notes, do it for this much time. Use those notes like a debugging log to figure out was this working? Was it not working? Did it make the change I think it was going to make? Or do I need to actually tweak the algorithm that I'm implementing here?
Do that. I love those. So looking at kind of the state of the system, so it's not just a single kind of criteria, but what's the general state going on? Being willing to run something until it's done. It's like if I'm still in this state, if I'm frustrated, I'll take a breath and then if I'm still frustrated, I'll take another breath and I'll continue taking breaths until my state has changed. And the debugging thing, I think is amazing. We have not brought that language into what we're doing, so we certainly will, going forward, debug your algorithms on a consistent basis. So good.
Yeah. Well, and one other idea that I sometimes fall back on is when thinking about my week, there's a difference between explicit scheduling and algorithmic scheduling. So when I'm planning out my week, sometimes it's I'm doing this on this day, this other thing on this other day. It's bespoke to the days. It's specific. Sometimes my weekly planning is more algorithmic. Every day, make sure that you get in at least 30 minutes of this every day. Make sure that you add an extra 15 minutes beyond each meeting to try to process the obligations of the meeting right away because that's more efficient. So both type of plans exist. One is like specifically looking at particular things that happen at particular times. The other is a rule set that I'm applying to my schedule as I generate my schedule throughout the week to try to optimize some sort of outcome.
Hi, it's Michael, head coach at Optymyze, and I hope that you enjoyed that wisdom from our brilliant luminary guest faculty member of Optymyze. Coach, it's time. It's time to master yourself, to serve heroically, and to empower others to do the same. Our world needs virtuous, heroic leadership and you at your absolute best. Of course, helping you do that is what Optimize Coach is all about. You can find all the information and sign up to join Class 3, which starts soon at www.Optimize me Coach, let's be the change and change the world one person at a time together starting with you and us today. It.
