Cal Newport is FED Up With His Calendar

00:00:00.000 | Hey, it's Cal Newport here. This is my second weekly update video. This is where I give you

00:00:06.720 | a look inside my life as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster, including the types of

00:00:13.600 | struggles that I personally go through as I attempt to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

00:00:19.600 | [Music]

00:00:31.280 | So here's the plan for today's video. I want to focus in particular on where I am with my writing.

00:00:37.680 | It was an interesting week that I've had with my book writing progress since the last video,

00:00:45.200 | so I want to get into that. And then I want to show you something here in my DeepWork HQ that

00:00:51.600 | I left off of the tour, the tour from last week's video, the most important part of the HQ I left

00:00:58.080 | out of the tour, and I'm going to show it to you at the end of this video, so be ready for that.

00:01:02.080 | All right, let's do a writing update. If you remember, I'm writing a book called Slow

00:01:07.440 | Productivity. I have some internal milestones. These are self-imposed goals that I'm trying to

00:01:14.080 | match, and right now in the month of October, I am trying to finish chapter six. The schedule I

00:01:20.400 | try to keep is writing first thing every morning, five to six days a week. Here's the problem.

00:01:26.960 | Since the last video, I have not gotten much done on this chapter. I was just looking at my

00:01:33.440 | Scrivener before we started recording. I think I've written less than 2,000 words. So I want to

00:01:40.000 | talk about what happened there and use that as an excuse to talk about more broadly difficulties

00:01:46.080 | that you face trying to do DeepWork on a regular basis. So here's why I didn't get much done. Two

00:01:50.480 | things happened. One, an unexpected commitment fell onto my plate in this case. The New Yorker

00:01:57.920 | asked me to write a reaction piece to something that was timely. So in my two-shift system,

00:02:03.280 | where in the morning I work on my primary DeepWork, and in the afternoon I do a short shift

00:02:07.680 | on my secondary DeepWork, I had to swap and make this New Yorker article the thing I was working on

00:02:14.480 | during my primary DeepWork hours. That's hard writing. It requires my full concentration.

00:02:19.280 | And my book got moved to the second shift, which means I'm not really making progress on my word

00:02:25.200 | count. I'm just doing background research, outlining, walking, and thinking through how

00:02:30.560 | I want the chapter to unfold. Next, calendar creep. So as much as I try to defend the morning

00:02:38.960 | for when I work on my book, inevitably there will be days where things come in that take up that

00:02:45.280 | time. And I've had multiple things recently come right near each other in my schedule. It's

00:02:50.320 | actually been a little bit frustrating. It's just coincidence. But they've come into my schedule,

00:02:54.000 | they've been hard to avoid, but they've made progress on the book difficult. So I'm looking

00:02:58.640 | at my calendar here, I'm going to give you two real world examples of calendar creep,

00:03:02.960 | places where my attempts to protect my morning failed. So the first was I had a call had to fall

00:03:11.600 | onto my schedule for 1030. It was a timely call and there wasn't any other time for me to do it.

00:03:17.200 | Later that day at 1, I was coming here to do some live call recording for my podcast.

00:03:25.440 | Then a reporter who's working on a potential profile of me wanted to come that day as well.

00:03:30.640 | So now suddenly, what was going to be a full morning of writing is basically nothing because

00:03:36.480 | I have to be completely ready for the reporter and coming to the studio, which requires some prep.

00:03:41.680 | I have to be done with that before my call that happens at 1030, which means I probably have to

00:03:46.720 | start getting ready for all of that at 10 or 930, depending on how much my prep goes. I don't get

00:03:52.240 | back from dropping my kids off from school until 830 or 845. There's no time left to do real writing.

00:03:57.760 | So these type of things happen. They happen to me, they happen to other people. Things pile

00:04:02.960 | unexpectedly on your calendar, your best laid plans to protect time goes away. This is where

00:04:08.720 | having the arbitrary milestones helps. Because I have this goal of finishing this chapter by the

00:04:15.360 | end of October, and because I know I have fallen behind on that goal, I have now reacted to this

00:04:22.560 | slow last week by adding extra sessions in the days ahead. I'm going to try to compensate

00:04:29.120 | for what I lost so that I can actually hit this arbitrary milestone.

00:04:34.640 | I'm looking at my calendar now. Here's what I'm doing. On Friday of this week,

00:04:38.560 | I'm adding, I've arranged to have an afternoon into the early evening writing block.

00:04:43.360 | I don't normally do that, but I'll come here to the HQ, change the scenery and power through. I've

00:04:49.200 | added a Saturday writing block for this weekend. I don't normally write on Shabbat, but this is a

00:04:54.000 | special occasion. On Sunday, I had to change the calendar, flip things around with my wife so that

00:05:00.400 | the morning I could have off, and I'm going to do a pretty intense Sunday morning writing session.

00:05:05.440 | Next week, I'm going on a trip. I'm going to a conference. I'm now systematically structuring

00:05:12.720 | in writing sessions into my schedule at that conference. I'm going to do a lot more writing

00:05:17.280 | in the next 10 days than I would do in a normal week because I have an arbitrary goal and I'm

00:05:23.520 | trying to compensate for a slow week. We'll see how that goes. The lesson I'm extracting from this,

00:05:29.280 | at least from my own experience, is that structuring deep work and trying to stick

00:05:34.160 | to the structure has this beneficial side effect of it will push you to do things like adding these

00:05:40.480 | extra sessions that you wouldn't normally do if you instead approach these big projects without

00:05:47.040 | structure. If I just said, "I write every day. This book is due in March. Let's see what happens,"

00:05:53.120 | this last week would never be compensated for. That's what's going on. Next week, I'll update

00:05:58.800 | you on how this is unfolding, but I have a lot of writing in my future. As I promised,

00:06:05.680 | I wanted to show you a secret element of the Deep Work HQ that I think we will all agree in the end

00:06:12.560 | is probably the most important element of this headquarters. I didn't show it to you in the

00:06:16.320 | tour last week, but I'm going to show it to you right now. Follow me. What we're going to do here

00:06:22.160 | is go back around the corner to the office portion of the HQ. Progress is being made.

00:06:32.320 | Each new week, this is becoming a better and better office. We have a monitor again. I finished

00:06:36.240 | building a 3D printer. This office portion of the HQ contains the cornerstone of the Deep

00:06:46.320 | Questions podcast franchise, the most important element of that franchise. That is my famous blue

00:06:54.640 | shirt. I present to you where the blue shirt lives, this cluttered closet on this single

00:07:05.040 | hanger. Every week, this comes out, podcast is recorded, and it goes back into the closet.

00:07:12.480 | Little known fact, we have a $500,000 insurance policy on this room because without this shirt,

00:07:18.720 | podcasts can't exist.

Cal Newport is FED Up With His Calendar | Weekly Update #2

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