In a recent New Yorker review of Matt Richtel’s new book, How We Grow Up, Molly Fischer effectively summarizes the current debate about the impact phones and social media are ... Read more The post Don’t Ignore Your Moral Intuition About Phones appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last fall, I published a New Yorker essay titled, “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?”. My goal for the piece was to better understand how ... Read more The post Does AI Make Us Lazy? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
One of the topics I’ve returned to repeatedly in my work is the intersection of smartphones and children (see, for example, my two New Yorker ... Read more The post An Important New Study on Phones and Kids appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A few days ago, I went to Disneyland. I had been invited to Anaheim to give a speech about my books, and my wife and ... Read more The post Dispatch from Disneyland appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Last month, Anthropic released a safety report about one of its most powerful chatbots, Claude Opus 4. The report attracted attention for its description of ... Read more The post Why Can’t We Tame AI? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In the spring of 2019, while on tour for my book Digital Minimalism, I stopped by the Manhattan production offices of Brian Koppleman to record ... Read more The post Are We Too Concerned About Social Media? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day ... Read more The post The Workload Fairy Tale appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
One of the main topics of this newsletter is the quest to cultivate sustainable and meaningful work in a digital age. Given this objective, it’s ... Read more The post AI and Work (Some Predictions) appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the ... Read more The post Back to the (Internet) Future appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A reader recently sent me a clip from Chris Williamson’s podcast. In the segment, Williamson discusses his evolving relationship with productivity: “Look, I come from ... Read more The post Productivity Rain Dances appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I recently listened to Tim Ferriss interview the prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (see here for my coverage of Sanderson’s insane underground writing lair). Tim ... Read more The post Let Brandon Cook appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
On Saturday night, in compliance with a law that the U.S. Supreme Court had just upheld, TikTok shut down its popular video-sharing app for American ... Read more The post The TikTok Ban Is About More Than TikTok appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In 2006, a high school student from Ontario named James Hobson started posting to a new platform called YouTube. His early videos were meant for ... Read more The post Lessons from YouTube’s Extreme Makers appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about ... Read more The post The Tao of Cal appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, ... Read more The post After You Vote: Unplug appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings ... Read more The post The Perfect Cheating Machine? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first ... Read more The post When Time Management Was Easy appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his ... Read more The post Dispatch from Herman Melville’s Farm appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is ... Read more The post Dispatch from a Writing Shed appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why ... Read more The post On Ultra-Processed Content appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, part owner and operations head for the storied English football club Manchester United, announced an end to the flexible work-from-home ... Read more The post Manchester United Embraces Pseudo-Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In recent months, I’ve been doing a fair number of interviews about my new book, Slow Productivity. I’m often asked during these conversations about the ... Read more The post Do We Need AI to Revolutionize Work? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I really enjoyed meeting so many of you at my Politics and Prose event a couple weeks ago. It was meaningful for me to be ... Read more The post Two Chances to See Me Next Week appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Earlier this month, a group of scientists from universities around the world published the results of an ingeniously simple experiment in the journal PLoS ONE. ... Read more The post Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
A brief book update: I wanted to share that Slow Productivity debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list last week! Which is ... Read more The post ChatGPT Can’t Plan. This Matters. appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
I know it’s been a minute since I’ve published one of my normal essays. I’ll be returning to these soon as the chaos of the ... Read more The post Come See Me Saturday in DC + TikTok Falters appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Conclusion Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Conclusion Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:04:21 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:04:21 | Continue reading
Chapter 5 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 5 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:07:27 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:07:27 | Continue reading
Chapter 4 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 4 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:07:50 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:07:50 | Continue reading
Chapter 3 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 3 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:08:37 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:08:37 | Continue reading
Chapter 2 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 2 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:05:12 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:05:12 | Continue reading
Chapter 1 Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Chapter 1 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:07:05 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:07:05 | Continue reading
Introduction Slow Productivity Chapter Commentary Introduction Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:05:22 Subscribe RSS Feed Download file | Duration: 00:05:22 | Continue reading
My podcast producer recently turned me onto a show called Acquired, which features its co-hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, diving deep into the backstories ... Read more The post How the Acquired Podcast Became a Sensation appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In 1951, Abraham Joshua Heschel published a monograph titled simply, The Sabbath. It consisted of ten short chapters, comprising of less than a hundred total ... Read more The post Heschel on the Joys of Slowness appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
It’s hard to believe that we’re less than two months away from the publication of my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment ... Read more The post My new book: Slow Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Someone recently forwarded me an essay from a blogger named Henrik Karlsson. It opens with an admission: “When I started writing online, the advice I ... Read more The post On Slow Writing appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
One of the least understood components of my time-block planner is the “daily metrics” box that tops every pair of planning pages. Given that we’ve ... Read more The post On Metrics and Resolve appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In the fall of 2016, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that pushed back against the conventional wisdom that social media was ... Read more The post Standing Up to Technology appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Earlier this week, Neil Gaiman was interviewed on Icelandic television. Around the twenty-five minute mark of the program, the topic turned to the author’s thoughts ... Read more The post Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In the context of knowledge work there are two primary ways to communicate. The first is synchronous, which requires all parties to be interacting at ... Read more The post Should This Meeting Have Been an Email? appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Starting a few years ago, ads for a web-based software start-up called Monday.com began to show up everywhere online. A subsequent S.E.C. filing revealed that ... Read more The post The Quiet Workflow Revolution appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Disruption and disorder have always stalked the human condition. This reality sometimes plays out on the grand scale, as in the brutality of terror and ... Read more The post On Disruption and Distraction appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
The other day the low tire pressure indicator came on in my car. I didn’t see an obvious flat, so the likely explanation was some ... Read more The post On Tire Pressure and Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In the summer of 2022, an engineer named Keegan McNamara, who was at the time working for a fundraising technology startup, found his way to ... Read more The post On Tools and the Aesthetics of Work appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In July, Meta announced Threads, a new social media service that was obviously designed to steal market share from Twitter (which I still refuse to ... Read more The post We Don’t Need a New Twitter appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
Within my particular subfield of theoretical computer science there’s perhaps no individual more celebrated than Edsger Dijkstra. His career spanned half-a-century, beginning with a young ... Read more The post Edsger Dijkstra’s One-Day Workweek appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading
In a recent article written for Slate, journalist Dan Kois recounts the shock his younger coworkers expressed when they discovered that he had, earlier in ... Read more The post When Work Didn’t Follow You Home appeared first on Cal Newport. | Continue reading