I'm Cal Newport. This is my third weekly update video where I give you a closer look at my own personal struggles as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world. As you can probably see, today I am not in my Deep Work HQ.

I'm instead in a hotel room in Augusta, Georgia of all places. I'm here at a computer science conference. In about two hours from now I'll be presenting this paper. Now I saw the house cleaning cart maybe two doors down from now, so my time here is probably limited before I have to go.

So I'll make this quick, but what I wanted to talk about today, appropriately enough given where I am, Deep Work while traveling. I have two major pieces of advice to give that I have learned through hard and long experience. The first piece of advice is don't wing it. I used to have all this optimism when a trip was coming up because I would imagine those days as empty.

Why did I imagine those days as empty? Because my calendar would be empty. You don't schedule meetings and appointments on days when you're traveling. My brain would see empty calendar days and think we are going to get everything done on the trip. It's all uninterrupted. We'll write thousands of words, solve major theorems.

It's going to be great. The reality, of course, when you're traveling is your day is not empty. The things that are pulling at your attention just don't happen to be on your normal calendar. It's more like conference sessions, conversations with collaborators you haven't seen, administrative details like preparing a talk that you have to give.

So what I've learned through hard experience is that you have to do a lightweight form of time blocking even when you're on the road. What I mean by this is pick out the two or three Deep Work targets you want to make progress on that day. Plan the time.

Plan the time smartly. What I do is I actually look at my program for the day. Look at the different sessions, the different events and pick opportune times to step away and work on something specific. This morning, for example, during a keynote talk, I actually attended it but was working on a computer science proof during that talk that was pre-planned.

Right now, when I took a break to record this video, I've been working on writing. This is a good time to get some writing done. I dedicated the flight here to doing a proposal review I owed someone. I printed it out. I knew that's what I was gonna do on the flight, that one thing.

So by pre-planning each day when you're gonna do the Deep Work, you're much more likely to get it done and your plans can be a lot more realistic. A little sub piece of advice here too is I take administrative stuff. I got to check my email and keep up with what's going on in the world and I put that into one session.

If you fall into the habit when you're at a conference, for example, of let me just continually be responding to emails, etc. You get a lot of context shift and you lose a lot of advantage of being out of your normal environment. So block those administrative things as well.

Second piece of advice I want to give, when I travel, I always look for at least one unusual novel or scenic location where I can go to do some deep thinking. So I want to leverage the unique physical settings of the places that I travel. So here in Augusta I have found the River Walk on the Savannah River serves that purpose for me.

It's a nice walk, you can see the water, you can see the nature, it's quiet, it's different than anything I have back in Washington DC. I've done one deep thinking session on that river so far. I have another one I'm about to do once I get kicked out of here.

My house cleaning. So I'm coming up to a place in my writing right now where I'm stuck on what's the right way to structure a section. I'm gonna go figure that out on the river. So that's my second piece of advice. Take advantage of the location. I was fortunate enough as a graduate student at MIT and as a young professor to be able to travel all over Europe, all over the world to do these type of conferences.

And so I have written and thought and worked on books in very interesting places. I remember for example working on how to become a high school superstar at a rooftop restaurant in Bologna, Italy. I have memories of being in Toronto with a cool hotel room overlooking the cityscape and I think I was working on So Good They Can't Ignore You there.

So I have a lot of memories of having a lot of good thoughts by seeking out interesting locations where I travel. Alright so those are my two pieces of advice. Lightweight time blocking of the deep work you're going to do. Don't just wing it. Consolidate administrative work like email checking to schedule times.

Don't make that the default and seek out interesting places to go as long as you're traveling. Get all of that concentration boosting environments that you can take advantage of that. Alright that's my update from the road. I'm gonna go walk on the river and I got to prepare to give this talk but I'll be back next week in my deep work HQ.

See you then.