Cal Newport

We might throw in phone hours.

It's a new idea I'm thinking about where you say, look, there's a longer period of time, like maybe all afternoon, where you can always call me if there's something that's so urgent you can't wait till the next office hours.

There's enough friction in phone calls that that actually turns out to work pretty well.

Like I'm not just going to call you because I want to get something off my plate.

I won't call you unless it really is serious.

So I would do that as well.

And then I would say, okay, what ongoing work does this not work for?

What type of projects do we work on on a regular basis where this isn't working because it's too long to have to wait till the afternoon's a problem?

I say, great, let's identify those.

And for each of those, let's build a protocol.

Here is our protocol for collaboration on this type of work and however that's going to work.

But it's like the information goes into this spreadsheet and then whatever.

Someone checks it in the morning, they move things to shared files.

I don't know what it is, but whatever it is that prevents us to have ad hoc unscheduled messaging isn't necessary.

So explicit workload management, I would have this rule of no hyperactive hive mind.

I would have protocols for any type of recurring collaboration where it could be explicit about how we actually want to do this.

And then I would have a culture of talking about deep work and concentration, like a tier one skill.

How's it going?

How many deep work hours did you get in this week?

Are you happy about that?