Ep. 245: “Crazy” Productivity

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Technology, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2023

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode Cal – against his better judgment – answers questions on the fly, with no advance plan or preparation. He also does a Deep Dive about the Twitter fog dissipating and discusses something interesting.

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

Deep Dive: What was Twitter anyway? [4:46]

- Is there a difference between passion and calling? [27:09]
- What are the four principles to reimagine knowledge work? [31:50]
- Is movie watching part of the Deep Life? [36:05]
- Does fixed schedule productivity work on a weekly scale? [38:54]
- How does effective altruism fit in value-based lifestyle career planning? [41:01]
- What are Cal’s thoughts on David Graber’s book, “Bull Shit Jobs”? [44:00]
- Do distracted adolescents risk losing the ability to focus as they grow older? [46:57]
- Does slow productivity assist with parenting and professional development? [48:29]

Something Interesting: Rob Drydek’s productivity system [1:00:37]

Links:

nytimes.com/2023/04/18/magazine/twitter-dying.html

Thanks to our Sponsors:

fieldofgreens.com Promo Code: Deep
hensonshaving.com/cal
rhone.com/cal
huel.com/questions

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
0:17.6	in an increasingly distracted world.
0:22.9	I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, there's no Jesse today, quick backstory on that, I'm just
0:29.4	about to leave for a quick trip to San Francisco, I'm going to be speaking on a panel about
0:36.4	generative artificial intelligence, those who listened to last week's episode or read my
0:41.4	recent New Yorker article know that I do have a few thoughts on that subject.
0:45.5	Anyways, because my week leading up to this trip was correspondingly crowded to make
0:51.4	up for the mixed time, I had this great idea that I would record the podcast in San Francisco
0:57.3	itself.
0:58.8	This idea seemed good until the trip got closer and then it seemed less good.
1:03.4	And the backstory here, and there's really a teaching moment to extract from this.
1:07.2	The backstory is, I've been pretty overloaded this spring, I engineer my schedule typically
1:13.1	so that the steady state is very reasonable.
1:17.1	But it's a bit of a rude Goldberg machine to keep the steady state reasonable involving
1:22.9	carefully calibrated rotations of different types of projects.
1:28.0	I'm only working on one at a time, typically, so it's not so bad, but it's very complicated
1:33.9	to keep things in the wings and leave them.
1:36.8	It's not unusual, as I've talked about on the show, to have a couple of weeks typically
1:40.4	in the spring or maybe a few things overlap and it's a little bit busier than normal and
1:44.9	you're also professors tend to be more exhausted with teaching by the end of the academic
1:49.4	year in the beginning.
1:51.0	This year, the Goldberg machine collapsed and then it accidentally caught on fire.
	...

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