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How to Be Awesome at Your Job

950: Cal Newport: Slowing Down to Boost Productivity and Ease Stress

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

Sharpening, Self-improvement, Meaning, Winning, Development, Money, Interview, Writing, Health & Fitness, Speaking, Mental Health, Success, Wins, Fun, Skills, Business, Careers, Training, Education, Collaboration, Decisions, Career, Selfhelp, Mockaitis, Thinking

4.51.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Cal Newport shows how to achieve more by doing less. 


— YOU’LL LEARN — 

1) Why we’re measuring productivity all wrong 

2) The surprising math showing how doing less means achieving more 

3) The trick to eliminating tasks that don’t serve you 


Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep950 for clickable versions of the links below. 


— ABOUT CAL — 

Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. 

• Book: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World 

• Book: Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout 

• Book: So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love 


— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW — 

• Book: Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin 

• Book: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy 

• Book: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown 

• Book: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen 

• Book: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein 

• Book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen Covey 

• Book: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan 

• Book: The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel 

• Book: The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein 

• Past episode: 614: Making Smarter Decisions When You Can’t Know Everything with Annie Duke

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to the How to be Awesome at your Job Podcast.

0:04.0

That's the core of the Knowledge Work Delimma,

0:09.0

is we're focusing on visible activity in the moment

0:12.0

as opposed to quality accomplishment over time.

0:15.0

From that fatal mistake comes like almost everything negative about the current

0:19.1

knowledge work experience. If you're producing stuff that's valuable, not only is that give you security, it begins to give

0:25.8

you leverage to slow down your definition of productivity.

0:28.3

Because the more you can point towards, I do this and I do this really well.

0:32.0

But that's also why I'm not just in sending emails all day in a bunch of meetings.

0:35.0

Hold me accountable for this, but in exchange for that accountability, you've got to give me more autonomy.

0:39.0

That's a fundamental exchange of trying to negotiate for a more sustainable, slower definition of productivity.

0:45.0

That's Cal Newport.

0:48.0

He's a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and a founding member of the Center

0:51.9

for Digital Ethics.

0:53.0

He's best known for his best selling books,

0:55.0

including deep work in digital minimalism,

0:57.0

and his latest book is called Slow Productivity.

1:00.0

So you'll learn one, why we're measuring productivity all wrong. The surprising math showing how doing

1:06.1

less means achieving more. And 3. The trick to eliminating tasks that don't serve you.

1:11.6

I'm Pete McKitis. This is how to be awesome at your job.

1:14.8

And now here's Cal.

1:16.8

Cal, welcome back.

...

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