On Time: Cal Newport redefines productivity

Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do we measure productivity? Our default metric tends to be activity. How many emails did you send? How many words did you write? How quickly did you respond to that Slack message? Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown and author of “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” advocates for a different framework. Rather than thinking about how much activity you have in a day, Cal wants you to consider: how do you work to land at the bigger outcomes and goals? In the second episode of our month-long series about how we make the most of our time, we’re zooming out from hours and days and examining time over the course of weeks. Cal sits down with Jessi to offer strategies for achieving long term productivity, speaking to the importance of quality over quantity, the power of boredom, and the future of technology as it relates to how we spend our time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn News.
0:05.0	From the news team at LinkedIn, this is Hello Monday. Last week in the first episode of our series, that's our series on how we make the
0:19.8	most of this time that we have. we got really literal and granular about how we put the
0:25.8	hours in our days to best use. We talked about auditing our calendars in 15-minute
0:30.6	chunks to see if we really were spending our time the way that we wanted to.
0:35.0	Like, you know, I may say that I want to be a person who reads novels, but at the end of the week
0:40.3	when I actually review how I've logged my hours, I discover I'm actually a person who
0:45.2	scrolls through Instagram Reals. Oops.
0:49.2	Today I want to take a step back because if we're really going to explore what it means to use our time well, we can't
0:55.2	limit our conversation to how to do more different things.
0:58.6	That's a fast path to burnout.
1:00.6	Everyone's just pretending like this is good, this is work. It just got too absurd for people to ignore.
1:06.3	It got too exhausting for people to ignore and I think it really pushed us past a limit.
1:10.3	That's Cal Newport. He's a computer science professor at Georgetown,
1:15.0	and a prolific writer.
1:17.0	For the last several years, his work has focused on how to help people around the world
1:21.0	get more done by becoming less distracted.
1:25.2	His most recent book is called Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment
1:29.7	without Burnout.
1:31.9	Cal invites us to rethink our ideas about productivity altogether. More after this. I'm Tommer Coyne, LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer.
1:48.0	In my new podcast, Building One, I interview some of the best product builders out there.
1:52.0	People at the intersection of Dream best product builders out there.
	...

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