Nagpal goes on to detail several examples of these efforts, but there’s one tactic in particular that should sound familiar. As Nagpal admits, early in her academic career she found herself trying to cram work into every free hour between seven a.m. and midnight (because she has kids, this time, especially in the evening, was often severely fractured). It didn’t take long before she decided this strategy was unsustainable, so she set a limit of fifty hours a week and worked backward to determine what rules and habits were needed to satisfy this constraint. Nagpal, in other words, deployed fixed-schedule productivity.
We know this strategy didn’t hurt her academic career, as she ended up earning tenure on schedule and then jumping to the full professor level after only three additional years (an impressive ascent). How did she pull this off? According to her article, one of the main techniques for respecting her hour limit was to set drastic quotas on the major sources of shallow endeavors in her academic life. For example, she decided she would travel only five times per year for any purpose, as trips can generate a surprisingly large load of urgent shallow obligations (from making lodging arrangements to writing talks). Five trips a year may still sound like a lot, but for an academic it’s light. To emphasize this point, note that Matt Welsh, a former colleague of Nagpal in the Harvard computer science department (he now works for Google) once wrote a blog post in which he claimed it was typical for junior faculty to travel twelve to twenty-four times a year. (Imagine the shallow efforts Nagpal avoided in sidestepping an extra ten to fifteen trips!) The travel quota is just one of several tactics that Nagpal used to control her workday (she also, for example, placed limits on the number of papers she would review per year), but what all her tactics shared was a commitment to ruthlessly capping the shallow while protecting the deep efforts—that is, original research—that ultimately determined her professional fate.
Returning to my own example, it’s a similar commitment that enables me to succeed with fixed scheduling. I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one’s productivity vocabulary: “yes.” It takes a lot to convince me to agree to something that yields shallow work. If you ask for my involvement in university business that’s not absolutely necessary, I might respond with a defense I learned from the department chair who hired me: “Talk to me after tenure.” Another tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it. If, for example, I turn down a time-consuming speaking invitation with the excuse that I have other trips scheduled for around the same time, I don’t provide details—which might leave the requester the ability to suggest a way to fit his or her event into my existing obligations—but instead just say, “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it due to schedule conflicts.” In turning down obligations, I also resist the urge to offer a consolation prize that ends up devouring almost as much of my schedule (e.g., “Sorry I can’t join your committee, but I’m happy to take a look at some of your proposals as they come together and offer my thoughts”). A clean break is best.
In addition to carefully guarding my obligations, I’m incredibly conscientious about managing my time. Because my time is limited each day, I cannot afford to allow a large deadline to creep up on me, or a morning to be wasted on something trivial, because I didn’t take a moment to craft a smart plan. The Damoclean cap on the workday enforced by fixed-schedule productivity has a way of keeping my organization efforts sharp. Without this looming cutoff, I’d likely end up more lax in my habits.
To summarize these observations, Nagpal and I can both succeed in academia without Tom-style overload due to two reasons. First, we’re asymmetric in the culling forced by our fixed-schedule commitment. By ruthlessly reducing the shallow while preserving the deep, this strategy frees up our time without diminishing the amount of new value we generate. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the reduction in shallow frees up more energy for the deep alternative, allowing us to produce more than if we had defaulted to a more typical crowded schedule. Second, the limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits, also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules.
The key claim of this strategy is that these same benefits hold for most knowledge work fields. That is, even if you’re not a professor, fixed-schedule productivity can yield powerful benefits. In most knowledge work jobs, it can be difficult in the moment to turn down a shallow commitment that seems harmless in isolation—be it accepting an invitation to get coffee or agreeing to “jump on a call.” A commitment to fixed-schedule productivity, however, shifts you into a scarcity mind-set. Suddenly any obligation beyond your deepest efforts is suspect and seen as potentially disruptive. Your default answer becomes no, the bar for gaining access to your time and attention rises precipitously, and you begin to organize the efforts that pass these obstacles with a ruthless efficiency. It might also lead you to test assumptions about your company’s work culture that you thought were ironclad but turn out to be malleable. It’s common, for example, to receive e-mails from your boss after hours. Fixed-schedule productivity would have you ignore these messages until the next morning. Many suspect that this would cause problems, as such responses are expected, but in many cases, the fact that your boss happens to be clearing her inbox at night doesn’t mean that she expects an immediate response—a lesson this strategy would soon help you discover.
Fixed-schedule productivity, in other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact. If you have to choose just one behavior that reorients your focus toward the deep, this one should be high on your list of possibilities. If you’re still not sure, however, about the idea that artificial limits on your workday can make you more successful, I urge you to once again turn your attention to the career of fixed-schedule advocate Radhika Nagpal. In a satisfying coincidence, at almost the exact same time that Tom was lamenting online about his unavoidably intense workload as a young professor, Nagpal was celebrating the latest of the many professional triumphs she has experienced despite her fixed schedule: Her research was featured on the cover of the journal Science.
Become Hard to Reach
No discussion of shallow work is complete without considering e-mail. This quintessential shallow activity is particularly insidious in its grip on most knowledge workers’ attention, as it delivers a steady stream of distractions addressed specifically to you. Ubiquitous e-mail access has become so ingrained in our professional habits that we’re beginning to lose the sense that we have any say in its role in our life. As John Freeman warns in his 2009 book, The Tyranny of E-mail, with the rise of this technology “we are slowly eroding our ability to explain—in a careful, complex way—why it is so wrong for us to complain, resist, or redesign our workdays so that they are manageable.” E-mail seems a fait accompli. Resistance is futile.
This strategy pushes back at this fatalism. Just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn’t mean you have to cede all authority over its role in your mental landscape. In the following sections I describe three tips that will help you regain authority over how this technology accesses your time and attention, and arrest the erosion of autonomy identified by Freeman. Resistance is not futile: You have more control over your electronic communication than you might at first assume.
Tip #1: Make People Who Send You E-mail Do More Work