Cal Newport

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Liz Moody Podcast · How To Work Less This Summer (And Still Get MORE Done) · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

That administrative overhead is not bad.

It's necessary to get what you need to do the project.

Where we get in the real problem with pseudo productivity, however, is when we allow too many of these projects to stack up, the administrative overhead begins to take over more and more of our day.

And then there's very little time left for the actual working on the project piece.

And most of our day is doing email in between meetings.

That's when we really see the ugly side of pseudo productivity raise its head.

Well, yeah.

So if pseudo productivity is just implicitly how you're being judged, it makes a lot of sense that I want to throw a lot of stuff on my plate.

So I always have administrative overhead I can churn through.

I'm going to look really busy.

Because if busyness is what's rewarded, why not then from a rational perspective, make your day really busy?

But on the other hand, if you had an outcome based notion of productivity, like we care about what you produce and how good it is.

Then suddenly you see this all differently.

You're like, wait a second, a day spent frantically sending email messages and jumping on the meetings, that's no longer a good productive day.

That's a day that's really getting in the way of what I really want to do, which is to finish these projects.

The frame we use to think about productivity is what determines what we think a productive day should look like.

Yeah, I think we have fully internalized pseudo productivity.

It's why when I talk to like a freelancer or a solo entrepreneur where there is no boss, they can do whatever they want.

They can choose what they work on and how they work on it.

They still find themselves all day long frantically jumping from email to email, meeting the meeting, because we really have internalized it because it is the only option that we really have had.

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