Hey, it's Kyle Newport here. This is my weekly update video where I give you a look inside my struggles as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I have two things I want to talk about today. First, I recently published my latest article for The New Yorker.

This was a 5,000 word long form piece. I thought this would be a good occasion to give you a peek inside my long form article writing process. So I'll walk you through how I actually put that article together from the original conception to publication. Second, I want to give you an update on my book, Slow Productivity, let you know what I've finished, where my word count is, what my plan is going forward for the next month or so.

All right, so let's start talking about my long form article writing process. So this latest article for The New Yorker was titled something like, "What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About Improving Work." That's not quite right, but it was a title like that. But the premise of this article was to look back at the deep history of the concept of work.

So going all the way back to the 300,000 years we spent during the Paleolithic age, living in small hunter-gatherer tribes, look back at what work meant for us throughout most of that history, and then compare that to what work means today for those of us who work in knowledge work at a computer screen all day.

And the premise was where we find big mismatches between what we used to do through most of our history and what we do today, we might find places where work is making us exhausted, where work is frustrating us, we might get some ideas for reforming modern work. So that was the concept I had from the beginning.

That was the concept I pitched, but that's very broad. So how do we get from that concept to a 5,000-word edited piece? I want to bring you into my process. So I've loaded up here actually on my computer the Scrivener file I used to write this article. So it's a look back essentially through the history of this piece.

And I can tell you where I started with this piece, as I do for some but not all, was actually with one of my research assistants. He read a bunch of books, he read a bunch of articles, loaded it all into Google Doc, came back here to the HQ.

We spent an afternoon just talking it through, bouncing the ideas off of each other. This is me just trying on what seems interesting here, what doesn't. And it gave me an entry point into this topic area. Once that work was done, I created the Scrivener project for this article.

Scrivener is what I use to do my non-fiction writing. And the very first thing I did was created a folder. I'm looking at it right now, where I brought into it every article that my research assistant had found, every note that he had sent me, and a rough summary of the conversation that we had.

So that is now the research seed for this article. The second thing I do is added a current outline file. So every one of my Scrivener projects in the research section on the left bar, I always have a current outline file. I put three asterisks on either side of it, so it'll get eye-catching.

I can put at the top and it's eye-catching. It's the sort of master file. And I began working on an outline. This brings me to the next stage of the writing process, which is significantly more research to support the specific outline I have now written. See, the sequencing here is important.

I need to know something about the field before I can write a good outline. But I need a good outline before I know what else I need to know about the field. And so I'm looking now at my research folders on Scrivener. I see one, two, three, four, five different directories full of notes on particular topics, plus an additional, I counted it earlier, 29 different additional files and papers I found along the way that didn't fit into one of those directories or the other.

So I have a large amount of research notes. Everything that I might use in the article is here. Up to this point, this had been largely second shift work. So if you've listened to my earlier weekly updates where I introduced this concept, typically what I do is have a first shift, second shift project when I'm doing deep work.

The first shift gets the morning, it gets the most of my time and attention. The second shift is usually something a little bit less cognitively demanding. That happens in the afternoon. When it became time to start writing that first draft, the New Yorker piece now becomes first shift work.

I can't write at that level in the afternoon. As an aside, it has to be my main point of concentration for that day. Now, I don't know exactly how long it took me to write this first draft. I think it was three weeks if I remember. And it was a beast.

7,000 plus words I wrote just day by day, piece by piece writing it. Now, here's an important distinction. As I write, I keep coming across things where I don't have the right source or don't know enough information. So I will stop my writing at that point, find that research, bring it in the Scrivener.

So those six folders and 29 or 30 pieces of extra research I talked about, that's where I ended up. Not where I started. That grows as I write. I just write day after day, slow and steady. If the next section I need to write in the article needs a lot of research and that takes up the rest of my time that morning finding the research, that's what I do.

So I get to the end of this. Now I've done three weeks of writing. I've been doing research on this article for well over one or two months at this point. 7,000 words. I give it some breathing room, put it aside, work on something else, come back to it, I look at it.

And in the case for this article, I looked at those 7,000 words and said, "This isn't it." That's all just gut. But it was a little flabby. The through line of the logic in certain places I thought was not as rock solid as it could be. The structure wasn't pulling me fast enough through.

I thought the structure had a little bit of extra weight on it. It just wasn't right. And what I did at this point is I just told my editor, "I've written a bunch. I don't think it's right. I'm taking another swing." Back to first shift work, blank page, pulling stuff from the old draft as needed, wrote it again from scratch.

This time I came in at 5,000 words and this was something I could work with. That was the piece I then went through several editing drafts. Again, first shift work until that was ready for submission. And then it goes into the whole production process. Those details I'll leave aside for now.

That's when I've been working with the magazine to get it ready. And the only thing I want to add to that is figuring out how to start over. This was largely something that was accomplished on foot. And again, my memory for this piece, it was one walk, one long walk where I started working through why wasn't the original piece working?

What might work better? And it was in that walk that I came up with a brand new construction that was a little bit ambitious for me, but I thought would work better. If you read the article, you will see it's a construction in which I interleave Apple computer and the protest among their employees about the return to the office.

I interleave that with work from the 1960s of a pioneering anthropologist studying an extant hunter-gatherer tribe. I go back and forth, go back and forth until the connection is finally made clear. And then I keep this intertwining through the rest of the piece. The other thing I figured out as I was going along on this article, just to let you in a little bit, was the strip back, strip back, pulled out detail, tightened, get in, get out, make the point, give the evidence.

So that's what it looks like to write a piece like this. It's a chicken and the egg problem up front where you need to know enough about the topic in order to actually figure out what to write about the topic, which teaches you what you want to figure out about the topic.

That's all circular. Then you have to just write. Then you have to just be ready to say this doesn't work. Then you're walking, then you're thinking, then you take another swing and you do that till you get it. Let's give another quick update on my book, Slow Productivity. I'm loading up the Scrivener project for that right now.

So as mentioned in previous episodes, the book has two parts. Part one, part two. Part two is the longer. I'm done with part two. I finished that last week. I have a nice draft of that that I'm ready to submit to my publisher. I'll load it up here. Part two ended up being, this was a good 30,000 words of well-edited text.

And I am now, have begun part one. Three major chapters to write in there, about halfway through the first. My goal for the rest of November is I would like to finish that first chapter. I wanted to finish the second chapter in November. Right now I'm aiming at be significantly into that second chapter by the time I get to December.

So again, I'm a little behind still where I wanted to be, but roughly on track. This is back to my first shift work right now. It's what I did this morning. It's what I'm going to do tomorrow morning. Write first thing, write first thing. The research collection, the Scrivener for this book is getting pretty big because it cites a lot of things.

There's a lot of quotes, a lot of show don't tell in this. And so I'm getting a pretty rich collection of folders and subfolders and subfolders full of articles, but I'm still having fun with it. Progress is still happening. So that's where the book is more or less on track.

That's a look inside my long form articles. I'll be back next week for a new update.