![]() He teaches computer science and he's also the author of the book, A World Without Email. Lately, Cal Newport has been thinking about an idea that was all the rage not so very long ago, The 4-Hour Workweek. Your main work is, as an academic, as a professor, how has this transformation, which is obviously inextricable from the pandemic so far, affected your own work as a teacher, as a writer, as a researcher?Ĭal Newport: Well, I think one of the obviously biggest short-term transformations was this experiment we've been forced into over the last year and a half into, what if we shut down offices? What if we make work remote? This has had an impact, of course, on academia. My university, Georgetown University was effectively shut down for most students and faculty for over a year. I'm happy now that I can actually be back and seeing my students. It was an interesting experimentation in trying to figure out in higher education what's valuable and what's not. There was prognostications early pandemic that we would all realize that we don't need physical universities because, technically speaking on paper, you could deliver classes via Zoom. We were all going to see that and that would be the demise of the university. Students hated it and there was a rush like, "How can we get back?" That's a theme that comes up a lot in this work, by the way, is that there's a lot of transformations that make sense on paper. ![]() The tech exists for this groundbreaking change to how we work and then we try it and there's a lot more complicating factors that rear their head. ![]() Interviewer: You recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker revisiting something called, "The 4-Hour Workweek." Not 4-Day Workweek, The 4-Hour Workweek. Then that was an idea that was popularized by Tim Ferriss 14 years ago. What brought him to the idea of The 4-Hour Workweek and what does it really mean?Ĭal: He was in that early period, the first decade of the 2000s after the first dot-com boom followed by a bust. There was this big growth period where Web 2.0 really picked up speed, Google picked up speed, social media emerged. Silicon Valley became a heroic sector of the economy. There, it was this whole culture of overwork that Silicon Valley was permeating out to the rest of the country and Tim was an overworked entrepreneur. He worked at a company, became an entrepreneur, was overworked, stressed out, and basically ran a lot of radical experiments and realized, "I can run my company in about four hours a week if my goal is just to live an interesting life and not to become a hecto-millionaire." He wrote this book about it and he went to South by Southwest in 2007. It was the center of this Silicon Valley overwork culture and gave a talk where he told the people in the room, "You're working too hard. Give up on this goal of becoming rich with your stock IPOs. Live a more interesting life," and they were wrapped.
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