Cal Newport gets a lot done. While on a book tour in Los Angeles to promote his eighth book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, he went sightseeing with his wife and their three sons. He also appeared on a half-dozen podcasts that week and recorded an installment of his own podcast, Deep Questions, now approaching its 300th episode. He writes twice a month for The New Yorker and is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Plus, he finds the time to obsess about baseball, specifically baseball trades, and more specifically, the Washington Nationals. 

With more than 3 million books sold, Newport’s own output invites the question: How does he do it? For Newport, the key involves dissecting, analyzing, and sharing the methods that work best not just for productivity but also for being productive while having what he calls a “deep life.” His mission is to help people establish and preserve the ability to concentrate as a critical skill. Too often, Newport says, the world mistakes being busy for being good. In Deep Work, his 2016 bestseller, Newport writes, “In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.” 

In the days of factory assembly lines (as in many of today’s more service-oriented jobs), success was measured by how fast the line moved or by the quantity of widgets a worker produced. Current metrics are a poor facsimile of that, as we incessantly check inboxes, respond to messages on Slack, and post on social media. Far from being a gauge of how well we’re doing, Newport contends, these tasks leave people exhausted. “People are clearly and demonstrably unhappy,” he says. “It isn’t a way to produce quality work—or a happy life.”

The idea that continual connectivity may be bad for you isn’t new. What’s different about Newport isn’t just his prescription—though he does zero in on actions he believes will lead to solutions for these problems. What’s different is the way he sees the big picture. He doesn’t want to change the workplace. He wants to change the world. 

Radical alteration of the way the world does business wasn’t how Newport started. His first book, written during his senior year at Dartmouth, was simply an answer to a problem. When Newport arrived in Hanover after public school in New Jersey, he found he didn’t know how to succeed. He had an image of what he wanted in a college—an intellectual community, broad learning, a quiet campus surrounded by mountains, and a crew team to try out for. Dartmouth offered all that. In high school, he had run a successful early web development company, mostly building websites for local businesses. But, like many college students, he found his first year difficult to navigate. “I was taking classes with private school kids who were used to more intense studying. I had to figure out how to work at a higher level,” Newport recalls.  

He picked the brains of older students to learn what made them successful. “They all tended to use active recall—trying to recreate answers or information from scratch, without looking at their notes—instead of passive recall, such as reading over highlighted textbooks or notes,” he says. By his sophomore year, he began an unbroken string, except for a single A- in a senior year political philosophy class, of 4.0 grades. “He became one of the most capable and organized students I’ve ever had,”  says Dartmouth provost David Kotz, who was Newport’s faculty advisor.

As a computer science major, Newport demonstrated a deep interest in systems, and he took that interest and applied it to systematizing college achievement. During an off term when he worked at a tech company in Manhattan, he mentioned to a friend that college advice books didn’t actually help students succeed at their studies, instead tending to focus on social life. The friend, Newport says, “dared me to write a book” that did better. Newport accepted the challenge. “The college advice space was underserved. I wanted to create something that helped students improve their grades, that treated college like a problem that could be solved with techniques that actually worked.” 

He found an agent, Laurie Abkemeier, who expressed interest in more than Newport’s idea of a business-inspired, systematic approach to mastering college. “Here was a guy,” Abkemeier says, “who’d started a technology business in high school but was also the editor of his college humor magazine. And he could write. I knew he was a go-getter.”

Newport’s sample chapters—probably the most essential piece of any book proposal—were “really great, entertaining and insightful,” Abkemeier recalls. A few weeks later, How to Win at College: Surprising Secrets for Success from the Country’s Top Students had a publishing deal. Newport’s real breakthrough came a year later, with How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less, which sold more than 200,000 copies. Newport’s method—surveying people and referencing famous names (Slow Productivity features everyone from Galileo to Jewel, the pop singer) to mine their “unconventional strategies”—became a template he follows to this day. 

Writing self-help books was not the most obvious career path for Newport. His mother programmed mainframe computers. His father worked in survey research, ultimately becoming editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. Newport has three siblings—one of his sisters and his older brother attended the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, while his other sister attended Notre Dame.

After college, Newport worked on the theoretical aspects of wireless networking for his doctoral thesis at MIT. By then married to his college girlfriend, Julie Morganstern ’04, he also worked on his third book, How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out), which he published the year after he received his Ph.D.

Newport worked hard to keep his academic world and his writing life separate. Kotz remembers finding out that Newport had written a bestseller. “I was amazed,” Kotz says. And, according to Newport, his faculty advisor at MIT discovered his parallel career only after stumbling upon How to Win at a local bookstore. 

But there were flashes of convergence. Newport recalls encountering an early version of Facebook during his senior year. He didn’t see the point. Twelve years later, in a 2016 TEDx talk, Newport related the story of his initial encounter with Mark Zuckerberg’s invention. “In a sort of fit of somewhat immature professional jealousy,” he told the audience, “I said, ‘I’m not going to use this thing, I’m not going to help this kid’s business, whatever that’s going to amount to.’ ” That was an amusing anecdote, but the overall thrust of the talk was  that social media offered almost no real value—and a strong chance of genuine damage. 

He compared the constant, drug-like bursts of pleasure and excitement to taking up permanent residence in a Las Vegas casino. “It’s one thing,” he told the audience, “to spend a couple of hours at a slot machine in Las Vegas, but if you bring a slot machine home with you, and you pull that handle all day long, from when you wake up to when you go to bed—we’re not wired for it. It short-circuits the brain, and we’re starting to find that it has actual cognitive consequences, one of them being this
sort of pervasive background hum of anxiety.”

Applause was polite, even mildly unenthusiastic. But as Newport made his first sortie against what he sees as the tyranny of technology-based instant gratification and how it fragments one’s attention and reduces one’s ability to sustain concentration, the reaction beyond the TED conference room was huge. The talk went viral, garnering more than 8 million views. What’s more impressive than the number of people who have seen the video are the comments: more than 15,000, nearly all in agreement, many expressing sheer relief at somebody finally pushing back against social media—and giving them permission to leave it altogether. 

Newport’s sensible arguments—that focus beats distraction, distraction creates division, and managing depth and pace can lead to vastly improved lives—seem almost obvious. In a world where people feel locked in by seductive technology and organizational rigidity, Newport’s fans feel that he offers them good advice and that he cares about their lives. “What initially appealed to me,” says Patrick Kirwan, a computer science major at Boston University who participates in Reddit’s r/calnewport forum (yes, Newport fans have a subreddit), “was how different his advice was. Everything I’ve ever heard has been the opposite of what he’s saying. It was ‘grind, grind, grind, don’t sleep, don’t take care of yourself.’ He showed me that there was another way, and it felt more like the way the real world should be, or even could be.” Newport isn’t just offering techniques. He offers hope. 

“It’s more than productivity,” Newport says of his mission. “It’s about having a good life.”       

Newport’s more recent books represent a shift in focus from his earlier how-to books. He calls his work “pragmatic nonfiction,” but sometimes feels he’s bouncing between two worlds, occupying neither the self-help nor the pure narrative genre. This sometimes leads to confusion and even criticism. In reviewing Slow Productivity for The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai wrote: “These recommendations sound appealing, though the individuals who need to hear them most are perhaps not the burned-out knowledge workers in Newport’s audience but the people who control the means of paying them. Newport’s ‘principles’ presume a certain constellation of factors, all of them working in your favor.” While Newport’s earlier works told readers how to do something, his recent emphasis is about how to be something, which is more difficult. 

Newport tries to practice what he preaches. He’s still not on social media, and he’s lately been on a campaign against email. It feels weird to message with the guy who wrote A World Without Email, but Newport is a responsive correspondent. Just keep the queries brief and actionable. He is also a movie aficionado and recently watched all the 2023 Oscar best picture nominees with his wife. (Time management tip: Don’t be afraid to break the three-and-a-half-hour-long Killers of the Flower Moon into five segments, as he did.) 

Newport sees the task ahead as about more than organizing one’s time, setting periods for undisturbed focus, and learning to recognize and value quality. If the world is going to change, he argues, the big issue is getting those who hold the purse strings to embrace depth and slower pacing, and to abandon Industrial Age definitions of what constitutes success. “These organizations don’t want to change,” he says. “Do we really want to pay these huge salaries just for people to spend all day answering email and Slack messages?” 

These days, Newport leans more toward broad philosophical problems, rather than advice (though he offers plenty of that, especially in his podcast). A cofounder of Georgetown’s Center for Digital Ethics, he’s deeply concerned about the way artificial intelligence may further stack the deck against depth. His incoming students face a disadvantage he never had to confront. He sees them—pulled in so many different directions, and not just by technology—as canaries in the cultural coal mine. 

“It’s more than productivity,” Newport says of his mission. “It’s about having a good life.”          

Dan Koeppel’s most recent book is Every Minute Is a Day: A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege, an account of the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in a Bronx, New York hospital. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife and two sons.