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 · last 12 months

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

They just swirl around any one of those decisions and try to destabilize it.

They come at it from two different angles.

And so we do have to be really careful about it.

One thing that really matters is putting stakes in the ground.

So I have committed to this person.

They're going to get this thing and it matters if I don't, and they're going to look at it and it better be better than it was, or it better be pretty good.

So I'm gonna have a stake in the ground.

So I do not have endless time to procrastinate or to seek perfectionism.

However, I'm going to put those stakes reasonable distances away.

I'm committed to do this thing, but instead of committing to do it by Wednesday, I said, give me three weeks.

So stakes in the ground that force you to actually do the work and care about the quality, but keeping the stakes far enough away that you don't have to scramble or work at an unrealistic level of intensity to finish the work

That seems to be the sweet spot.

And you have all these fun examples of famous artists, et cetera, sort of using this strategy.

This is like the Beatles with Sergeant Pepper releasing the single.

So they want to spend too much time obsessing over their tape delay loops inside the Abbey Road studio.

There's these kind of cool examples of famous examples of this being done.

But it's a very practical idea.

Commit to things, but make the commitments reasonable to actually get the work done.

Well, you kind of can is what I realized was because knowledge work is so ambiguous and obfuscated.

Like here's our workload system.

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