Cal Newport here. This is my fourth weekly update videos. These are the videos where I give you a look inside my life as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster and talk about my struggles to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world. Today I want to talk about reading. So in episode 220 of my podcast, which came out on Monday, I casually mentioned in response to a listener's question that in the last four days I had bought four new books which I plan to all finish in the next four weeks.

This raised the natural follow-up question of well how do I actually structure my reading? How do I get all of these books actually consumed given all the other things that are going on in my life? So that's what I want to talk about in today's video. I'm going to break my reading into three categories.

Books I read for writing or professional projects, books I read for just my own interest, and non-book media, so sort of miscellaneous media that I also consume. I'll talk about my strategies for all three. I then want to take you on location, so stick with me in this video.

I want to take you on location to the very newest reading location in my life. You will hear about this more in a second, but I just had a natural gas fireplace installed in my house so that I could sit by a fire to read in the evening. I'll take you there and show that to you a little bit later in the video.

Alright, so let's talk about the first type of reading I do, which is books that are relevant for research. So I need it for something I'm writing, for example. Typically my strategy with those is a one chapter a day baseline. So typically first thing in the morning, if I'm busy, maybe a little bit later in the day, but it's just my baseline.

When am I going to get in my pages? Right now, for example, I just started reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. I need this for an article I'm writing. It's about 300 pages long, 15 chapters more or less. Starting today I'm doing a one chapter a day baseline. I read my chapter this morning in the morning before I even took my kids to school.

That's what I'm going to try to do most days that I'm up in time, and if not I'll grab the time a little later. What I then add in, because that's a reasonable baseline, but that's going to take me 15 days to finish that book, I then add in for these professional focus books, these books relevant to my professional life, extra sessions here and there.

These will go right into my time block plan for the day. So maybe on Wednesday I'll put aside an hour after lunch, or maybe on Friday morning I'll put aside the time between two different meetings, and I'll have time block sessions just for reading. If you put aside a half hour or an hour in the middle of your workday, you're already in time block mode, you can blow through three, four chapters no problem.

So now we put this together and you see how I'll finish this book relatively soon. I'm reading a chapter a day, if I do three sessions that's probably seven or eight chapters easy. So now one week of background reading with two or three time block sessions, each of them less than an hour, that book is done.

So that's how I tackle my professional interest books. For books that I buy just for my own interest, so for example the book I bought this morning was John Meacham's new biography of Abraham Lincoln. I'll always get out of bed for a new Lincoln biography. I have a long bibliographic relationship with Lincoln.

I'm really excited for this new one. There I have an opposite rhythm. The default reading of whatever non-commercial book I'm reading at the time, so a book just for my own interest, is at night. When I get in bed I read every night in bed. And so I do not want a book that has anything to do with any professional project before bed that's going to turn back on work mode, that's going to undo all of the advantage I get from doing a shutdown ritual.

So I always want a book to read at night that is unrelated to my work. So that Lincoln book for example, I'll start reading that every night and that becomes my baseline. At the end of the day I have that baseline of reading. For these personal interest books I then add in other reading sessions, ad hoc reading sessions, as my schedule allows.

I like reading to feel as a high priority default leisure activity when I don't have something to do. So there's a lot of different locations or settings in which I'll integrate this ad hoc reading sessions for my personal books. I made a list of it. My front porch, when the weather is nice I associate my front porch with an outdoor couch.

I'll read there in the afternoon before dinner while the kids are running around and being crazy. There was a field I can reach with my morning walks. I was really big on this during the pandemic in particular. I would walk to that field and I would read under a pine tree there.

Reading with lunch is a big thing for me with personal interest books. Get a good meal, get that book. 20 minutes, there's a chapter or two read right there. My study at home, I like to read in my study at home. This is where I just had installed a new gas fireplace looking ahead to the cold weather season it just started so that I'd be more tempted to do evening.

We're talking after dinner writing sessions because I could have a nice crackling fire. I'm actually going to show you this fire in just a couple minutes so stick with me. That's how I do my personal interest reading. Rhythm at the night, ad hoc sessions in interesting locations occasionally throughout the day.

That Lincoln book is about 400 pages. It'll probably take me about two weeks at this background to get that done but that's exactly how I'll be doing it. For both commercial and personal interest books or professional and personal interest books, I do one at a time in each of those categories.

I'll finish my professional interest book at the moment before I move on to the next. I will finish superintelligence before I move on to whatever's next. I'll finish that Lincoln book before I move over to whatever personal interest book is next. I do it sequential. You have a sort of race to the finish line to get it done and then you switch on to what's next.

Finally, non book related reading. As long-time listeners of my podcast or readers of my book know, I don't use social media. I don't consume a lot of online news. When I see that glowing computer screen and think about going over there to get information, I see time that I could be spending doing intentional deep things just being sucked out of my head.

I'm very suspicious of that. So my non book reading is largely confined to physical printed things. I get the Washington Post delivered to my house every morning because I live in Washington DC and I will skim that each morning over breakfast. I'll look at the front page and I'll look at the metro section.

The metro section so I can see local news of relevance. The front page will let me know what's going on in national news. I'll look at the sports page if the Nationals had a game and I want to see how the coverage is and that's about it. Maybe I'll read one or two articles per day.

A couple things that seem interesting. Tell you what, that keeps me completely up to date as far as I'm concerned with what's happening in the world. That keeps me pretty up to date with interesting stuff happening in my region. No Twitter needed. I'm also as you might imagine a longtime subscriber of the New Yorker.

My New Yorker magazine policy is always at least one article per magazine. So when the new magazine comes I always take out at least one article that seems interesting. I'll usually read it when I get home from work and I see it there. I'll find an article. I'll just read it.

It takes 15 minutes but at least one article per magazine. That's always my rule. As I tell people you need an exception to that rule which is if there's ever a Cal Newport piece whether it's in the magazine or NewYorker.com that you always have to read. So let's just make that the baseline.

And that's my reading. So that works out to about five books a month. I actually go through the books I read on my podcast each each month. So if you don't follow the Deep Questions podcast you should. You can get some more details there. That's why I keep up with the news.

That's why I keep up with the interesting writing. It's not as much time as you think. It's much more about the regularity of it. Every day there's multiple different reading sessions going on even if they're short. That adds up to a lot of reading, a lot of intellectual stimulation, a lot of new information to try to structure into your understanding of yourself and your world.

It's fuel for ideas. It's fuel for self-reflection. It's fuel for growth. It's fuel for creativity, hard ideas, print words tackled on the page day after day. It's worth it and that's how I do it. Alright I want to take you now we're going to jump over and I want to show you that brand new, the newest location in my secret reading location repertoire, my new crackling fire in my study.

So let's go see that. Alright as promised here I am in my study at my house and I wanted to show you the latest feature that I had installed specifically to help induce me to get more reading done and that is this gas fireplace right here. I can turn this off and on with the press of a remote.

It was a pain. We had to replace our meter. We had to retile this whole thing but it was worth it because I'm thinking ahead to those cold winter nights when all you want to do is stay warm and I think being in this study having it be dark, just my reading lamp on and a few of the library lights and hearing the crackling fire means I'm more likely to read and the more reading the better.

We'll do a tour of this whole study in a later video but for now as promised I wanted to show off this latest feature that I added. Alright so that's it for this week's update video. We'll be back next week with my next update video and I will see you then.