An Expert's Advice for Busy Students Seeking Balance

"Deep Work" author Cal Newport answers my question on his podcast

A few months ago, while finishing up my senior year of college, I wrote in to bestselling author Cal Newport’s podcast “Deep Questions” with a question about time-block planning. He responded in today’s episode 312, “Productivity Basics”!

If you read my latest article entitled “How I ‘Won’ at College with Time-Block Planning”, you’ll be familiar with the concept of time-block planning, a Newport-endorsed approach to personal and professional productivity that allocates each chunk of the day with a specific task or group of tasks to work on. The activities assigned to these chunks or “blocks” are informed by your weekly plan, which is informed by your quarterly plan, which is informed by your long-term vision of the deep life — of a life well-lived.

Newport at TEDxTysons during 2018 talk “Why You Should Quit Social Media".

Time-block planning throughout college helped me immensely to produce high-quality work while largely avoiding academic burnout. It allowed me to dive deeply into my studies and perform highly in my extracurricular activities, while at the same time containing my responsibilities so as to protect my leisure time, sleep, and sanity (for the most part).

I mentioned in my last article that because of time-block planning, I rarely worked late into the night. Admitting this felt somewhat radical, as it’s more or less the norm in college to regularly burn the midnight oil, especially during exam season. As it turns out, I probably could have further contained my workdays had I heeded more of Cal’s following advice.

Here’s what I asked on the podcast (Spotify time-stamp 51:57):

“I’m a college student and I find it hard to fit all my activities and responsibilities into the 11 hours allotted by the time-block planner, so I often find myself scrambling with ad-hoc work in the evenings. How do I schedule a longer day?”

Much of Cal’s talk of time-block planning is geared towards working professionals, but as a student, it’s rare for all of our obligations to fall within the typical 9 to 5 schedule. So here I was curious how to adapt time-block planning to the specific demands of student life.

The Newport-approved time-block planner has 11 spaces, which is much longer than the typical office worker’s schedule, but at times it still felt constraining for my commitments and obligations as a college student, which were spread throughout the day and often bled into the evening.

In his response, Cal acknowledges the uniqueness of my situation as a college student and offers 5 practical tips for containing student work within the constraints of the time-block planner. Let’s review them and see where I succeeded and where I could have adjusted my approach so as to more effectively contain my workdays.

1. Keep your course and activity load reasonable.

As Cal mentions, no recruiter or grad school admissions committee is going to care about the busyness of your college schedule. They’re instead going to care about the reputation of your institution, your performance in your courses, and any directly relevant skills you’ve developed. There is no prize for having the busiest schedule. So why strive for it, especially if the commitments flooding that schedule don’t directly align with your values or your future vision? Being mindful of not overloading yourself is not only a critical form of self-care, it also ensures you have the time and energy to make progress on the things that truly matter to you.

I was pretty good about this. First, let’s look at the academic side. At Williams, as I assume is the case at other liberal arts institutions, it’s quite common nowadays to double or even triple major. Nonetheless, I stuck with one major and one concentration (which is kind of like a minor). This ensured that no single semester was overly demanding: I never, for example, took multiple writing-intensive or lab courses at once. This allowed me to hone in each semester on my 1 or 2 most demanding required courses with laser-like focus and stand out in my major and concentration. It also gave me the flexibility to explore an eclectic mix of courses outside my fields, like Astrobiology, Africana Studies, and music history. Having this intellectual flexibility is, in my opinion, a boon for any college student. It makes for a well-rounded education.

I was also careful about choosing my extracurricular activities. As an aspiring academic, most of what moved the needle forward for me career-wise was confined to my major/concentration courses, research, and the occasional conference or intensive summer program. This meant I was lucky enough to choose extracurriculars that nurtured other aspects important to me: namely, movement and creative expression. Much of my extracurricular time therefore revolved around dance and music rehearsals. These activities were cognitively demanding and time-consuming, but I had both the mental energy and the space in my schedule to take them on precisely because I was very intentional about my course load.

2. Use autopilot scheduling.

If you have regular assignments, like weekly essays or problem sets, Cal recommends scheduling in advance regular times during which you will complete them. For example, if you always have a response paper due Wednesday, put on your calendar (not just your time-block planner) that you will spend, say, an hour every Monday outlining it and an hour every Tuesday completing it. Also figure out where you will do this work. Autopilot scheduling frees up valuable mental energy which you would otherwise spend every week just trying to figure out when and where to complete regular assignments.

I did not do this. I instead left it all up to my weekly plans, or, more likely, my nightly time-block planning sessions. Some assignments did inevitably creep up on me, as I’d discover the night before that the only way to finish that weekly essay due in two days was to grind in the library late tomorrow night. I wish I’d heeded this advice. Perhaps I’ll try it in grad school.

3. Take advantage of your mornings and afternoons between classes and activities.

Avoid pushing everything off until the evening. Take advantage of empty spaces throughout your day between classes and activities to get stuff done.

I was good about this. I often took advantage of the time before my first class of the day to do my most cognitively demanding work. Once I’d blocked in the rest of my commitments for the day, I would find ways to knock out assignments and even get ahead by making use of the blocks of time in between. This was probably the single most useful strategy within time-blocking that allowed me to (mostly) avoid working late into the night.

4. Study in quiet places and leave your phone behind.

The spirit of this piece of advice is to not do your most intensive studying in situations where you know you’re likely to be interrupted. Just knowing that you might be interrupted can create a background hum of anxiety that prevents you from doing your best work. And if/when you do get interrupted, you’ll be forced to context-switch — to shift your focus from one task to another. The more you context-switch during a study session, the more difficult the work will feel, the longer it will take, and the lower its quality will be. Therefore, allowing emails, notifications, and background conversations to inundate your study session is poison for deep intellectual efforts.*

This is also something I was very mindful of. During my study blocks in college, I would refrain from context-switching to the best of my ability. This meant studying in the library where I was unlikely to be distracted, keeping my phone off and in my backpack, and keeping open only the applications and browser windows that were directly relevant to my work.

*Group studying is fine for problem sets and group projects, as long as external distractions are kept to a minimum. It’s also generally fine to work with others and/or in louder environments when doing shallower, less demanding tasks.

5. Make paper and exam studying plans.

This is similar to autopilot scheduling. The idea is to plan and put in your calendar well in advance when and how you’re going to study for/ work on your major papers and exams throughout the semester so they don’t creep up on you. This is another area I was pretty lackluster about. To be fair, as a humanities student I didn’t have many exams to begin with, but I’m sure it couldn’t have hurt to have had a game plan for the many high-stakes papers and projects that accumulated towards the end of each semester.

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Conclusion: How My Approach Measured Up

So here’s how my approach to time management in college aligned with Newport’s advice: I kept my course and activity load reasonable, I took advantage of time in between activities, and I studied in quiet places without context-switching. Here’s where it diverged: I did not use autopilot scheduling, nor did I make paper and exam studying plans.

Clearly, there’s always room to improve when it comes to time management and productivity. And though these concepts have understandably taken on somewhat negative connotations in recent years, we should be careful to uncouple them from that dreaded phrase, “hustle culture”. Managing your time and caring about productivity is, in my view and in Cal’s, actually about carefully choosing your activities and containing them in service of your vision of the deep life. It’s about agency. It’s about enhancing your quality of life.

A huge thanks to Cal Newport and his producer Jesse Miller for taking my question.

Check out Cal Newport’s podcast “Deep Questions”, a weekly show on living and working deeply in a distracted world. Available wherever you get your podcasts.