Happiness, Leadership, Time Management

Episode #58 – Cal Newport on A World Without Email

My guest this week is Cal Newport, author of the New York Times Best-Selling book: A World Without email: Reimagining work in an Age of Digital Overload.

Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown and he is the author of two previous best-selling books on productivity and managing our time: Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

Cal is at the forefront of figuring out how knowledge workers can thrive and be productive in the crazy environment we find ourselves in, with our inboxes overloaded with email, with constant interruptions via text and instant messaging and social media.

Cal has heavily influenced me, and countless others, on the need to carve out large blocks of uninterrupted time to focus on Deep Work, that’s meaningful, important strategic work that takes dedicated attention. One of the most important differentiating factors for our career is our ability to carve out this uninterrupted time and complete projects with long-term impact. And in this book, he shows us how to do that.

What You’ll Learn

  • Why does our work today prevent us from having long periods of uninterrupted work?
  • What can we do to change how we work so we can get long periods of uninterrupted work?
  • What is the “hyperactive hive-mind” and why has it become the default mode of getting work done?
  • The challenge of the “hyperactive hive-mind” approach to getting work done, and how to overcome it
  • Why we should design our work to avoid constant context shifting
  • How to focus on the process of our work flow and design systems of communication that avoid unscheduled messages

Books & Resources

Connect with Cal Newport

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