Cal Newport

But it feels like such a different way of thinking about time, especially outside of work, than the other way that's put on this, which is often thinking about like, hey, don't be optimizing everything.

Don't always try to be so efficient.

This is very different, right?

Because what you're talking about is like, yeah, you have obligations and then you have free time that you want to do interesting stuff in and you want to make sure the obligations don't, you know, have too massive of a footprint.

And it's about building the right portfolio of activities for the time you have.

This seems almost like efficiency and optimization...

they're not in this conversation.

And they often dominate conversations of time management.

So it's just, I don't know, I want to get your take on this.

And when you're thinking especially about life outside of work, you're kind of divorcing time management from these notions of like, oh, I'm always trying to be productive.

I'm always trying to optimize.

And it's like, no, I'm building a portfolio of things to do with, I have this much time to spend today.

What am I going to do with it?

It just has a very different valence to me than the way this is often discussed.

Yeah, I just think it's just useful, right, to think about it this way, that there's not necessarily a negative valence to time management.

It's like, well, the time is here.

It's going to get spent.

And a lot of people have complicated lives, not chaotic lives, but complicated lives, especially with kids and other types of things we have going on.

But that's fine.

Complicated is not bad.