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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

But if it's like, I'm gonna take two weeks and really down cycle at the end of January, or in the summer, I'm gonna do less than I do for the rest of the year.

I think you can more often than not get away with that.

Exactly.

In the long run, you're producing better stuff, right?

The self-reinforcing cycle of slow productivity is that the longer you do it, actually, the better the stuff you produce and the more leeway you get for doing more unusual things.

So there's this nice feedback cycle.

There's a company I talk about in the book that, for example, has cycles literally using that term built into the way they run their company.

They say, okay, here's how you operate as an employee.

You have up cycles, which are four to six weeks long, where you're working on a small number of really important things.

And then you have a down cycle.

which is two to three weeks long.

Don't do a lot of big things during that time.

You need to reflect, what do I need to work on next?

What went wrong with the thing I did?

Close up all the loose ends on the big project you were doing and recharge.

And the employee handbook at this company is very clear.

It says it's tempting to want to just add more things into the down cycle.

Don't.

That's not going to actually be good for the company in the long run.

We want you to take the down cycles as really being a lot less stuff than the up cycles.

Showing 601–620 of 1,088 · page 31 of 55