I'm Cal Newport and this is my first weekly update video. Now the idea with this series is to give you a look inside my life as a professional writer, professor and podcaster. I want to get into some of my own personal struggles to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

So here's the plan for today's episode. I want to start by giving you quick updates on the book I'm writing, what's happening with our podcast Deep Questions and my academic research. After I'm done with those updates, for the first time ever, I'm going to reveal to you a look in this Deep Work HQ hideaway where I retreat to do a lot of my own deep thinking.

It's a hideaway above a storefront in downtown Tacoma Park. So I'll give you a look around what's going on here. Let's start by giving you an update on the book I'm writing. So here's the background. I'm under contract with the Portfolio Imprint of Penguin Random House to write a book titled Slow Productivity.

The current subtitle is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This will be my eighth book, believe it or not. It'll probably fall somewhere between 70,000 to 90,000 words when all is said and done. My current due date is March, but I'll tell you my plan is to get this done earlier.

So right now, what am I trying to do with the book? Well, in the month of October, when I'm recording this, I have a chapter I'm trying to finish. So I have synced up one chapter to this month. I'm more or less on track to actually get this writing done in time.

But I will say there have been some struggles. The main issue I'm having with not only this book right now, but also with some of my New Yorker writing is second draft syndrome. So I'm a big believer in take your time, figure out what you're going to write. I like to walk, develop my outlines, take careful notes, gather my sources.

And then when I write, try to get it right the first time. So after that, you're really just editing the language. And I am finding myself section after section in this chapter, writing 1,000, 2,000 words, taking my time. It'll take me two days. So I'm doing careful prose and having to go back and extensively rewrite.

And it's always in these second rewrites that I get what I like. And so I've been a little bit frustrated about this. It's happening in my book. This happened with almost every one of my recent New Yorker pieces, especially when the longer form ones I write. And I step back and say, no, no, no, I got to take another swing at it.

So that's a struggle, but I'm overcoming it. Now, people are curious, what is my writing habit right now? Well, because I'm not teaching, I have flexibility on my schedule. And so what I'm doing, my ideal writing schedule I've been implementing this fall so far is first thing every morning, six days a week.

Regular writing on Shabbat, Saturday. Every other day, write two to four hours, depending on what my schedule allows. And that's been going well. So this has been priority one is writing the book. I'm hitting my benchmarks. I'm not ahead of schedule. I'm not behind schedule. I'm having the second draft issue, but I'm just upping my hours to compensate for it.

So progress is occurring. If you want to get a look at what my writing life encounters day to day, I'll show you. Here's my computer. This is what I'm seeing two to four hours every day. Scrivener triple pane. I got whatever I'm writing, research outline notes next to it, footnote inspector next to that so I can keep my footnotes straight.

This is what I see hour after hour, day after day. Progress is going. So let me just conclude my discussion of my book by I'm loading up now in Scrivener the full word count of everything I've written so far. 35,961. Progress is being made, but I'm going to have to keep at it.

And look, if you want to read what I've been writing, we'll put a link in the description of this video to my New Yorker archive so you can see all the articles I've written for them. If you want to learn more about my books, calnewport.com. It's all right there.

All right, let's do an update on the podcast. So as you may or may not know, I host a podcast called Deep Questions with Cal Newport recorded out of the studio right here in this hideaway, my Deep Work HQ. So what's going on with the podcast these days? Well, we're still doing one episode a week.

Longtime listeners know this is a change we made last spring. We went from a two episode a week format to one episode a week format to focus on the content. We wanted to get the show better, get the numbers up on single episodes before we went back to doing two episodes a week.

So we're still doing that, but we're seeing our numbers start to rise at a rate that we like. The big change that's happening right now, and that my producer Jesse, who's right over here holding the camera, is really taking the lead on, is we're bringing in more other people.

We want live callers so that on the episodes you'll actually hear me going back and forth interacting with a listener who has a case study or a call and we want to do more interviews. So in general, happy about the way it's going. We have some complexities. Just like with writing, let me update you on how I actually schedule this work.

So my rule for the podcast is the half day rule. One half day once a week. That is what the show gets and we try to do as much as we can with that time. So today, for example, is a podcast day. We finished recording episode 218 of the Deep Questions podcast not long ago.

I arrived here around lunchtime and it's now, let me look at my clock here, 5 o'clock. So this morning I could write and work on other things. Half day. So it's a good challenge to figure out how much we can fit into a half day, how much improvement we can do, but it also keeps the podcast from metastasizing over my whole schedule.

I might be slowing down the progress with the show by doing this, but it makes the schedule work. So Deep Questions is the name of the podcast. The same YouTube channel where you're seeing this video, you can see videos of each week's episode. Also there's clips on this YouTube channel of popular questions and segments.

All right, final update, academic work. So I'm not teaching this semester. I'm on teaching leave, but I am a working computer scientist. I do theory work on distributed algorithms. I am working on, at this point, primarily one paper. So I'm on my way to a conference two weeks after we record this where I'm actually presenting a paper I won an award for.

I'm actually kind of proud of that. But let me get tactical about how I'm trying to fit this research into the other things going on in my academic and writing life right now. Because again, there's a bit of a pain point here. My plan was the second shift rule.

Every day, deep work right away, right now that's my writing. Every day at some point have what I call a second shift of deep work. And it doesn't matter if it's only 30 minutes long, but you're always touching base with something unrelated to the primary deep work every day.

So for me, it's going to be touching base with making progress on this academic paper, or it's typically doing some sort of research or thinking efforts for, let's say, like a New Yorker piece. And to understand how this complex mechanism works, when one of these things in the second shift gets near completion, it then takes over the primary shift.

It's working okay. But I would say in the last week or so, my success rate with the second shift doing the second shift is 50%. All right, so that's what's going on. What I want to do next is give you a look inside what I call my deep work HQ.

This is my secret deep thinking hideaway. It's in an office suite hidden above some stores on the main street of Tacoma Park, Maryland. It's a few blocks from my house, so it's easy to get back and forth. I've never actually shown this place to the public before, so this will be a first.

Let me warn you before we get started, it's halfway renovated. All right, so the room we're in now is the main conference room of the deep work HQ. It's where we just did our update. I do work here. Producer Jesse does work here. I have computer science meetings here.

I'll get together with other professors when we work on papers. There's some local writers in town who come for certain slots to come in here and write to get away from the noise at home. Nerve center of the deep work HQ. We have up on the wall here, these are actually proof sheets from our friends at Mouse Books.

Mouse Books is a company that sells these pocket-sized books. The idea being don't pull out your smartphone when you're distracted, pull out a mouse book. These are actually the sheets that go to the printer, the things that get printed to make the mouse books. They sent us some. We have some foreign copies of the books over here.

These books I've written are in something like 45 different foreign markets we have deals with. So you can find these books in a lot of places. You can find deep work in Mongolia, for example. I'll show you one little known flaw. Maybe this is very valuable. Here's the Russian edition of Digital Minimalism.

The first edition misspelled my name. Call C-A-L-L Newport. They fixed it in the second edition, but I appreciate the thoroughness here. So this is now a collector's item, so I like to display that. It keeps me humble. All right, so let me take you out of this main room and show you the rest.

One last thing to show you in the main room here is the whiteboard. It's where a lot of work gets done. This is actually from the last meeting I had with some of my computer science collaborators. Believe it or not, this is pretty meaningful. This is the beginnings of a paper that, if all goes well, will probably be submitting in February.

There's actually some work happening here. The other side of this whiteboard actually has some business strategy, so I'm not going to show you that one. All right, out here we have the main hallway of the HQ. Display of my books. We have the ego wall here. This is a fan drew this for me.

This is actually exactly how I look. I don't have my shirt on, so I think that's just good to know. If you're not in shape, you can't think. So we go down the hallway. We have two rooms here. This room is a mess, but it's going to be cool, so I'll just show it to you briefly.

So right now, we're storing a bunch of the old lights we used to use and a bunch of other books and boxes we haven't set up. But just to give you the vision of this room, it is going to be the business office/maker lab. So me and my boys like to do DIY making, so here's our 3D printer.

We're bringing in a bunch of electronics and circuit gear. So we're going to have one of the desks in here is going to be dedicated to building things. The other desk will be just the business office for the HQ, where me and my producer Jesse can get the actual day-to-day work done.

So we've got a lot of work to do here, but we're excited about the possibilities. Finally, I want to show you where the magic happens, where the Deep Questions podcast actually gets recorded. Here is the studio. This is where it happens. You probably heard the sound get immediately flat as soon as I came in here.

It's the whole thing soundproof. So I sit here. Producer Jesse sits there. We got our two cameras. The lights, because this is such a small space, the lights are actually installed on the ceiling, so we get our fill, hair, and key lights without having to take up any floor space.

Mixing boards and sound processors. Jesse runs the camera switchers right off of that control board there. And the real magic to the show is the scripts. So each time we record, we have 20, 30 pages of ads and questions and reads and notes. That's the core of the podcast.

It takes us about two hours of prep work to get this ready each week, and everything goes off of there. So that's a look inside my Deep Work HQ. It is itself a work in progress, but I got to say, having a place to retreat to that's just for thinking about this type of ideas, just for being deep, away from the distractions at home, away from the distractions of my life as a professor, has really been one of the favorite things I've ever been able to do as a writer.

So anyways, I will keep you posted as we continue to update and improve this HQ, but I'm glad I had a chance to show you what's going on. That's my update this week. Be back next week, let you know what's happening in my life.