How I’m Organizing My Life this Fall | Advice

Cal Newport (0:00)

I found myself recently, as the lazy quiet of summer gave way to the noisy insistence of the fall, being more irritable than normal. I would get really annoyed about the latest blown save for the Washington Nationals, or I'd walk into a cluttered room and in a frantic fit decide I had to clean that room right away because it was intolerable the way that it was currently laid out. Now, I'm familiar with this routine because it's my mind's way of telling me that now that the fall is beginning, it's time to turn back on some more serious organizational systems. I slow down for the summer, but when the fall starts, my mind begins to push back and say, we got to get more structured. So I did. Last week, I sat down and figured out the exact setup for my organizational systems that I'm going to run this fall, including the specific tools I will use and the processes I will use with those tools. This is what I want to talk to you about today. I'm going to put on my Productivity Nerd hat and walk you through the exact setup I will be using this fall to organize my life. But I'm not just going to leave it there. I'll then step back and talk about A, why it's important in general to periodically update or change your organizational systems and B, give you some best practices for building a system that fits your needs for this upcoming fall. And in case you're wondering, my Productivity Nerd Hat, it features David Allen making out with the Trello board. It's pretty disturbing. All right. So we got a lot of advice and ideas to cover in this episode. So let's get right into it.

All right. So here's my plan. We're going to proceed in three parts. In the first part, I'll go through the details of my system for the fall of 2026 Then we'll talk about why tweaking your systems like I do is actually a good thing. Then we'll talk about best practices when you're creating your own system for this upcoming fall. Now, a quick disclaimer before we get started, I should briefly address the meta question of why do we care about organizational systems at all? I mean, didn't Jenny O'Dell teach us that productivity is simply the subordination of human individuality to the industrializing logics of late stage capitalism? In other words, there's a bit of a like, hey, let's not talk too much about organizational system vibe on the internet these days. But here's why I think it's important, right? So my main role is a computer scientist who studies human flourishing in a technological world. One of the things I've learned is the technological world throws a lot of distractions and a lot of work and a lot of shiny objects at you. And if you do not have an intentional plan for how to organize what you have to do and to aim intentionally your time and attention, the technology will make these plans for you.

They're happy to hijack your day in a way that's going to allow Mark Zuckerberg to buy the second half of Kawhi. I don't know what he does out there, but maybe involves David Allen making out with travel boards. I don't know what tech people do. So I do think it's important to talk about organization, not because, God, what's this kind of tiresome rhetoric about? We're always optimizing ourselves because we're trying to internalize late stage capitalism. No, if we're not organized, technology will organize our lives for us. So that's my disclaimer. Let's get in with it. Part one, I want to talk about my system for the fall of 2026 Now, I'm going to proceed by first talking about the material. So that is like the specific tools I'm using, and then we're going to talk about the methods, the particular rules or systems I'll use to integrate those tools into my life. I want to give some setup here. This is not a normal fall for me because I'm on sabbatical, so I'm running a more lightweight system this fall than I normally would in a typical year. However, I've been told that even my lightweight systems would be considered pretty robust for a lot of other people, but I just want you to have that note in mind. All right, let's start with the key tools that we're calling materials that I am using in my fall system. All right, the first material is where am I storing my tasks this fall? Well, because I'm on sabbatical, I am storing them all in a computer program called Things 3

I'll put it up on the screen here for people who are also watching. Here's the website for Things.