Dr. Cal Newport: A No-Pressure Plan for Next Year's Resolutions [GREATEST HITS WEEK]

Afford Anything

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Entrepreneurship, Business, Investing

4.6 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2024

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. She’s famous for her work in radioactivity. Lin-Manual Miranda is a songwriter, producer and director who won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2016, as well as several Tony awards. What do they have in common? They lived a century apart. They innovated in disparate fields. But they shared a similar productivity practice. Both achieved greatness by embracing the practice of slow productivity, says Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. Slow productivity is a three-part practice, Newport explains: (1) do fewer things; (2) work at a natural pace; (3) obsess over quality. We’re used to thinking of productivity as doing more in a short amount of time. This flips that idea on its head, focusing on doing less, but excelling. Slow productivity is the practice of doing fewer tasks better. In this episode, Newport explains how the practice of slow productivity diverges from the normal ways that people in modern society tend to work. Life can be stressful. Your to-do list might feel never-ending. This episode can help you focus on the few things that matter most. It can help you feel less stressed, less busy, and yet — paradoxically — more productive, at the same time. We're sharing this as part of GREATEST HITS WEEK, a 5-day series in which we're sharing 5 episodes, across 5 days, that originally aired at the start of 2024 (January through March). You may have missed it then; enjoy it now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy last Friday! It is the last Friday of the year, the Friday to end all Fridays in 2024.
0:10.3	We are celebrating with the fifth and final episode of Greatest Hits Week, in which we talk to the
0:18.2	Productivity Master himself, Dr. Cal Newport, about how to reach your
0:25.5	goals, reach those resolutions that you've set for yourself for the year ahead. So if you have
0:32.9	big plans and big dreams for 2025, you're going to learn in today's episode how to achieve more
0:39.9	by doing less, a no pressure plan for slow productivity. Today's episode originally aired
0:48.3	March 28th. So here we are exactly nine months later, almost to the day.
0:55.8	And I want you to ask yourself, have you incorporated lessons from Dr. Newport's ideas into your life?
1:04.1	Have you embraced some of the key concepts, the key takeaways of slow productivity?
1:10.0	If you haven't or if you think that you could use improvement,
1:13.6	you will love this very timely reminder of the research-based insights
1:22.4	that Dr. Cal Newport shares on slow productivity.
1:33.0	Enjoy. If you're familiar with Cal Newport,
1:36.9	then you already know how to live in a world without email. And you know how to go deep in your work,
1:42.8	but do you know how to be productive without being frenetic? That's what we're going to learn today.
1:48.4	Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies
1:52.4	to any limited resource you need to manage, such as your time, your focus, your energy, your attention,
1:58.3	all of which are matters that Cal Newport tells us that we're probably
2:03.0	spreading a little bit too thin.
2:04.8	So what matters most in your life and how do you make daily decisions accordingly?
2:09.7	Answering those two questions is what this podcast is dedicated to.
2:13.8	I'm your host, Paula Pant.
	...

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