Ep. 175: What is the Deep Life?

Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed by everything you have to do? The writer Oliver Burkeman recently experimented with an unexpected response to this common sensation: he decided to work much les...

31 Jul 20231h 13min

Do history’s greatest thinkers care about time management? In today’s episode, Cal analyzes the system that the mathematician and philosopher, Kurt Godel, used to structure his days, weeks, and years ...

24 Jul 20231h 26min

Sometimes the most effective way to contain your workload is to simply declare how long you’re willing to work and then refuse to violate your pledge. In this episode, Cal revisits this “fixed-schedul...

17 Jul 20231h 13min

In Cal’s new “deep life stack” the first layer toward finding more meaning is to develop discipline. Why does this come first? In this episode, Cal dives deeper into the importance of starting with di...

10 Jul 20231h 13min

Over the past twenty years, “productivity” has come to be synonymous with using digital tools to speed up non-essential parts of knowledge work. As cal argues in this episode, this “cybernetic” approa...

3 Jul 20231h 12min

Some of the most interesting and impactful people in the world build their work around a commitment to doing only a few things very well. No one remembers that it took Newton decades to finish The Pri...

26 Jun 20231h 18min

In this episode, Cal is joined by Laura Vanderkam (author of Tranquility by Tuesday and co-host of the Best of Both Worlds podcast). Cal and Laura tackle a collection of your questions about the strug...

19 Jun 20231h 38min

How do you leave a life of superficial distraction and cultivate something deeper? In today’s episode, Cal describes “The Deep Life Stack,” an approach to cultivating a deep life that starts with over...

12 Jun 20231h 18min