Hey, it's Cal Newport here. This is my second weekly update video. This is where I give you a look inside my life as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster, including the types of struggles that I personally go through as I attempt to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

So here's the plan for today's video. I want to focus in particular on where I am with my writing. It was an interesting week that I've had with my book writing progress since the last video, so I want to get into that. And then I want to show you something here in my DeepWork HQ that I left off of the tour, the tour from last week's video, the most important part of the HQ I left out of the tour, and I'm going to show it to you at the end of this video, so be ready for that.

All right, let's do a writing update. If you remember, I'm writing a book called Slow Productivity. I have some internal milestones. These are self-imposed goals that I'm trying to match, and right now in the month of October, I am trying to finish chapter six. The schedule I try to keep is writing first thing every morning, five to six days a week.

Here's the problem. Since the last video, I have not gotten much done on this chapter. I was just looking at my Scrivener before we started recording. I think I've written less than 2,000 words. So I want to talk about what happened there and use that as an excuse to talk about more broadly difficulties that you face trying to do DeepWork on a regular basis.

So here's why I didn't get much done. Two things happened. One, an unexpected commitment fell onto my plate in this case. The New Yorker asked me to write a reaction piece to something that was timely. So in my two-shift system, where in the morning I work on my primary DeepWork, and in the afternoon I do a short shift on my secondary DeepWork, I had to swap and make this New Yorker article the thing I was working on during my primary DeepWork hours.

That's hard writing. It requires my full concentration. And my book got moved to the second shift, which means I'm not really making progress on my word count. I'm just doing background research, outlining, walking, and thinking through how I want the chapter to unfold. Next, calendar creep. So as much as I try to defend the morning for when I work on my book, inevitably there will be days where things come in that take up that time.

And I've had multiple things recently come right near each other in my schedule. It's actually been a little bit frustrating. It's just coincidence. But they've come into my schedule, they've been hard to avoid, but they've made progress on the book difficult. So I'm looking at my calendar here, I'm going to give you two real world examples of calendar creep, places where my attempts to protect my morning failed.

So the first was I had a call had to fall onto my schedule for 1030. It was a timely call and there wasn't any other time for me to do it. Later that day at 1, I was coming here to do some live call recording for my podcast. Then a reporter who's working on a potential profile of me wanted to come that day as well.

So now suddenly, what was going to be a full morning of writing is basically nothing because I have to be completely ready for the reporter and coming to the studio, which requires some prep. I have to be done with that before my call that happens at 1030, which means I probably have to start getting ready for all of that at 10 or 930, depending on how much my prep goes.

I don't get back from dropping my kids off from school until 830 or 845. There's no time left to do real writing. So these type of things happen. They happen to me, they happen to other people. Things pile unexpectedly on your calendar, your best laid plans to protect time goes away.

This is where having the arbitrary milestones helps. Because I have this goal of finishing this chapter by the end of October, and because I know I have fallen behind on that goal, I have now reacted to this slow last week by adding extra sessions in the days ahead. I'm going to try to compensate for what I lost so that I can actually hit this arbitrary milestone.

I'm looking at my calendar now. Here's what I'm doing. On Friday of this week, I'm adding, I've arranged to have an afternoon into the early evening writing block. I don't normally do that, but I'll come here to the HQ, change the scenery and power through. I've added a Saturday writing block for this weekend.

I don't normally write on Shabbat, but this is a special occasion. On Sunday, I had to change the calendar, flip things around with my wife so that the morning I could have off, and I'm going to do a pretty intense Sunday morning writing session. Next week, I'm going on a trip.

I'm going to a conference. I'm now systematically structuring in writing sessions into my schedule at that conference. I'm going to do a lot more writing in the next 10 days than I would do in a normal week because I have an arbitrary goal and I'm trying to compensate for a slow week.

We'll see how that goes. The lesson I'm extracting from this, at least from my own experience, is that structuring deep work and trying to stick to the structure has this beneficial side effect of it will push you to do things like adding these extra sessions that you wouldn't normally do if you instead approach these big projects without structure.

If I just said, "I write every day. This book is due in March. Let's see what happens," this last week would never be compensated for. That's what's going on. Next week, I'll update you on how this is unfolding, but I have a lot of writing in my future. As I promised, I wanted to show you a secret element of the Deep Work HQ that I think we will all agree in the end is probably the most important element of this headquarters.

I didn't show it to you in the tour last week, but I'm going to show it to you right now. Follow me. What we're going to do here is go back around the corner to the office portion of the HQ. Progress is being made. Each new week, this is becoming a better and better office.

We have a monitor again. I finished building a 3D printer. This office portion of the HQ contains the cornerstone of the Deep Questions podcast franchise, the most important element of that franchise. That is my famous blue shirt. I present to you where the blue shirt lives, this cluttered closet on this single hanger.

Every week, this comes out, podcast is recorded, and it goes back into the closet. Little known fact, we have a $500,000 insurance policy on this room because without this shirt, podcasts can't exist.