In the August 23rd podcast you said doing halfway time block planning is worse than doing none at all

I wonder how this applies to building a time block planning habit from scratch which is something I'm trying to do.

I'm Cal Newport and this is a deep questions habit tune-up mini episode. Habit Tune Up, Mini Episode.

In this format, I answer audio questions on the narrow topic of tuning up your productivity habits in this period in which our professional lives are increasingly disrupted.

Before we get rolling with today's questions, there's something I noticed recently, and by

I noticed I mean my wife pointed it out that I thought was worth bringing up.

When I do weekly planning, I get stressed out and cranky.

Not fun to be around.

I've really began to try to understand why, and I have a theory that I think is interesting, because I'm not sure if other people suffer from the same issue.

But when I do weekly planning planning what I am doing is confronting everything

on my plate for the week. Here's the meetings that are scheduled, the classes, the

lectures, the lectures, all the household things, the child care, the homeschooling,

everything on my plate.

Then you start looking at projects you want to make progress on,

deadlines that are coming up.

Task, small tasks, you know, these ones really do have to get done this week.

Let me highlight them.

You have all these chess pieces and like I say, you have to move these chess pieces around

on the metaphorical chess board that represents your available time and

attention for the week and this process surprisingly gets me quite

stressed out and cranky and what I realize is that what's going on here is that our brain, our

Paleolithic brain is not well suited for this type of batch planning. So even though you know in your

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