Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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...

How do you leave a life of superficial distraction and cultivate something deeper? In today’s episode, Cal describes “The Deep Life Stack,” an approach to cultivating a deep life that starts with over...

Productivity YouTube is filled with breathless videos about optimizing systems and squeezing every ounce of speed out of your common habits. But does all of this efficiency really end up improving the...

The art of thinking – plain, old-fashioned, hard concentration on useful ideas – is rapidly vanishing as our culture recasts humans as the custodians and recipients of digital computation. In this epi...

Do you live to work or work to live? In this episode, Cal talks with author Simone Stolfzoff about his provocative new book, THE GOOD ENOUGH JOB. Cal then answers listener questions about escaping pro...

Few professional experiences feel worse than overload. But what really causes this unfortunate state? In this episode, Cal takes a closer look at overload, identifying its main culprits, identifying s...