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

You don't have to do that to slow down your productivity.

Partially, we just have to reduce the number of reward signals because it's reward in part because we're really hardwired.

We know there's emails waiting for us.

We know there's text waiting for us.

Our brain knows on the other side of those emails and text is another person in our tribe who needs something from us.

That is a very hard signal to ignore because just if we're going to talk about evolution,

It would be very dangerous in the Paleolithic if you had a habit of like, I ignore my tribe members.

They need something.

I'm ignoring them.

You're going to get a rock in the back of your head.

We take it very seriously.

Even if our frontal cortex says it's not urgent, we have norms in the office that says if it's urgent call and don't expect responses right away.

And no one is actually literally upset at me.

No one literally is going to hit me with a rock for not answering these emails.

there's a deeper part of our brain just like, no, no, no, no, someone needs us.

It's very hard.

And so of course the dopamine system fires up because it wants to push us to answer that need.

So like what we really have to do is reduce the number of signals that are there just waiting for us.

And that's where I think reducing unscheduled messaging as a collaboration tool really makes a difference where we have these very structured, brief, but regularly scheduled team meetings where as things come up, so I call this docket clearing, as things come up that we need to think about, we put it on a shared document

that we call the docket.

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