Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 156: LISTENER CALLS: My Process for Writing New Yorker Articles

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.OPENING CHAT: Cal is excited about his new email setup. LISTENER CALLS:- Shutdown struggles. [13:58]- The difference between value-based planning and the deep life buckets. [17:47]- Drowning in meeting prep. [28:21]- Fiction book recommendations. [32:34]- My process for writing New Yorker Articles. [40:27]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This podcast is sponsored by Chili Sleep. Science tells us that the best way to achieve and maintain consistent deep sleep is by lowering your core body temperature. That temperature-controlled sleep will restore testosterone levels, repair muscles after a hard day work, even improve cognitive function. I don't need, however, science to tell me this because I am a hot sleeper and therefore I know from first, hand experience how much better I feel when I can actually have it be cool when I'm sleeping. This is why I am so excited about chili sleep. They have luxury mattress pads that are hydro-powered and temperature controlled. You can put these on your existing mattress and precisely control its temperature.

This is the best approach I have ever tried for making my sleep temperature. I want it to be, you can count me as a chilly sleep fan. Now, here's the good news. If you head over to chili sleep.com slash cow, you can learn more and check out a special offer available only for deep questions listeners. And this is only for a limited time if you go to Chile, C-H-I-L-Sleep.com slash cow to take advantage of our exclusive discount and wake up refreshed every day.

I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 156. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined by my producer Jesse. We have some listener calls to get to in today's episode. But first, Jesse, I have something I'm excited about in terms of my personal digital life that I want to tell you. Fire away. All right. It has to do with and don't get too excited once you hear this topic, my email set up.

I'm excited to hear. There we go. Longtime readers of mine from the early days of the blog know that I have a really weird email setup that I've never really done much too just because I'm busy and it was good enough where I have a lot of addresses in my life. If I do the math now, I'm doing the math in my head. one, two, three, four, five, six. I think there's at least six different email addresses that one way or the other make their way back to me. And over the years, and these are personal addresses,

Georgetown addresses, used to be MIT addresses, but those are gone now and a lot of writer-related addresses. They would all come into the same Gmail inbox. Okay. And they would then get filtered into different labels, which are sort of like glorified folders based on the address. They would go to these different labels.

So it was like I had five or six inboxes within my inbox, all come into the same inbox, and I have this weird habit of what I used to call the monotypic inbox where everything would get marked is red. So I did not like the idea of red versus unread messages because I think it led to people being lazy in their email habits,

storing too much information in their inbox because they could quickly differentiate the new stuff from the, old stuff. So I made everything unread. So like you had the process it out of there. And that had been my setup for a very long time. And I just had tricked out Gmail so that when I send a message, I can just bring down a drop down and select what address I was sending from. It's like five or six addresses in there. I'm moving away from that after years. I'm moving away from that because as I learned researching a world without email,

it's too many different context all mixed together. So checking my inbox, quote, unquote is a mind-melting, distressing, anxiety-generating slog because there is six addresses worth of emails in there. And you can just jump from one to another, click, click, click, click, click. And they're all completely different contexts. And you're going from like our IT consultant, over to my department chair, over to a reader, over to my family, back to a student of mine at Georgetown. And it's all mixed together. And it would just

melt my brain trying to switch from one context to another. And I hated it and it was anxiety producing. And so I'm making a change. So even though you could, you wouldn't see the other layers, it was still contact switching? It was so quick to just click. Okay.

And so when I would check my inbox, then it would be like, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. It's a big, looking at one after another, one after another. Yeah. So here's what I've done, I'm in the process of doing,

is I now have three separate Google workspaces, completely different Google accounts. So there's my Google account at Georgetown. I just had all of those things forwarded to my personal account no longer. Turning off the forward, I have to go to that, log into that account where the Gmail, the calendar, everything is just for Georgetown. Then I have the Google account for my personal Gmail address and my personal calendar is there. but that's just going to be communication from people who have my personal address. I just recently, we just got this up and going.

Shout out to Karen, who sort of operates the IT, the IT mechanisms of the sort of the Cal Newport, quote-unquote, empire. I mean that sarcastically. We now have a Google dedicated official business, Google workspace for Calnewport.com. Okay. You don't know this, Jesse, but I'm setting up a Jesse at Calnewport.com address. So you're going to be brought into this pretty soon, so be ready for that. But that's a separate Google account to log into, and that's where all of the Calnewport.com email is going to come. And I have to log in and be in that account and it has its own calendar and we'll have our own Google docs and everything.

It's just for just for CalNewport.com type stuff. I like that. So in terms of the calendar, when you always talk about how people should look at their calendar each day, how do you structure that if you have to go into three different? for an account. Like, is there a one master calendar to you? Yeah. How are you going to do that?

That's a good question. I'm trying to figure that out. So let me get your opinion on this. There's an increasing number of people at Georgetown who are making their Georgetown calendars visible to other Georgetown people. And so when you make it visible, it doesn't show people what the different things are in your calendar,

but you can go and look and see when do they have stuff and when do they don't have stuff. And there's an increasing number of people that would now say, okay, we should meet about that. Let's do like Tuesday or Thursday of next week. Just send me an invite for a time where I'm free. And then you can go and look at their calendar and see when they're free. It's sort of, this is a world without email style, reduced back and forth messaging.

So I kind of like that. But I have so many other things to get scheduled in my life. Yeah. Well, I guess you could capture that in the prior day's shutdown routine. You'll kind of know what's the next day. so you wouldn't have to go into a certain account to check it if you didn't want to, like, say in the morning, if you don't want to log into three different accounts

for the calendar stuff. But in terms of the email, it makes a lot of sense. The email makes a lot of sense. So the calendars right now, I pull them all into one calendar. Okay, you do. But I do it on my personal calendar. Okay. That's what I'm right.

So I pull in my Georgetown calendar and I pull on my wife's calendar. But that's not visible to other Georgetown people. So this is kind of the question I have, this is a side question. But maybe I should make my Georgetown calendar my main calendar and I pull other stuff into it

so that I can do that trick of telling people grab a time when I'm available. I have to think about that. I don't even know if that works, by the way, not to get to IT. I mean,

if I'm sharing one of my other calendars in my Georgetown calendar, do other people see those events too? Yeah, I'm not sure about that. I think I would rather just have not enough stuff to schedule that it matters.

That should really be the goal. You know, not trying to streamline down to the last minute of, Because the people I know who do use this, they do a lot of meetings. Like, I think it's absolutely necessary. I would like to get to a place where it doesn't matter if it's pretty inefficient to set up a meeting because I don't do many. Yeah, most of your stuff is automated anyway, I would imagine, because you talk about it a lot.

Yeah. But in terms of the email, that seems to make, how is it working out for you? It's brand new. This is the first day where I was in my main inbox with my personal account. And I was like, oh, that was quick to check my email. And it's like, oh, right. All the Cal Newport stuff's not in here. And you had to go over to another account to look at it.

I like it. So I'm still figuring out the mechanics of how I want to exactly how I want to do this. I haven't turned off the forwarder yet from my Georgetown accounts to completely isolate that in my Georgetown workspace. I actually have a fourth Google workspace, which I just don't check. But I, so my Cal, whatever my address is, like Cal Newport at the New Yorker.com of a New Yorker address. That's also a Google workspace. So in theory, I can log into there and see like the internal Georgetown email. mail, the New Yorker emails. It felt like one account too many. And right now there's just someone over there at the New Yorker who forwards me things I need to know. Like if here's an announcement,

you should know or whatever, because he knows I don't check that inbox. But maybe I should, I don't know. Look, it's a whole, there's a lot of email. That's a company. When you're in there, it's all of the HR stuff, all of the announcement stuff, all of the whatever. So I don't want to forward that into my world. So I think I'm just going to leave the New Yorker world to, um, They know when to bother me if there's like something to need from me. A couple of follow of questions that I think the audience might be interested in. How often were you checking the old email on a daily basis? Well, look, I can go days without checking it at all.

And it's always a source of consternation to some of the people I work with, which I understand. But there's really two modes of work out there. There's the mode of work where mainly what I do is move back and forth emails in between meetings. And then there's the mode of work, which is mainly what I do is try to produce products that I So papers or prepped courses or podcast episodes. And they're not really compatible worlds. And because it was such a overwhelming anxiety-producing pain to get into these six inboxes combined together, if I'm busy, a day or so would go by where I don't check it.

And then I would need like 90 minutes to get through it because of the context shifting. It was incredibly painful. So I'm hoping now with these separate inboxes, it's way less painful and more focused. So look, look, I'm doing Georgetown work, and now I can put aside 20 minutes to check Georgetown email. And that's the context I'm in and it's going to be very efficient. Okay, now it's a day, it's a studio day. We're working on the podcast. I'm in my Calnewport.com world and we're checking dad and spending time and I'm just in that context.

And so I think I don't have to check all three inboxes every day, but I'll be able to check some inboxes every day. And the whole thing is going to be more efficient that I think. But I still haven't fully worked out the vision. I'm going to get rid of some of these addresses, and I'm trying to work out exactly what my rhythm is here, which calendars I'm trying to work out. But I've just become a big believer recently in minimizing context shifts. I really did not fully – I don't think I fully accounted for the cognitive drag of shifting context. In deep work, I just talked about when you're focusing, you don't want to destroy. But I didn't really get into the world of the shallow.

Even when you're doing shallow work, there's a difference between spending 20 minutes in an inbox where all the emails are about the same thing. It's very different than spending that 20 minutes in an inbox where the emails cover six different things. You're going to get 50% done. Yeah. Your brain gives out. So one last question.

How do you keep your inbox? Do you have message in there? Do you clear it out? Does everything get processed like you talk about? Yeah, I process it. Yeah, I process it out. So you'll do that with all the new existing? Yeah, I process them down.

If you can't process down your inbox, then you're missing something in your system. Now, in Monday's episodes Deep Dive, I got into this a little bit. It's called Productivity System Leaking. The way I know my system is leaking, there's some systems I'm not trusting or I'm missing, is when I start using my inbox to store things. I got into that in Monday's Deep Dive, where I basically said, I'm beginning to put reminders to myself in my inbox. That means I'm not, there's a part of my system I'm not trusting.

I'm beginning to put notes on article ideas in my inbox. That means the note taking part of my system I've given up on, I'm not trusting. And so I recently went through a big purge of that. And again, listen to Monday's episode, The Deep Dive, if you haven't already. I get into what I did, but I said, no, no, no, there is nothing I am storing in my inbox. I had better systems for all of that. So now I'm back to things are tuned up, and inboxes should go back to zero. And so I'm back there.

Anyways, we'll see how it goes, but I'm nerdishly excited about moving to a world of completely separate. And I love that terminology, workspaces, Google workspaces, that you go to that Chrome profile, and you're just in that world. And it conceptually disentangling all these parts of my life is already giving me some relief. Awesome. So you can give the audience a update in a couple weeks or next month or something like that. We haven't heard from you in months. I was like, because I don't know. I can't figure out how to get it.

these different accounts. It's over. All right. Anyways, let's go on and do some listener calls. Cal, I struggle most with shutting down my day. I recently became a software architect, but I'm still constantly tasked switching between my old development responsibilities and learning my new architectural role, such as keeping up with new projects and technologies inside our organization. I can usually perform some deep work in the mornings, but my afternoons are filled with status calls and virtual meetings to solve multiple small technical issues. At 4 p.m., I'm drained and finding the energy to clean out my inbox, organize my task list, and put a bow on the day, feels like a chore. I don't have a problem turning off my work.

It literally doesn't even pop into my brain when I'll leave the office. Any tips on closing out the day? Could I maybe shut down at lunch and leave the rest of my day for meetings with colleagues? Or do you have any other advice? Well, that's a good question. It's a common issue, that the afternoons get so busy that when you get to the end of the day, you can't face the onslaught of information you have to deal with. It's too exhausting. It takes up too much time.

I'm going to have two pieces of advice to give to you. Number one is what you suggested in your call, I actually think is a good idea. I think it's completely fine to have a reckoning with your inbox and your plan that doesn't happen at the very end of the day. Lunchtime is not a bad idea. You deep work in the morning. At lunchtime, you process through the emails that have been sitting in your inbox.

You look at your plan for the week and update that. You look at your calendar. You get your arms around everything. And then you turn your attention towards the status calls and meetings that take up the afternoon. It's a great idea. It's actually going to give you more energy as you get towards those meetings because you don't have this open loops looming in the back of your mind while you're trying to pay attention to what someone's telling you. The other piece of advice I'm going to give is every time you, schedule a status call or a meeting, schedule for right after it time to process and make sense of what was discussed in that meeting or what was discussed or in that status call.

So you put something in your calendar, you put that right in your calendar right after it, 15 to 30 minutes, depending on how big the meeting or call is. This allows you to actually close all of the loops that are opened with each of these back and forth interactions to go through it and say, okay, what did I just commit myself to? And where am I going to put that? Where should I write that down? And do I need to put some more notes on my list? Now I have to get back to this person or may put a reminder on the calendar. You want to figure out what do I need to do? Is there some emails I need to send out to get a process started?

Do it there. Make that part of your meeting. When we separate the two, this also leads to overwhelm. Because what happens then is if you have four status calls and meetings scheduled in the afternoon, you end up with four status calls and meetings worth of open loops and things that have to happen and deadline reminders all mixed together in your head and now it's 430. You're like, I can't even disentangle all of this.

The thought of it is giving me anxiety sweats, right? It's built up to be too much. And forget all the other emails unrelated that have been building up, it's too much. But if after every meeting you say, I'm now going to spend time working on it, that a meeting is a two-part affair, there's a part where there's other people involved and there's a part where I deal with it, that all gets handled and you get closure and you take a breath, then the next one. And then when you get to the end of the day, there's a lot less to deal with. You've dealt with the stuff that those things generated. And all that's left now is maybe

emails that have arrived unrelated to your meetings during the day. And if you want to handle those the next day at lunchtime or what have you, I think that's fine. So do those two things. Do your official shutdown earlier and schedule a processing period, piggybacking with every single other thing that goes onto your calendar. And I think you're going to find the shutdown is going to be painless. And you're going to come into it with much more. mental clarity. All right, moving on, we have a call now about value planning and the deep life buckets. Hi, Carl.

I have a follow-up question to two concepts you've been talking about. How does one combine the practice of four-buckets, the four-bucket approach, perhaps maybe a bit for the beginners of the deep life practice with the strategic value-based planning, the multi-layered multidimensional practice you've been describing you follow. I've been struggling with finding a place for the four buckets in the strategic weekly and daily plan. planning. I find it somehow unnatural to combine these two, and therefore your thoughts on it would be appreciated. Well, this is a good question. These two things are related, but they don't accomplish the same goals. Let's try to isolate each of these approaches and underscore what

they're meant for. So we're talking about the multi-scale planning, the values-based multi-scale planning for those who are unaware, this is the idea where you have a list of your values. You use those values to help create a strategic plan for the current semester or quarter, depending on how you like to divide up time. You then use that strategic plan or semester plan or quarter plan to influence your weekly plan each week. Let me look at that when I create my weekly plan. What do I need to do this week to make progress on that bigger picture plan? And then your weekly plan informs your daily time block plan.

That's value-based multi-scale planning. For me, that is the crux of how I actually intentionally deploy my time. It's what makes sure that all the different things that are important to me and my career are getting attention and that we move from the values at the highest level down to what am I doing right now on the lowest level. All right, now let's look at the bucket-based system. The bucket-based system is an exercise to help try to move your life closer to the ideal. of the deep life. The idea here, for those who don't remember,

from when we talked about this a lot earlier in the podcast, is that you define what we call a bucket for each of the important areas of a life well-lived. So you might have craft, which covers your work, or other types of creative endeavor. You have community, your connection to family, friends, and those around you. You might have Constitution.

In the classic four bucket list, you'd have Constitution, which is your health. and then you would have contemplation which covers things like ethics, philosophy, and theology. Those were the classic four. There's other ones we've talked about as well. You can break them up as you want. You don't have to make them alliterative either.

I just like to do that. So in the bucket method, you have these buckets for the areas of your life that are important. Step one, you establish a keystone habit for each of these buckets, something you do every day and track, something that's not trivial, but also something that's not impossible.

as a way of signaling to yourself that you take each of these areas of your life seriously and you're willing to do non-urgent, non-forced, non-trivial activity towards the advancement of each of these different parts of your life. They're all important. The next step of the bucket-based method is to then dedicate four to six weeks to each of these buckets to really thinking about that part of your life and big picture changes you want to make. Overhauling that part of your life. So when you have those four to six weeks on Constitution, you're really,

rethinking your health and your fitness and how that's organized in your life, etc. So I see the bucket-based system as it's almost like a one-time project-based exploration overhaul of your life. You want to make sure that you're updating your various rules and habits and systems that you run your life with to be better in tune with what is important to you, that your life is aimed closer towards that, that is deep. It's not unlike saying, okay, what I'm going to do is hire someone to come and overhaul my closet and get my clothing up the speed. I don't like the way I'm dressing. You know, it's like a one-time thing you're doing because you want to dress better.

The bucket-based system is I'm going through this thing. It's going to take me maybe five or six months. I'm going to come out of it on the other end with my life better aligned with what's important to me. So think of it that way. It's an exercise and life, intentional life overhauling. Value-based multi-scale planning is how you live your life. That's actually how you organize and structure your life into perpetuity. That is the structure of how your life goes.

You have the plan for the semester, which influences the weekly plan, which influences the daily time block plan. It's how your system, your regularly applied system for actually making sense of your time. That's just the backdrop of how I actually make sense of what I should be doing next. and the bucket system is this one-time improvement or overhaul or optimization of your life. Now, where do these things actually formally intersect? Well, if you're going through this exercise of keystone habits followed by one-by-one overhauling your buckets, that's going to show up in your semester per quarterly plan. That's where those worlds actually intersect.

Hey, one of the things I'm doing this semester is I am now in the middle of the overhaul of the craft bucket. And here's my thoughts on that. So you see that when you look at your semester plan each week. And so each week you're actually making sure there's time put aside to make progress on that. And when you get to each day, when it's relevant, you actually have the time blocked off in that day to make progress of it.

So that's where they formally intersect. It's going to show up on your strategic semester quarterly plan. So that'll percolate down to your actual action. But the character of these two things is different. Say it one more time. The multi-scale planning is a persistent system for making sense and organized in your available time. The bucket system is more of a one-time overhaul

to align your life better with your values to make your life deeper than it was before you started the exercise. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Now, if you are using the internet in public without a VPN, you are tempting fate. This is what happens when you connect to that hot spot at a coffee shop or an airport. Your computer or phone or tablet is sending little messages to the website you want to talk

to in bundles called packets. Anyone else connected to that same hotspot can see those packets you're sending. They can see what website you're talking to, what you're sending to that website. You are quite exposed. A VPN can solve this problem. Here's how it works. If you use a VPN on your devices, instead of connecting. directly to the website you want to talk to,

you instead form a completely encrypted secure connection to a VPN server. Anyone who is sniffing your packets on that same hotspot is only going to see this is someone saying something to a VPN server. I have no idea what website they're talking to. I have no idea what they're saying. The VPN server then talks to the website of your choice on your behalf.

When it gets a response from the website, it encrypts it and sends it back to you. So you are completely secure. You are completely private. Now, if you're going to use a VPN, I would suggest express VPN as the service you should choose. There's a couple reasons why. One, their software is incredibly easy to use.

It works on all of your devices. It's easy to set up. It's right back there in the background. You don't even know it's running. Two, they have a ton of servers all around the world you can choose, and the connections are lightning fast. So you have a secure connection. connection out into the greater internet at very high speeds. ExpressVPN is the VPN I use when I'm

on the road, and I'm on the road a lot all over the world because I travel for conferences, I travel for computer science, I travel for book tours, and there's almost always an express VPN server geographically nearby I can connect to and get that lightning fast secure connection. So secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash deep. That's EXP-R-E-S-V-P-N dot com slash deep. And you can get an extra three months free. But to get that, you need to go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep. This show is sponsored by Optimize, an online network dedicated to helping you live a deeper life. When you sign up for Optimize, you get access to over 600 philosophers' notes.

These are best-in-the-business summaries of some of the most important nonfiction books ever written. You also get access to over 50 101 video masterclasses on some of these big ideas, including one that I taught, all digital minimalism 101. and you get a daily plus one email that takes one big idea from this corpus, presents it to you in a accessible video, and then links below to the Philosopher's Notes you can follow for the books from which that knowledge was extracted. I've been talking about Optimize on this podcast for a while

because I'm good friends with Brian Johnson, the founder and Mad Monk CEO of the company, but today I have very exciting news. Optimize is now free. You can sign up at Optimize.me, no strings attached, no credit card, no monthly fee. It's just free. You can just join and be a part of that network. And right away, immerse yourself in this knowledge to help your life become deeper. So there's no reason not to try it. Go to Optimize.combe today and create your free account. All right, let's move on to another call now. This one has to do with notes and meeting preparation.

Hi, Cal. My name is Jeff. I work as a chief of staff in the R&D org at a large tech firm. In my role, I take many, many meetings each week with a wide range of stakeholder teams and individuals and leads. Many of these meetings recur over time, so I maintain agenda documents to help me come to those meetings prepared, capture notes as well as action items. Ultimately, this adds up to a pretty decent amount of overhead, and I'm not sure it's an optimal way to approach agendas and notes for future reference and the capturing of action items that eventually flow into kind of my main system. I love any thoughts you have on how you approach meeting prep, how you capture notes or decide whether notes are worth capturing over time, and any takeaways when you work with so many different collaborating teams and stakeholders. Thanks so much for the podcasts and all the terrific books and articles that you've authored over the years. They've been both inspirational and a really big help to me personally. Well, when it comes to a meeting heavy schedule, I tend to believe that processing is actually a more important and more efficient way of making sense of meetings than prep.

So let's put these two things in the contrast. Prep is about what you do in advance. You know, let's put together these agenda documents. Let's have all the information. This document, we can then be the place where the notes ultimately reside, et cetera. out, let's make sure that we come into the meetings, don't we're going to talk about. That's important. But we often, I think, neglect the time after the meeting to make sense of everything that happened. And so to me, if you had to choose just one thing to add to your meeting schedule to help keep your arms around all of these things, it would be this rule that I've talked about often that when you schedule a meeting, as part of that meeting, you schedule immediately after it time for processing it.

And that goes right on your calendar, so that time is now captured. So if you have a meeting from 1 to 130, you schedule 1 to 145, and you delineate on your calendar, 130 to 145 is for processing. So now that time is taken. No one can take that with another meeting. You're not available to 145. Now, in that processing time, you say, I need to close every single loop that was opened in this meeting.

Now you're flexible. Some meetings, you just need to get things into your existing systems. You don't need an extra infrastructure here of shared agenda documents where notes and tasks go because I'll tell you what, the other people aren't going to look at them unless they work for you and you force them. They're not going to look at those things. So you might just be putting this into your systems. Reminder on my calendar, a task in my task list, update my weekly plan, etc. When you do have systems, maybe there's particular types of meetings that happen recurringly and you have some sort of task board for keeping track of what's going on with this project, that's fine. And you can update those systems then after that meeting is done.

So prep is important. And I think we put a lot of attention on prep. We hear a lot of stories like Bezos at Amazon requiring you to write these really to the point memos before he will attend a meeting where it's incredibly clear. This is what this meeting is about. This is why we need to have a meeting. Here are the decisions that need to be made. Here's all the relevant information that you can read beforehand. I think that's all great and where that's relevant do that.

but we don't spend nearly enough time on how do you close those loops. Because the thing that's going to kill you is if you go from meeting to meeting to meeting, don't get a close the loop from one before you start the next. It all piles up and it becomes very stressful and very anxiety producing and you lose things and they get jumbled and your energy gets lost and your effectiveness as an executive is going to plummet. So remember, a meeting has two parts. The part that everyone knows about because everyone's in the same,

space for a certain period of time and the part that immediately follows where you are by yourself making sense of everything that was just discussed, don't neglect that second part. I think you're going to find that you're able to handle these meetings with much more cognitive agility. All right, let's go in another direction here. We have a call about fiction reading. Go-a-cow, Kyle, Mike from Melbourne, with some gratitude, an idea and a question. Firstly, I just want to say thank you for all your work. I've been reading and listening to everything you do for the last 10 years, and it has absolutely impacted me and led to me pursuing my version of The Deep Life.

So thank you. The question is, recently you mentioned on a podcast some of the fiction books you were reading, and you mentioned Andy Wheels, Hail Mary. I'm halfway through it. It's absolutely brilliant. I can see why you would geek out on all the math and science. Fantastic books. So the question is, any other.

similar books that you might recommend. Any other fiction books you've read over the last year or two. And the idea would be to potentially have Andy on as a guest on the podcast. I'm sure there'd be a way to tie it to the show, talking about his productivity and routines and where he gets his ideas from potentially. But I just think the two of you geeking out on math and science would be fascinating to listen to. Thanks again for everything that you do. Love your work. Bye. Well, first of all, I love that idea of getting Andy on the show because I have this dream I've talked about before where I want to write a novel in Andy's style. So that style where it's not hard sci-fi, it's, I call it Blackboard sci-fi. So you actually work through, you know, he works through the actual physics of his story with real-world physics to understand how everything works.

And I think it would be really cool from a computer science perspective to write a novel about the moment in which you cross. There's a term for this I don't know. So listeners who know, let me know if there's a specific term I should know here. But there's a threshold that artificial intelligence could cross where it is able to act independently outside of the specific intended purposes given to it of the people who created it. Like there's some sort of threshold that probably has a cool name. And it would be cool to write a novel about that. Tight novel, quick moving. I like the structure of Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man.

It's a very quick moving takes place in near real time. It's over like two days. Boom, boom, boom. Limited set of characters, limited set of locations. But bring in an Andy Weir style blackboard sci-fi where you really get into, like, how would that actually happen? Like, this is, it was running, you know, we're at this type of deep learning neural net, and we're in the Google cluster.

and the scale got to this and really working through because I think there would be a public interest aspect to this, a way of bringing people into the world of AI technology and don't hold punches. This is a complicated technology, but let's get into it. I think that'd be such a cool book.

And I think it would be fun to write. I have no time to write something like that, but it's part of my aspiration that my life should get to a point where I could write something like that. Like, that's a scheduling dream of mine. I have too much going on right now. How would I know that I have the right mix?

but I could write a book like that. So I should bring Andy on to talk about that. Like how does he write? How does he work it through? What's his process? He has a cool story, by the way. I don't know if you know it. But he was working for NASA when he wrote The Martian.

And he was not even self-publishing. He was posting chapters on the web. You know, it was just going to a website. Like, let me work through, you know, what's going on. It was also another great example of slow productivity and action. He was just working through chapter by chapter at a completely slow, because it was just him, completely slow pace. He thought this was fun. The main character's name is Mark. Like, what's, what's the challenge Mark is facing next? And how would he work it out? And he was just publishing these

things on a website and people loved it. And then at some point, a publisher said, we should put this into a book and we should sell it as a book. But what classic slow productivity, right? It wasn't this stressful. I'm on a book deadline. I have to get this thing done. He was just working on this then crafting it. And that's what made it work. He could take his time and work out the math and it wasn't stressful and it became a huge seller. So I want to get Andy on. I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about how do you write a book like that. And then I just have to figure out how to take like 17 out of 26 things that I'm currently committed to do off my schedule. And that should free up, I think, like a tight 15 minutes a week I could work on this, which means

by the time the book comes out, we would already be enslaved by artificial intelligence. So it would be relevant. You got to have relevance to what's going on. Okay, in terms of fiction recommendations, don't come to me to fiction recommendations.

I'm a terrible fiction reader. I grew up with genre books, right? Because I began reading at a very early age adult fiction and the books my mom would get me from the library. She's like, I don't know what books to get a, you know, eight-year-old.

So she would just get me genre fiction books. And so I have a weird nostalgic childhood affection for genre nonfiction. I read so much nonfiction for my work that I don't have, I use fiction reading as a escape or relaxation. So it's all embarrassing. All of my suggestions are embarrassing because it's all just genre fiction writers for which I have some sort of childhood connection. And I enjoy, you know, getting some crackers and reading it on the couch or something like this. So, like, for example, at the moment, I'm reading Wilbur Smith's very first book that he wrote in the 1960s.

Smith died a few weeks ago. He was a British or maybe African writer of, I don't even know what you call it. It's genre. It's adventure. He writes a couple different topics, but sort of like adventure. It's not thriller, but more like adventure books, epics. And it's none of its good literature. and it's all of its time

and incredibly anachronistic but I grew up on these things and he'd write books like he wrote one I think called gold mine and it would just be about a gold mine in Africa and there'd be some

protagonist and antagonist and there'd be some drama and he wrote a book I think it was called something like hungry as to sea and it was about a salvage boat

captain you know and like they're trying to salvage a boat and then bad guys get involved and try to hold them hostage I don't know

there's usually some adventure in it or something like that. And so I was like, oh, let me go back and read his very first book. It's called When the Lions Feed. And it's an epic of this family, the Courtney's and it's in South Africa, I think.

And it's set into 1800s. And, you know, again, it's of its time and very anachronistic, but not great literature. I love first books. You wrote in the 60s. And so I'm enjoying that. It's a crazy book. It takes place over a whole

lifetime. And I don't know, they're these two boys on this farm in colonial South Africa, and the one shoots the other one's leg off. So like this sets off this whole dynamic between them, and there's a war at some point, and the dad gets killed in the war, and the one brother gets estranged from the other, and he leaves and takes off his money and gets involved in a gold field, and that gold field develops and becomes Johannesburg comes out of this. And now the brother is like a tycoon. And Smith, Wilbur Smith will just be like, let's get into the mechanics of how the land acquisition would happen if you're trying to build up a gold mine empire in South Africa, in 1800s. So anyways, it's all to say, I have terrible fiction recommendations, but I love this whole genre stuff. So I'm reading Wilbur Smith right now. But more importantly, let's get Andy here. I'm looking at Jesse. Jesse, let's get, let's get Andy in here, Jesse, okay, take care of that for me and we'll figure that out. All right. We have one more. question here. And this one will shift from fiction to nonfiction. It's a call about how I write my own articles. Hi, Kyle. First of all, I would like to say that I love all your books, the New Yorker

articles and the podcasts. Your ideas change my life. Thank you. I'm Fabien. I'm a teacher and a consultant. I've already written articles for Portuguese newspapers, but left it for lack of time. I would like to know what your process is for writing articles for the New Yorker. Do you follow the format for writing essays that you present in your book how to become a straight-day student? Do you have days to research, others to write? What times do you schedule for this job? Generally, what is your process?

Thank you very much. Well, when it comes to my New Yorker writing, the process depends on what type of article we're talking. about. So there's two categories here. There's the twice a month column I've been writing this fall, and then there is the less regular, longer form pieces that I would write before this and return to at some point in the future. So I'll focus in on what I'm doing now, which is the twice a month column. And I'll tell you what the ideal process is, what I aim for, and then I'll talk briefly about how I sometimes fall off of it.

But the ideal process I have from one of these columns is, first of all, the research is typically, you know, I have to pull from things I already know. There's not enough time for me to do a ton of original research. The primary research that happens for these columns will be if I need an interview. So a lot of them are interview-based. Those will get scheduled ahead of time. They might happen a few weeks at least before the columns come together. Sometimes I also have to read a book or two just to be up the speed

on some things that might be relevant and I'll do that in advance and that's fine because we have these mapped out pretty far in advance because the art the art department needs to know farther in advance what the article topics are going to be

so that kind of happens just in advance like schedule interviews etc when it comes to the writing process I alternate between one week writing one week production one week writing one week production That's usually how it works. So an article that, let's say, appears on Monday would be something I would file the previous Tuesday.

And then between Tuesday and the Monday when it comes out is production and editing and fact-checking, etc. So when I'm in a writing week that's leading up to, let's say, a Tuesday filing, the ideal thing I'll do is I'll first step one outline the article. And I'll figure that out on foot. so it doesn't have a, if you'll excuse the double use of the word here, big footprint on my schedule. Typically walking back from dropping my two older boys off at the bus stop, I'll just work it through. All right, I know the topic, maybe I've already done the interview, let me work through the structure. And this is just practice. You write enough of these, you get a sense of the options.

And I'll write down that outline. I'll jot down in Scrivener, the outline. The next step is, you know, I will typically do what I call a happy hour writing session, which just refers to the time it happens. it'll be at the end of a workday, kind of early in the week, I will stay at the HQ, or sometimes I'll go to the coffee shop down the street. Shout out to Tacoma Bevco and get started. But this is really more of a breaking the seal type thing. What I'm really doing during this session, and again, it's in the evening, so it doesn't

have any footprint yet on anything else I'm doing. I start pulling in more sources, so finding relevant articles or things to quote, and I will put those all into Scrivener in the research folder, so I have everything there in the Scrivener project file for the article. And in a perfect world, I write the first paragraph. There is a huge break-to-seal effect to getting those first sentences down. It's very hard to open a New Yorker piece, and just in general, it's very hard to get things going. So that gives you a sense that there's momentum. My ideal schedule, I then do a morning writing session later in the week, so Thursday or Friday morning where I try to get maybe half the article done.

And then I do a Sunday morning session. And that's when I try to finish basically the article. And then there would be a polishing session on the following Monday or Tuesday morning to go through and polish it and get it ready to file. There's not a lot of time here. And I haven't seven or eight other jobs. I can't spend too much time on this. You've got to get in it and get it done.

Nail the structure right well. polish that up hard, get it out quick. That's the ideal structure. And then I'm filing on a Tuesday and then there's stuff that happens. Copy edits, come back and fact checking. That just gets worked into the schedule. But otherwise, that's a breather until the writing starts again the next week. So that's the ideal schedule.

I often fall off of that. Falling off of that means that I have to add one or two extra writing sessions. So I don't make the progress I think or my time is more limited than I think. I will use right now as an example. It's Friday. and I have to file on Tuesday and I have four sentences written.

So I'm a little bit behind. I did that this morning. I just had other things going on this week and for whatever reason I couldn't get the traction going. So I have to alter my schedule. And so like this week, what I'm going to do

is a Saturday morning and Sunday morning session. Morning with my first cup of coffee is my best writing time. My semester is over. This is why I'm not sweating. My semester is over. So typically Mondays, I'm on campus all day.

I'm not this Monday. And so that's my savior. I can then put in a much longer block on Monday to really finish the article. So I'm doing something different this week. But that is my ideal schedule. For the long form pieces that have multiple interviews and I have to do a lot of original reporting, that's a whole different story. That takes place over months.

I like that because I'm very good at non-urgent but important work, like making steady progress on things. is a lot less stressful, I think, than every other week. Something has to be filed. But that's the way I do it. And I will just say, because you said you ran out of time to write, this whole process was designed to have a minimal footprint on my schedule as a professor who works on other things. So you'll notice when this schedule works properly, there's a happy hour session, a weekday morning, and a Sunday morning. So in theory, when this schedule is operating at full pitch, there's a few.

few hours of one weekday morning is the only part of my normal nine to five workday that get sacrificed to the New Yorker writing. Now, I don't always hit that, but at least it is feasible, and maybe about 50% of the time I do, and that allows me to actually do a pretty large amount of productive writing here without it taking over all the other aspects of my life. So good question, and that's a good reminder for me that I'm behind and I have to get back to writing. All right, well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who called in.

Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can leave your own listener call for me to answer on the show. Be back on Monday. And until then, as always, stay deep.