Cal Newport

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1,088 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Cal Newport’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Pseudo productivity is my term for what we implicitly

refer to when we think about what productivity means in knowledge work.

So it's like what we implicitly rely on when we think about what does it mean to be productive?

And I define it to be a heuristic that says we will use visible activity as a proxy for doing something useful.

So it's an activity-based notion of productivity.

The more I see you do things, the longer you do things, the more productive I'm going to assume you are.

And that's basically the unwritten law of the land in knowledge work right now.

Yeah, it's one of those squirrely sort of terms.

You can't quite nail it down exactly.

There's formal definitions such as a job in which your primary goal is to add value to information using your brain.

I like to think about it more if you look at a computer for most of your day and or you get upset about email, you're probably a knowledge worker.

So I think the informal definition probably captures a lot more detail than the formal ones.

Part of the problem is that the actual things you're doing that produce value bring with them administrative overhead.

So if I have a particular thing I'm doing, I'm producing a marketing white paper for my company.

That white paper has value, right?

Because we're going to put it out there.

It's going to bring in customers.

There's administrative overhead that goes with that project.

So I have to send emails to people to sort of gather things to get approvals.

There's some meetings that have to be scheduled to talk about what we want in it.

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