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

Let me step back.

What's going on with work?

If you don't have time just to sit and reflect on your life, you're going to get pulled along and then you're going to look up one day and be very far from the shore you thought you were on.

So I think all of those things mix into down cycles.

So certainly it's bad if you have none of that.

if it's just go, go, go, always overloaded, all year round, if you get none of those things, that can't be a good situation.

Yeah, so three says, figure out what's important about what you do and keep trying to do that thing better.

Like really care about doing things well, especially like the main things you do at a very high level.

This is what fuels the other two.

And it does so in two ways.

One, when you begin to really care about quality, busyness becomes unnatural to you.

You don't have to convince yourself anymore that pseudo productivity is not the right way to go.

When you don't care about quality, it could be scary to leave pseudo productivity.

It's like, what else do I have?

And if I'm not visibly active all the time, then I'm not anything.

And who am I to get away with this?

But when you start to really care about quality, then suddenly like, man, these emails, these meetings, all the stuff going on, this mystery of overhead, that's getting in the way of doing this thing better.

And so suddenly that busyness becomes anathema and it becomes the most natural thing in the world that you want to slow down.

At the same time, as you get better at the things you do best, your leverage to slow things down increases.

So you get this nice sort of virtuous cycle.

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