Well, I'm Kalnu Port and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply

in an increasingly distracted world.

I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

Jesse, interesting observation from my life, I wanted to point out, as you know, I was

in a busy period in the sense that I had these overlapping kind of major deep work intensive

deadlines that I was switching back and forth between for months it felt like one after

another, always two at a time, all of that's temporarily done.

So like this is great, I don't have a major time demand is now out of my life, it's just

doing the loosens of closing up the semester at Georgetown, getting my final lectures

grading like this type of thing.

What I found this last week of having no major hard things to work on is that the small

stuff just ate up all the time, really, and I was ending days feeling rushed and feeling

like I was not on top of things, which is crazy because objectively, the amount of

available time probably doubled.

And what I realized was going on, it's a pretto principle type of thing.

I was not structuring my days because I was like taking time off, I'd come out of all of

this intense period, like look, I had now it's easy, go to class, just take care of some

things, and without structure, the small stuff just metastasized and took all the time.

You can spend your entire day, well let me go back and forth with this person on email,

let me think about this, and the time just gets eaten up.

So now I've had to return to, wait a second, even when you don't have a lot of do, you

have to structure your time like you do have a lot to do.

...