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

have it built into a system where I know when and how to do my pieces, the footprint on my day there is going to be much smaller, even if the total number of minutes I spend on it might be the same in both scenarios.

So we reduce what we work on at once, and then we tame the expected administrative overhead that goes along with the work that remains.

Probably, especially if not everyone's in the same location.

And here's why.

The productivity poison that we really need to be worried about right now in our current moment is context shifts.

When I have to change what I'm paying attention to from one target to another, that's an expensive neurological operation, right?

If I'm exposed to an interruption, an email or a message that comes through, the cost is not just the 30 seconds it takes to look at that message.

It's the context shift that initiates within my brain.

My brain begins to shift over.

Oh, we're going to think about this now.

It's an expensive, messy process.

And so what happens is if I have a quick interruption,

That can reduce my cognitive capacity on the original thing I was doing for 10 to 20 minutes because it cycled me out of where my brain actually was.

So in the modern digital office, one of the real killers is having to keep change your context back and forth.

So lots of emails, lots of slack.

This keeps you in a sort of constant muddled state of colliding cognitive context, which is exhausting.

It makes it hard to think.

Now, in the old world, where we're all in the same office,

if you're looking to procrastinate a little bit, which is completely natural, or just get some connection because you're feeling a little bit exhausted, you're able to get all these cues from people.

Okay, here's someone getting coffee.

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