Side Gigs, Prefrontal Cortexes, and Cal Newport
“Your capacity to change yourself, change others, and even change the world, may boil down to how well you know your brain, and your capacity to consciously intervene in otherwise automatic processes.”[1] If having an accurate self-assessment is important for productivity, then David Rock’s Your Brain at Work is an important contribution to the “self-care” and “productivity” conversations. At the end of this post, I’ll list a few other resources that came to mind while reading Rock.
I’ve mentioned my side-hustle before. My wife and I love having a small business, probably because of the “’work-life balance’” Rock wrote about in Scene 8: “Drowning in Uncertainty.” We “are able to make more of (our) own choices, or at least it feels like that.”[2] Yet, one of the challenges of having a side-hustle is that we are limited in the amount of time and energy we can allocate to the business each month. Another challenge is that the time that works best for our clients and for us is not always “ideal.” Recently, we had to schedule some calls with a cohort of clients on several Mondays this year. If Rock is correct about the “significant resources” required “to operate” the prefrontal cortex when it comes to “understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting,”[3] then scheduling a meeting on a Monday morning is probably less than ideal. In my situation, this is true for at least two reasons.
First, my side-hustle is just that. It’s on the side. It’s not my full-time W-2 employment. In that sense, if a meeting is taking place with a client on a Monday morning, it’s taking away energy I need to give to my full-time executive director role. Coaching a client takes a lot of mental energy. How will I help them plan? What goals should we pursue? This is a lot to process. Rock says, “Conscious mental activities chew up metabolic resources,”[4] and if these mental processes are happening on a Monday morning, my prefrontal cortex is going to be even more limited as I shift from my side-hustle to my executive director role.
However, I’m not planning to drop my side-hustle. I recall Austin Kleon writing about side-gig endeavors, stating, “side projects…are important.”[5] With Kleon arguing for maintaining both a side gig AND a day-job, and with the board of directors in my day job being cool with me having a consultancy, I’m willing to set aside a few early Monday mornings to meet with a cohort of clients IF that’s the only day/time that works for both parties. That doesn’t change the reality that doing so is incredibly hard. It cuts into time that I want to set aside for prioritizing projects and setting up my week.
Second, I decided in the summer of last year to set aside Mondays, especially Monday mornings before 12pm, to NOT schedule meetings. In fact, by setting aside Mondays and Fridays to be free of meetings, when possible, I think I’m able to more readily employ System 2 thinking to counter the errors I’m prone to make with system 1 thinking.[6] Setting aside these times for other, deeper work, outside of meetings, helps limbic system development. When I remain committed to blocking out that time, combined with routine time for “daily office,” I think I assist my “ability to regulate (my) emotions instead of being at the mercy of them” which is “central to (my ability) to (be) effective in (the) chaotic world” around me.[7]
Of course, that is not always entirely possible. After all, to participate in this DLd program I needed to set aside 12pm EDT – 1pm EDT for zoom calls for the doctoral cohort. And sometimes the complexity of juggling multiple schedules, some of which are beyond our control (e.g., our clients’ schedules) presents the need to make exceptions.
Setting aside chunks of time for focused energy that avoids context-shifting is crucial to flourish in productivity. Multi-tasking is not really all that it’s cut out to be. Rock acknowledges that, especially in a knowledge economy, “workers everywhere are experiencing an epidemic of overwhelm.”[8] He goes on to say that “even the brain of a Harvard graduate can be turned into that of an eight-year-old simply by being made to do two things at once.”[9] Rock isn’t alone in this belief. Sönke Ahrens believes we’ll grow in our ability to focus “if we avoid multitasking, remove possible distractions and separate different kinds of tasks as much as possible so they will not interfere with each other.”[10]
Though not a new idea, time-blocking is a productivity hack I found from author and computer science professor Cal Newport to help avoid the back-and-forth of multi-tasking (i.e., frenetically checking email all throughout the day). Newport is a big believer in digital minimalism, deep work, and less context-shifting. Rock sounds a lot like Newport when he writes, “Deep thinking tends to require more effort, so plan to do your deep thinking in one block, perhaps early in the morning or late at night.”[11]
And here’s a list of a few other resources that came to mind while reading Rock:
- Calnewport.com, Cal Newport’s website. Newport is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker, with articles like “It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity.”
- A World Without Email, by Cal Newport
- Fullfocus.co, the website of Michael Hyatt
- What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done, by Matt Perman
[1] David Rock, Your Brain at Work, Revised and Updated (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 244.
[2] Rock, 124.
[3] Rock, 8.
[4] Rock, 8.
[5] Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, (New York: Workman, 2012, 2022), 62-63.
[6] See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
[7] Rock, 99.
[8] Rock, 4.
[9] Rock, 5.
[10] Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking, 2nd edition, revised and expanded edition (Hamburg, Germany: Sönke Ahrens, 2022), 58.
[11] Rock, 16.
About the Author
Travis Vaughn
11 responses to “Side Gigs, Prefrontal Cortexes, and Cal Newport”
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Hi Travis,
Your comments struck a lot of different cords for me.
My issue is one of balance. I need a certain level of activity in order for me to feel engaged. (My wife says I am a stress addict). However, I seem to have settled on some “deep time” from 4:00 am to 6 am.
I am at my most energetic and yet it still leaves me time to get my special needs daughter ready for her day (if I am positive – she is positive, if I am negative – she is negative). so setting a time to go deeper has certainly helped me this semester.
Laundry, vacuuming, feeding family is also a part of my day and lately I have been using these mindless task times, do let my mind wander (Default Mode Network). Ah…the life of a house husband!
Shalom…Russ
Good grief, brother. I’m guessing your 4am “deep time” was made more accessible because of your military background. Seriously, though, I love it. Last semester, I was waking up at 3:30am to be able to include my doctoral work with my new role as executive director in my current organization. That was insane, and I have backed off of that time this semester.
I’m curious, though, what did your 4am – 6am time include?
Oh, 23 years of getting up early is sort of the norm for old Army guys. 6 am is always Physical Training (PT) so formations are at 0545. Which means you launch yourself No later than 0515, which means you are up 0400 ish, just to get the cobwebs out of your brain.
Old habits that I resurfaced to work on my academic stuff. 10:00 (2200) pm however is a bridge to far for me. So I am off to bed around 9 pm (2100). Life in the slow lane I guess.
Travis-
Thanks for sharing some of the ways you approach your week. I also have found the intentionality with planning my calendar out to be a helpful, if imperfect, process.
I want to give a loud ‘amen’ to your support of side hustles. I have found that allowing myself to do something totally different from my day job helps me to be sharper at my day job. Engaging with teams outside of my primary role gives me new perspectives, I get exposed to new thinking; when talking to my boss about it, I summarize it as professional development (that she doesn’t have to pay for). Its a win/win.
I have found that when I am engaged in a side hustle AND when I am doing things like time blocking my calendar, I feel a little guilty. Like I am spoiling myself by allowing this margin. So, I have to force myself to reframe it in my own mind to highlight all the benefits we have been discussing. Do you ever have that experience?
Jen, I think your comment about side hustles needs to go in its own blog post, or perhaps even in a Harvard Business Review Ideacast podcast about how to think about side hustles. Like Austin Kleon, I’m going to steal your quote — “Engaging with teams outside of my primary role gives me new perspectives, I get exposed to new thinking; when talking to my boss about it, I summarize it as professional development (that she doesn’t have to pay for). Its a win/win” — and use it somewhere, somehow. Seriously, that is a fantastic framing of the very legit and helpful purpose and nature of side-gigs.
And regarding the time blocking, I do experience something like what you’ve said, though lately I have not been seeing the margin that I would like to have, even with how I’m approaching my schedule. Do you time block digitally or with pen and paper in a daily planner or notebook?
I mostly do digital. In my world, I live out of Outlook calendar. So, when I block “Prep for Meetings” in my calendar, my time shows as unavailable to my colleagues- which is helpful. Plus, it gives me visual reminders of where I want to focus. That said, right now, I have a list of things that I want to do in my “Prep for Meetings” time, and I have a hand written list, with time allotments and prioritization of those tasks. Probably not the most organized way, but it kinda works!
Your thoughts about Cal Newport reminded me of a conversation I had this week with my team leader. In a discussion about feeling over-extended I asked him what takes up the bulk of his time these days. I was expecting him to say “cultivating new contacts” or maybe “mission admin tasks” but he actually said that switching from one task to another is where he spends most of his time. I was surprised, but it drove home this point that we waste so much mental energy if not actual minutes and hours by switching between tasks and processes.
Like you, I try to keep my Mondays mostly unscheduled so I can concentrate and set up my week well. Fridays have long been the day when we attempt a Sabbath, with greater or less success depending on the season. But as you said, often we aren’t able to stick to those ideals when we need to accommodate other people’s schedules. How often do you find yourself saying “no” to scheduling something on a Monday, for example? Do you fight pretty hard for that boundary or are you pretty flexible in it?
Thanks Travis…your post and this book has me thinking as much about my time management and how that impacts my effectiveness in thinking. As I continue to process this…I’m beginning to recognize a few of my strengths–flexibility & serving others–are starting to become weaknesses. While I have a few set blocks in my weekly calendar, I also tend to accommodate those I supervise and my family’s schedules quite a bit. One of my ‘love languages’ is acts of service…and as an enneagram 5 I am also reluctant to ask things of other people. This combo has created a fairly fluid weekly calendar with too few blocks to both think deeply and also enjoy recreation. I’m curious: apart from blocking off ‘system 2’ thinking time, do you also block off ‘down time’ or ‘sabbath’ in your weekly schedule?
Scott, yes I do block those times off, though I haven’t been as consistent as I would like. Earlier this year, I updated my schedule to block off 6pm Friday – 6pm Saturday as Sabbath. I don’t have to preach on Sundays like you do, so I don’t know what would work best for you. I have also been pretty consistent keeping my Mondays and Fridays free from meetings, especially Fridays, and that helps as well. I’ve recently leaned more analog than digital this year when it comes to setting up my day in the morning. That’s something Cal Newport has helped me with.
“Your capacity to change yourself, change others, and even change the world, may boil down to how well you know your brain, and your capacity to consciously intervene in otherwise automatic processes.”
Travis, I love how you started with this quote. Take your time in answering…How do you feel God has called you to actually change the world?
I’ll give you two responses. One, let’s have a longer conversation at Oxford – ha! Two, I don’t think that’s my calling (to change the world). I do think I am called to be faithful with what God has put in front of me to steward, and I do think I have two or three things to say about this and that, but “faithful presence,” to steal a phrase from James D. Hunter, is probably what I’m called to be/do. For what it’s worth, here’s my mission/calling statement I wrote several years ago: “To glorify God by serving owners, executives, and other leaders in business and in the nonprofit (and church) sector, by solving problems through coaching, consultation, building networks, and forging alliances.”