Modern work has a giant problem: It keeps us stressed enough to be miserable, but never stressed enough to quit. Cal Newport, a computer scientist at Georgetown, says that’s not an accident: When work switched from factories and farms to offices, we never figured out how to measure the productivity of knowledge workers. Looking busy became our flawed metric, even though busyness keeps us from producing better work.
I sit down with Newport, author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, about how to do deep, valuable work in a world that rewards fake productivity. We cover:
Why emails and meetings are killing our ability to do work that means something.
The conversation to have with your boss when you have too many meetings and other tasks.
The three core rules of “Slow Productivity:” do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality.
Enduring myths of productivity, from Jane Austen to Jack Kerouac.
How to say no without burning a bridge.
How to use AI to enhance your work without hurting your thinking.
How to rebuild your attention span the way you’d train for a mile.
And more…