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

It's all of those things.

Yeah, that latter point, that's like the traditional sort of Shabbat going back to sort of the Hebrew Bible notion, Genesis of Shabbat.

The idea is this one day a week, it's meant to be a day to look at everything else and say it is good.

It's a day for gratitude.

I do like that notion with down cycles as well.

The down cycle, if we extend the metaphor of Shabbat,

is not about instrumentally preparing yourself to work again, but to actually have gratitude for the creation is good.

All the other stuff in the world that is good.

I think that's really important.

It's also a good time to figure out what to do next.

We underestimate how hard it is to figure out the right thing to do.

So the company I talked about before that has the mandatory down cycles is

That's a big part of their motivation is we want you to take longer and think harder about what's worth doing.

And it actually kind of makes sense if you think about it, because if you pick something that's not that important and you spend six weeks on it, that's a lot of energy and concentration and manpower, like

working on something that didn't really matter, we'd rather you spend a little more time to make sure the project's going to be really important.

And reflection is important too.

You need time to understand what you've just been working on.

Was this important or not?

What did I learn from it?

What else is going on in my life?

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