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

It's not unusual for that to actually take some time for you to figure out.

It's not obvious for a lot of people anymore because pseudo productivity has obfuscated it.

You have two things you have to combine here typically.

So one is actually just doing fewer things at once.

Where does all the small things come from?

Well, each big thing brings with it its own small things.

So if there's too many big things, the number of urgent small things begins to take over the day.

And this begins past a certain threshold to get in the way of finishing the big things and everything slows down.

So the sort of blunt response is, can we reduce the number of things we're doing at once so that the amount of administrative overhead is not taking over the whole day?

Once you've done that, the more specific answer is, okay, now let's take the administrative overhead that remains and let's tame its impact on our schedule.

So this could mean a lot of things.

Partially this could mean, for example, let's get rid of unscheduled communication.

Maybe we have office hours and team standups so we can have back and forth not happen over email or Slack, but at a set time each day, like let's boom, boom, boom, go through five or six things all at once.

It might mean putting processes into place.

Well, we sort of know these podcasts come out on these days.

These things need to happen.

These posts needs to happen, the social, this copy editing has to happen on the description.

Let's work out our process for this so we know when and how that work happens and when and how each person's involved in it so it's not unfolding haphazardly.

Often what we're trying to avoid with administrative overhead is not the total number of minutes it requires, but the distraction or interruptions it generates.

So if I can take a lot of work that's regular and instead of having it unfold over just ad hoc Slack messages,

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