Rethinking Productivity and Scheduling
Riverside by Andrew Crane
How do you keep your schedule and track your work? A paper planner? Bullet Journal? Google calendar? Trello? Slack? Another online service or function of your email provider?
When did your develop your current method of scheduling and approaching your work?
I’ve thought about my productivity and scheduling almost obsessively for years. Like many of us I have gone through phases of being consumed by a preoccupation with scheduling and optimizing, with phases of enrapture with certain methods of planning or types of planners. I used a bullet journal for a while (which I actually loved, and often imagine going back to in some updated fashion), and am still a huge believer in the act of writing. I regularly take notes on generic things and always have lots of notebooks laying around for collecting to-do lists and ideas.
As someone with an affinity (compulsion?) for optimizing and productivity in a culture that is enthralled with achieving more, it can feel like being in a never-ending loop of employing the next best app, setting reminders in our inboxes and calendars, and trying new programs for productivity, always on the cusp of our best selves and output yet.
Perhaps because of this personal and cultural drive toward productivity I was drawn to the work of author and computer scientist Cal Newport. I think the first book I read by Newport was So Good They Can’t Ignore You, but Deep Work is the book that really made me intrigued about his ideas. I’ve read all his books now, and although I am not a huge consumer of podcasts, I am a weekly listener to his Deep Questions podcast.
Deep Questions is geared toward those who work in the “knowledge work” sector - anyone whose main capital is their knowledge. It frequently addresses the balance of distraction and productivity (Newport is also the author of a book titled “A World Without Email”) and regularly presses us to question what productivity really is with regular discussion about topics like “life-centric planning” and work-life balance.
Last October I was catching up on episodes I had missed while driving to a gig in Maryland and stumbled into Episode 316 of Deep Questions where Newport dissects the quarterly and weekly approach he uses in creating his daily schedule.
At the beginning of each quarter (or academic semester) Newport lays out his quarterly plan by deciding what the biggest and most important goals and areas of focus for that quarter are, followed by the creation of a weekly template beginning with what you are required to do (when do you work, have family obligations or other non-negotiable commitments).
Once the template shows what you are obligated to do, you add in what you have identified as important priorities on your quarterly plan. Whether they are health goals, family goals or personal creative projects, the should be added to the template in time blocks that are to be protected the same way as all other required commitments. They are also non-negotiable commitments on your calendar.
In this method of using weekly templates, at the beginning of each new week you sit down with your template to address what will be different than usual in the upcoming week and if you need to make adjustments in order to continue protecting both required commitments and your quarterly goals.
As I listened to this episode it dawned on me that I’ve approached my work and my schedule essentially the same way since high school. It has always been dictated by school or activities, and, following school, it was dictated by my work (i.e. dictated by others).
Something I think most musicians can relate to is the odd balance of working a job that is essentially second shift - teaching privately, gigging, and even audio/sound and event management is largely a night time and weekend job. Once we finish school we have to question what the daytime hours are for. With work often taking place from early afternoon until late in the evening, you’re left with most of the “normal” work day to account for. There are some obvious answers to this dilemma: practice of course (which comes with its own challenges), advertising your studio or work and recruiting students, building a network, perhaps taking auditions or applying for jobs, and a “day” job are among the most common solutions.
There is not shortage of things we “should” be accomplishing, and as a freshly graduated musician I felt an intense amount of guilt and laziness if I wasn’t working during the day like I did in school. I was up late teaching, driving, rehearsing, but sleeping in felt wrong. Taking time out of regular daytime hours to go to the gym, grocery shop, or handle life tasks also felt wrong.
The very real sense that I needed to be working when I was teaching and working during the “work day” was perpetuated by my Type A nature, and also by my need to earn a living. Hours spent not working were hours I was squandering potential income.
With this feeling eating away at my sense of purpose and productivity, I spent well over a decade doing my best to fill every hour of the day with a productive task that either was work or might result in work. As you might guess, this was exhausting, unsustainable, and in hindsight I never imagined having, I can see now that it was also unnecessary.
Stretching out our work tasks and practice hours can help us find meaning, but so can exploring other creative hobbies and projects when we’re done with work (more on this another time!). Taking a fresh perspective on the way we schedule our work and view productivity can help us turn off our “work brain” and rest once our tasks on any given day are complete. We might never be done with work like practice, but there’s no reason we need to be mentally engaged with it 24/7.
It became clear in the last year that there as a lot of friction in my life between how I wanted to spend my time and how I was actually spending my time. The way I was structuring my life was not set up to support the things that were meaningful to me and crucial to improving my work.
A lot of the friction I was experiencing was a result of filling up my calendar the same way I always had - with things that made me feel busy and productive. The result of falling into this easy trap was that I was spending more time than I needed to on simple tasks like answering emails, planning for lessons and classes, and especially on being available to others. As I made myself feel productive thanks to a full calendar, my personal projects and pursuits as well as my practice time suffered. It all amounted to feeling tired and unfulfilled.
…
Newport’s method of Quarterly Planning and Weekly Templates was appealing to me for its practicality. It wasn’t the bullet journal crowded with a messy overlap of obscure personal habits and professional work, and it wasn’t full of fluffy, lofty goals with no plan for action. It encourages a focus on our most important or meaningful work that is mercifully realistic. (You can keep a separate list of one, five, or ten year goals if you want to also think broadly.)
Realistic objectives of the Quarterly Plan and Weekly Template:
What are you required to do in the next twelve weeks?
What do you want to prioritize in the next twelve weeks?
How much time will it require to do both what you must do and what you want to do?
Motivated by taking a fresh approach, I started 2025 with a Quarterly Plan and Weekly Template beaming up at me from my desk.
I laid out what I was required to do - an easy task with obvious constraints coming from teaching, professional commitments, and scheduled performances. As I started to fill in what I wanted to do, I quickly started jotting down line after line of lofty goals. It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t used to planning around my big ideas and objectives in any practical way.
After much gnashing of teeth to narrow down what might realistically get done this quarter, I very carefully scheduled blocks of time into my schedule for my very carefully selected projects.
(If you subscribe to my newsletter you’ve gotten a spoiler…)
In the first six weeks of this year I proceeded to keep exactly zero of the appointments I had made with myself on my weekly template for my personally meaningful and important work. I gave away all of the time I had set aside as protected, squeezing in writing and practice wherever it might fit. In some cases it was unavoidable, but in all cases I never fully made up the focused time I had given away.
My Weekly Template has succeeded in a different way than I expected: identifying my most fatal scheduling and productivity flaw. People pleasing. (See also: low hanging fruit).
Although I have not made progress the way I’d expected to, I am seeing my schedule and behavior in a new way that is incredibly valuable. We can’t break our habits if we don’t realize they exist. Or, in my case, if we realize they exist but are not forced to look them straight in the eye.
I looked these fatal flaws in the eye a week or two ago and haven’t made any big changes to remedy them - yet. In the time since, I’ve been to a conference I presented and performed at, and filled another week’s protected time with other tasks (that were, in fact, adjacent to my required work). I could easily feel guilty about this or be very hard on myself, but I’ve realized that the changes I want to make are not small feats. Investing in my own creative projects, hobbies, and even my free time after decades of not doing so is, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, not going to come naturally.
…
Writing a block of time on the calendar is not carving the act of doing in stone. It would be easy to look at this as a matter of discipline, but as anyone who has ever pursued a fitness goal understands, discipline is fleeting. I don’t want to strong-arm my way into doing what matters only to find myself back where I started once the novelty wears off.
So what is the moral of this story? I don’t know yet. I’m writing this at 8PM on a night that I’m home by myself, capitalizing on some quiet time with my thoughts. It’s certainly not the 9AM coffee date I scheduled with myself two weeks ago, but it works nicely nonetheless. Normally I would chastise myself for doing work at night, but some of what I’m learning is that the way I want to force my calendar to work might not be the way it works best.
Along those lines, I’ve tried to force myself to be a morning exerciser or yogi for the last few years because it used to work so well with my schedule before I was doing so much day time teaching. Since starting this Weekly Template experiment, I’ve taken to exercising or doing yoga in the evening. Movement is becoming a “shut down” activity from a day of teaching when my brain needs a break rather than something that must be done in the morning where it steals from the time of day where I do my best deep work. Another example of the way perspective can create flexibility.
Maybe that’s the moral of the story - my schedule has never fit perfectly into the boxes I’ve designed, but perspective and flexibility might mean something different than I used to think they did.