I like Cal Newport’s writing - although the person itself is also slightly strange to me: who would mention Joe Rogan’s mike choice as an example for something? In any case. Some good observations on the broken idea of measuring knowledge work productivity like assembly line productivity and fake bussyness.
I noticed that he seems to like to read biographies of knowledge workers in a broad sense and mines them for examples to illustrate what to do or why some things are or need to be a certain way. I may have to try to read more biographies myself. I love memoirs as a genre (I should read more of them), but never gave biographies a chance - because I am kind of allergic to the exceptional in general (but super-curious about the mundane).
The contents of the book are just confirming my feeling that slow and small is the future. As I express also in the end of this post here, for example:
[M]y own life’s plan: A (relatively) small but reflected life in the here and now is more rewarding, more livable, more rational, more emotionally honest and also more ethically sound, than any sweeping pronouncements of a “big life"™ could ever be.
My recent personal manifesto was inspired in part by reading this book.
It’s a quick read (or listen, in my case), apart from the Joe Rogan thing (and it’s not that that mike choice example was offensive, it just was weird and suggests maybe what podcasts Newport listens to? Maybe? Hopefully not? Hopefully not in earnest at least?) quite inoffensive.
People who know Newport’s books will most likely have heard many of those tips from him before, but the reframing in terms of slow productivity is interesting.