I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life

in a distracted world.

So I'm here in my Deep Work, H.Q, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

Jesse, I'm a little bit relaxed today because yesterday, the day before we recorded this,

I published the fourth of the four weekly columns i had

promised the new yorker oh yeah so four and four weeks four and four weeks the month of january

was cow month what i was really doing actually was uh taking over kyle shaka's column for a month

he's on leave or some such and so And so they're sort of handing out his column

with various people. So I took it for the month of January. Man, that's a hard job. So he writes one

every week? I guess so. And you usually write one once a month? Or whatever. Whatever. I work on a word

count. So it just sort of depends what I'm doing. Like shorter ones, they'll be more frequent.

But if I do some longer ones, less frequent.

I did a twice a month column in, God, early pandemic.

And I don't remember if that was 2020 or 2021.

But for about six months or a year, I did a twice a month column.

That was like, okay, especially during the pandemic because there's nothing else to do. Like we couldn't go anywhere. I would just come here and work on these

articles and it was like something to do. Like you couldn't go to campus. You weren't going to social

events. And I remember that being like, okay. That was some breathing room. Once a week is fast.

It was fun though. You should check out the final column. The final column is about

Michael Crichton. Like the challenge was to work Michael Crichton as a motivating force into one of

these columns. And I wrote about actually lessons, lessons from Crichton that's relevant to dealing

with technology today. So I think it's kind of a cool idea. I did not, however, get eruption

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