Deep Questions with Cal Newport

When it comes to generating fantastic ideas – the type that can make your career – you don’t have to passively wait for inspiration to strike. You can, instead, *hack* the creative process to increase...

In celebration of the newly released *second* edition of the Time Block Planner, Cal provides some additional expert tips for getting the most out of a time blocking discipline before answering listen...

One of the most popular (and widely forgotten) slogans of the ancient world was Festina Lente, or, “Make Haste Slowly.” In this episode, Cal looks deeper at what this phrase meant, and in doing so unc...

Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed by everything you have to do? The writer Oliver Burkeman recently experimented with an unexpected response to this common sensation: he decided to work much les...

Do history’s greatest thinkers care about time management? In today’s episode, Cal analyzes the system that the mathematician and philosopher, Kurt Godel, used to structure his days, weeks, and years ...

Sometimes the most effective way to contain your workload is to simply declare how long you’re willing to work and then refuse to violate your pledge. In this episode, Cal revisits this “fixed-schedul...

In Cal’s new “deep life stack” the first layer toward finding more meaning is to develop discipline. Why does this come first? In this episode, Cal dives deeper into the importance of starting with di...

Over the past twenty years, “productivity” has come to be synonymous with using digital tools to speed up non-essential parts of knowledge work. As cal argues in this episode, this “cybernetic” approa...

Some of the most interesting and impactful people in the world build their work around a commitment to doing only a few things very well. No one remembers that it took Newton decades to finish The Pri...

In this episode, Cal is joined by Laura Vanderkam (author of Tranquility by Tuesday and co-host of the Best of Both Worlds podcast). Cal and Laura tackle a collection of your questions about the strug...