So I wanted to do a quick deep dive today before we got into our questions. We do have a good collection of questions, but I wanted to tackle this question, is friction bad? And the precipitating event that got me thinking about this question was reading John McPhee's book, "Draft Number Four." So "Draft Number Four" is a book that John McPhee wrote relatively recently about the process of writing and things he has learned about the process of writing.

There's a little bit of memoir thrown in there and quite a bit of discussion on things like structure. And what caught my attention, among other things when I was reading it, is that he described his research process, how he organized and made use of the information he collected during research in the pre-computer era.

So McPhee has been active in professional writing since the '60s, a long period before there were computers. And here was his process. He would go out in the field and take tons of notes, both in notebooks and on tape recorders. And McPhee is a long-term researcher. It's not unusual for him to spend eight months, 12 months on a single article.

Now, of course, back then, they would write articles of crazy lengths, like 40,000-word articles, which is crazy. They'd have to break them up over multiple issues. There are many books. But he would fill up many notebooks, many tape recorders. All right, so how do we get from that? How does McPhee get from that?

Stack of notebooks, stack of tapes, to an article that's coming out in "The New Yorker." So here's what he used to do. First, he would painstakingly type up all of those notes. So he would go through the notebooks and type up on his typewriter, remember, pre-computer era, type up on his typewriter everything that was in those notebooks.

Then he would go to those tapes and he would transcribe everything that was recorded on those tapes, all of the interviews and conversations on those tapes. He had one of those old-school dictation desks where you had foot pedals, so you could control the speed of the tape recorder with a foot pedal so that you could slow it down just enough that you could keep up when you're typing.

This used to be real common back when dictation was used. So he would type everything up. And when he was typing it up on his typewriter, separate blocks of notes would be separated with multiple blank lines. So, okay, here's some notes from one conversation. Now here's some notes about something else.

He'd put blank lines. And the reason why he would do that is that after he had laboriously typed up all of this, and we're talking weeks and weeks of work, he would Xerox copy every one of those pages, take the Xerox copies and cut out each of those blocks.

So he had space in between each block of notes and he would cut out strips from these pages along those spaces between the blocks of notes. So he would just have endless slips of paper, each piece of paper with a separate piece of conversation or observation or note that he had took.

Then he would sort those strips of papers into topic and put them all into a folder dedicated to that topic. So now he would have, after weeks of work, dozens of folders, each dedicated to a particular event, discussion, or topic relevant to the article. And the folder would be full of all of his notes he had taken anywhere relevant to that topic.

Finally, he would then take a card, I'm assuming it'd be an index card, he didn't specify. And for each of these topics, he would write that name on a card. And he had a piece of plywood in his office. And Justin and I were talking about this earlier, but I was gratified to hear that early in his career, McPhee had a deep work HQ style office.

It was a Nassau street above a store, across the hall from a massage parlor, just like we're above a restaurant on the main street of our town, across from a physical therapist. And I don't even know what the other people do. I think they mainly just glared us for not wearing masks, but I don't even know what they do.

But in our weird HQ, so McPhee had a weird HQ as well. And he would lay these cards out on the plywood and move them around, move them around. What's the structure for this piece? And he could spend weeks doing that until he finally had figured out this topic and this topic and back to this.

And he had all the cards figured out. Now he was ready to write. And when it came time to write, he would say, this is the card I'm on right now. Let me take the folder corresponding to that card, open it up, spread out all these slips of paper.

Here's everything I know about that topic. So I can draw from these quotes and these citations and these observations as I'm writing that section of the article. Then he moved on to the next section, take that folder, lay them out, write that section of the article. That is how John McPhee would research and write his articles.

This is an incredibly laborious process. It's a very time-consuming process. He would spend weeks and weeks just working with his notes before he was writing. It is a process that is full of friction. He's literally cutting paper with scissors and putting them in folders. I mean, this is a process where there's friction all over the place.

But anyone reading that part of draft number four would say that makes complete sense. What John McPhee was trying to do necessitates slowness. He has to internalize this information, be exposed to it again and again, marinate in this information until he really just feels like he is in that world and understands it.

So as he begins trying to structure his piece, he can see how it should all come together. And when it comes time to write a section, he can see what's out there and knows what to pull from. The friction is a feature, not a bug in this particular system.

And this is common if you study the writing techniques and the research techniques of really acclaimed nonfiction writers. They have high friction, slow systems. Now, there's an early essay I wrote for my newsletter and blog at calnewport.com years ago, where I talked about the historian Taylor Branch's research methods.

So Taylor Branch wrote this fantastic award-winning trilogy, three-part biography of Martin Luther King, epic, epic project, many, many years. I believe it won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, one of the two, fantastic series. And he talked about years ago, and I wrote about this, a similarly slow process.

Now, he had computers at the time he was writing this, but he used a Microsoft Access database and everything, every bit of note he would find anywhere, he would just read everything, everything. What are all the news? Here's a day when Martin Luther King is in this town. Let me go find all the newspapers from that town on microfiche and go read them and pull out anything that seems relevant to understanding what was going on that day.

So, I mean, he would really read every letter, but would go three, four layers away from even what King was doing just to find all this tangential information. And he coded everything with a date and put it into this database. And then he could spit out, like, okay, here's the period of King's life that I'm writing about now.

And he could spit out, give me everything I have notes on from like this week. Every letter that was written that week, every newspaper I looked at. And so, again, this laborious process of let me just take everything in and put into a database and time code it. So when it comes time to write, I can have a density of information.

What happened on this day and this week and immerse myself in it and then write. With confidence and with that iceberg below the surface of knowledge, supporting the thing that he was actually writing about. A slow process, laborious process, but a necessary process. So we see this with acclaimed writers, high friction, slow systems for making sense of information.

Where we don't see this as anywhere else. And that is what I was noting is that that is a problem. We have made productivity synonymous with low friction and speed. How do we get this done faster? How do we get you the information you need quicker? Can we make connections for you on your behalf?

Maybe the software can show you what you need. Can we throw machine learning at it? This would be the new thing to do. So that the amount of extra effort you have to do really does get minimized. And when it comes to hard cognitive work, especially creative cognitive work, minimizing friction, minimizing effort is not necessarily what we wanna do.

The example of John McPheen, the example of Taylor Branch is canonical slow productivity in action. What they were doing required in the moment, inefficient, slow, thoughtful work. You look at any one day and you might say, this day was not productive. You cut things with scissors all day, but you fast forward out, zoom out to the looking at the next year, that full year, you say, wow, this was a fantastic article you produced that year.

It's a very productive year. You zoom into a particular day, you see you're just cutting things with scissors, zoom out, incredibly productive year. And this was my observation. Friction is sometimes something we wanna get rid of. If I'm doing a mindless administrative task, make it easier for me to do it, sure.

But sometimes friction is exactly what we need. If you're doing something deep, taking your time, going slow, having old tools, having to do processes to take time can be a feature and not a bug. So I think it's something we just need to keep in mind. Sometimes going slower, sometimes having things be a little bit harder is what you need.

That's what it sometimes takes to do hard work. So I admire that process. By the way, like McPhee goes on and talked about his computer setup, once he got a computer setup, and he ran this completely weird old school editing software called K-Edit. That's like a line editor. It's not a WSYW word processor that someone custom programmed for him.

And he tried to explain it and I couldn't understand it. So when he got computers, it did not simplify his life. He did not have a sort of Rome account, Zettelkasten system that was automatically putting all of his notes around. Somehow his computerized system seemed even more complicated to me than what he was doing with the note cards.

- Your buddy Ryan has a similar process too, right? With the note cards and folders and stuff. - Yeah, Ryan will write down, Holiday will write down everything of interest from the books he's reading and then put them away into boxes of note cards. And he takes his time.

And then when it comes time to write a book, he'll go through and pull out the note cards he thinks are relevant to that book and the information is all there. Yeah, it takes a lot longer to do the reading, but he would say that's the point. It's like, yeah, I want it to take long.

I want to pull out the ideas. I want to think about them. I want to store them so I can use them later. You know, slowness is underrated, especially in our current world of work. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)