Ep. 240: Disciplined Laziness

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Technology, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2023

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You can’t just turn a “work harder” or “relax” knob. Once you realize that productivity ideas can offer you great autonomy in shaping your life - however you decide to do that - your relationship with it becomes more nuanced and fruitful. Productivity can be understood as applying organization tools and deliberate processes to take back control of your obligations.

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo

Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia

Today’s Deep Question: Is productivity about optimization or autonomy? [6:06]

- Should I start a blog to prepare to write a book? [23:18]
- How do I recover from burn out? [30:11]
- How do I prioritize when I have too many interests? [35:15]
- Should I ditch my side hustle? [39:25]
- How do I convince my self-focused colleagues to participate in more efficient group systems? [43:24]

Something Interesting:

- The five books I read in February 2023 [53:24]

Links:

vice.com/en/article/akdyje/the-relentless-rise-of-the-productivity-influence
youtube.com/watch?v=YctcDlPixb8

Thanks to our Sponsors:

This episode is sponsored by Better Help: betterhelp.com/deepquestions
blinkist.com/deep
expressvpn.com/deep
ladderlife.com/deep

Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply
0:17.0	in an increasingly distracted world.
0:24.4	I'm here in the Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.
0:31.1	You know, Jesse, last week we talked about Ginny O'Dell and her new book that was taking
0:38.8	a nuanced look at time and the treatment of time in our lives, and one of the things
0:45.0	that we brought up during that episode, one of the things that caught my attention was
0:48.3	there's typically this, I don't want to say bad guy, but antagonist, I would say, in
0:54.0	these sort of new treatments of time, these antagonists that are often go by the names
0:58.9	of productivity bros.
1:03.2	Now I feel out of touch because I don't use the internet that much, I'm not on social
1:06.6	media, I don't browse on YouTube, so I didn't really know, I mean, I remember the old school
1:10.9	productivity bros from, you know, when I was coming up, when Tim Ferris was very focused,
1:16.0	when there's 43 folders was very focused on optimizing time, but I didn't really know what
1:19.8	has productivity, bro culture evolved into, so I did a little searching, to try to understand
1:27.4	what was going on, and I found an article that I think was useful in lighteniness, I'm
1:31.6	going to put it on the screen here for people who are watching at youtube.com, so that's
1:35.5	Cal Newport Media, this is episode 240, you can also find it at the deeplife.com, so I
1:40.4	found this article from Vice, titled The Relentless Rise of the, quote, productivity influencer,
1:48.4	in quote, this is an article from Claire Hubble from last year, last winter, so I was looking
1:55.0	through here, there's our friend Ali Abdu, I did a show, I did his podcast, I like him
2:01.9	a lot.
2:02.9	All right, so here's some quote, I just want to read a couple of quotes from this, because
	...

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