A Conversation With Cal Newport on Writing Productivity (Killer Writers)

Cal Newport is a busy but balanced guy who gets things done. That’s why I wanted to talk with him. He’s the author of four books of particular interest to me: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and his latest, Slow Productivity. I think one of the reasons I like his thinking so much is he aligns with what I have found productive over the decades of my life, both in my work and the work of the fantastic writers and filmmakers I’ve had an opportunity to get to know over the years. Each of these books I mention is great independent reading. 

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Cal doesn’t do a lot of interviews, so when he agreed to talk with me, I jumped at the chance. While what he says can apply to any knowledge work, I find his advice especially useful for writers. “Cal, tell us what deep work is and give us a definition because I think we all, at the end of the day, and certainly at the end of our lives, would love to write things that are considered profound and live on.”

“Deep work is a type of effort where you’re giving full concentration without distraction on something cognitively demanding. The opposite of deep work (non-deep work) is where either the work is easier, or your mind wanders. You’re working on it, but you’re also checking something else. You’re thinking about the book chapter, but you’re also looking at your phone or jumping over to see what’s happening on email. I call that shallow work. What defines deep work is difficulty and the fact that you’re executing it without any of those cognitive context shifts.”

“How can writers apply deep work to what they are doing?”

“The first thing I’ll say with writers is their core activity, which is writing, will always satisfy the first half of the definition of deep work. It’s cognitively demanding. Where writers get in trouble is they skip the second part. Instead of giving it undivided attention, you’re more or less focusing on what you’re writing, but you keep doing these quick checks: ‘Let me just quickly check my phone,’ ‘Let me just quickly check email.’ One of the main arguments I make in my theory of deep work is that those quick checks have a negative impact. We often underestimate the effect of quickly checking a phone or email inbox. We feel like, at the moment, this is a momentary distraction. We look at this for 30 seconds because we’re waiting for something to come in. Then, we get back to our writing. It still feels like single-tasking. But what we miss is that when we turn our attention even briefly to a different context, it can initiate all these changes within our brain that can affect us for the next 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes. Every time we switch our attention, even if quickly, we have this sort of long-term footprint on our ability to focus. Writers get tripped up when they tell themselves that they aren’t multitasking because they don’t have multiple windows open simultaneously. They plan to work on the chapter for the next two hours. Still, they’re doing these quick checks and not realizing that it’s having just as much damage on their ability to concentrate and produce cognitive labor as if they were more traditionally trying to do multiple things at the same time. It’s that purity of focus and the lack of context shifts that make deep work really work. For writers, it’s absolutely the critical piece to having those really productive writing sessions.”

“What techniques can writers use to access deep work where you’re not distracted?”

“It helps to schedule the time you’re going to do the deep work, so it’s clear this is the window in which you’re doing it. You should put it on your calendar like any other meeting or appointment and treat it with the same respect. Then you have the simple binary rule: When I am in one of these sessions, I don’t do anything else. If you’re not delineating deep work time from other times and just saying, Today I want to get a lot of writing done. I also have emails I have to do. There’s some phone stuff I have to do. All this is going to have to happen today at some point, it’s much harder to avoid interweaving things. But if you say No, this next 90 minutes is clearly marked as deep work time, and I have a simple binary rule: no attention shifts during this time, it’s much easier to actually access it. I think clarity about scheduling and what happens during those sessions goes a long way to accessing the potential of deep work.”

“Something I do is pre-schedule, and you do precisely the same thing, according to your book. The day before, you write on a sheet of paper: 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, etc. and plan your day for tomorrow. Tell us about your method of doing that because it truly is life changing.”

“I call this time blocking. I think it is the most effective way to schedule a day if you do cognitive work. The idea is that you give every hour of your day a job. Instead of coming into your day and just continually asking, What do I want to do next?, maybe consulting a list, or just thinking about what might make sense, you sit and plan out that next day instead. You block off your time and give those blocks a job. So okay, the first 90 minutes of the day—from 9:00 to 10:30—I’m writing. From 10:30 to 11:00, I’m catching up on my emails. From 11:00 to 12:00, I’m doing these three errands. From 12:00 to 1:30, I’m working on copy editing the draft. You’re actually planning out what you want to do with your time in advance, and then the only scheduling commitment you need to make is a general commitment to trying to follow your schedule. This ends up making much better use of your time. Then, again, if you try to go through your day reactively—what should I do next? what should I do next?—you’re not likely to make the best decisions. You’re also much more likely again to fall out of deep work and mix things together. When you don’t time block, your brain says things like, well, we know at some point today we have to check our email to see what’s going on with our editor. So why not now? And then you tell your brain, Well, I don’t know. I’m writing right now, and then five minutes later, Why not now? Five minutes later, Why not now? And you’re constantly in battle with your brain. So, you plan ahead of time. You say, Why not now? Because we’re in this block right now, and that time is in the future. I have found informally that people who time block feel like they get twice as much done in the same amount of time just because of the clarity it gives them and the lack of distraction it supports.”

“In focus, too, at the end of the day, there is noticeably a different feeling that you have when you shut off, you can look back and say, ‘Time well spent.’”

“Yeah, and shut down. If you’re blocking off what you want to do with your time, you can end that day, and, as you said, when you get to the end of the day, you can have a little shutdown ritual, which I encourage. You close your open loops and look at your calendar for tomorrow, make sure you didn’t forget anything, and then say, Okay, I am done with work today. Shut down. Now, your mind will be able to unwind. If, instead, you’re just going through your day getting stuff done, your mind’s like, well, what are we missing? Should we do more? What’s going on? But if you’ve time blocked your day, you can look back and say, It was a good day, well spent. I know when the day ends. The day is now done. I can switch to a different mode. So, it really does let you unwind better.”

“Some readers may immediately object and say, Hey, things come up, and you’ve got an answer for that: be flexible.”

“The goal with time blocking is not: can I devise a plan for my time that doesn’t change that day? There’s no one who, at the end of the day, comes in and gives you a medal because you stuck with the time block plan you made that morning and throughout the whole day, and nothing changed. Most oftentimes, things change. You misestimate how long something will take, or this or that. That’s fine. All you do if you fall off your time block plan the next time you get a moment is fix your plan for the time that remains. The goal is not to somehow be omniscient and figure out exactly a schedule that works perfectly. The goal is to have intention and clarity for your time going forward. And so, if this thing takes too long, that’s not a problem. When you’re done, fix the plan for what makes the most sense for the remaining time. It’s about intention, not about some sort of predictive perfection.”

“Looking at your concept of slow productivity. For writers who think, I need to get a thousand words today, I need to get fifteen hundred words today, I read this, and even for me, after years of writing, I think, You know what? What if I slowed down a bit and just wrote better rather than writing more words? Can you comment on that?”

“This attachment of speed to productivity is something writers should be very worried about. As I argue in that particular book…”

“Slow Productivity.”

“…this actually comes from knowledge work in general. Knowledge work managers having a hard time managing office workers because there wasn’t a box of widgets they could count at the end of the day. In that context, knowledge work managers invented this notion I called pseudo productivity, in which just visible activity became a proxy for useful effort, and the more frantically you were doing things, the more you were generically assessed to be productive.”

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“Mistaking busyness for productivity.”

“We’ve adopted that in our culture, and writers take that on, and they think, I have to be hustling and getting after, and be very busy, and doing 10,000 words a week, and this really matters. But it doesn’t. If you step back and look at people who produce stuff that matters, they take their time. They do good work. There’s no real reason for them to be stressed out frantic because, in the end, no one really remembers that this book took you three years instead of two and a half, even though the difference for you as the writer might be super stressful. No one remembers how long it took. No one cares or remembers if, on Tuesday, you were working till 8:00 to try to make some arbitrary word count. It’s, in the end, did you produce something that’s good. Taking your time and having some more variation in the intensity takes longer, but the results are better, and it’s more sustainable. Because of that, over a long scope of a career, you’re probably going to produce more stuff, anyway. So yeah, I’ve become a big aficionado of slow productivity.”

“It’s an incredible book. I’m really going to push that everybody take a look at it because I think with writers that I correspond with, they are obsessed about the number of words that they get in per day, and this is a complete mind shift. Will we do pulp fiction and throw out five to ten books a year (not saying someone like Stephen King or Dean Koontz can’t write ten wonderful books per year—but most writers can’t)? Or are we going to create something that matters? And I think this really helps to do that.”

“You have to trust yourself. You have to trust yourself to produce good work, to listen to yourself and your energy, to be producing stuff you’re proud of. You have to keep in mind the third principle, which is obsess over quality. This all works if you care about what you’re producing, and if you care about what you’re producing, then you’re much more likely to say, Let me slow down. Let me take my time. I don’t have it today. That’s okay. Maybe tomorrow I’m going to have it better. You don’t worry so much that if I don’t force myself with these arbitrary rules to write every day, then I’m going to stop writing. If that’s the case, then maybe you shouldn’t be a writer. And actually, it’s a fear that’s unfounded for most people. They discover when they really care about what they’re doing, they can handle variation in their intensity without giving up on writing. They’re going to stick with something that matters, even if they’re not following tight rules, and that pseudo productive speed is very stressful. I’ll say, for example, I sold Slow Productivity as part of a two-book deal. Immediately after that book came out, I said, Hey, for the next book I owe you, let’s add another year to the deadline before I hand that in. And you know what, I was in a perfect situation to get that because they had just published my book Slow Productivity, and it’s been great. I’m just taking more time to write that next book. In the end, it’s not really going to matter. That allows me to do it better and take my time. It’s going to be a better book, and no one is going to know was it two years later or three years later, when that came out? No one’s really tracking it. But for me, it’s going to make a big difference.”

“Do you have any parting advice for writers on incorporating the two books we talked about—Deep Work and Slow Productivity—into their lives?”

“Respect focus and recognize that focus doesn’t work unless it’s complete. When you’re writing, you cannot have context shifts. That is productivity poison when you’re writing. Then, when you zoom out and bring the Slow Productivity mindset into the picture, remember when you look at stuff that’s great, no one knows how long it took. You don’t want to take forever, but you don’t have to do things on the fastest feasible schedule. Give yourself enough time to have busier days and less busier days. Periods where you’re making progress and periods where you’re trying to recharge. That type of up-and-down—steady, but up-and-down—pace is more natural. It’s going to burn you out a lot less, and it’s going to produce, in the end, better work.”

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Cal Newport is a Georgetown University computer science professor specializing in distributed systems and a bestselling author of seven books, including Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. He writes for major publications, contributes to NPR, and runs the popular blog Study Hacks. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his family. https://calnewport.com/