Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Break Free From Burnout: How to Work Less and Get More Done | Cal Newport #548

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

In today’s fast-paced world, the pursuit of productivity often leads to overwhelm. In fact, one report suggests that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 466 of the podcast with Professor of computer science and best-selling author Cal Newport. In this clip Cal shares some actionable advice that can help you reclaim your time, reduce stress, and find a more balanced approach to work and life. Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/466 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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with your first order. See all details at www.drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Byte Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 466 of the podcast with professor of computer science and best selling author, Cal Newport. In today's fast-paced world, the pursuit of productivity often leads to overwhelm. And in this clip, Cal shares some actual advice that can help you reclaim your time,

reduce stress, and find a more balanced approach to work and life. stress and find a more balanced approach to work and life. A recent report in the UK suggested that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. What do you think an alarming statistic like that says about the state of society? It says about the state of knowledge work that is broken, right? If you get annoyed by how much time you spend with email, if the word zoom generates mixed emotions, you're probably a knowledge worker. Yeah, if you're if you're working a lot, but you're working on something that's tangible and meaningful, it's not gonna burn you out.

What's burning people out is the fact that they're busier than they've ever been before, but they feel like they're producing much less. So what's gonna burn you out is four or five hours of Zoom meetings plus 125 emails sent and received. And yet the important report, the piece of software, the product strategy you're trying to put report, the piece of software, the product strategy you're trying to put together, nothing's happening there.

It's almost like a psychological experiment. We're gonna have, you spend your entire day talking about work, no actual work is gonna get done, maybe if you wake up earlier on the weekends, you can make a little bit of progress, and we're all gonna pretend like this makes sense. That's what I think is burning people out. It's the absurdity of the busyness,

not just the raw workload itself. Yeah. Everything you say yes to in a work context brings with it administrative overhead, right? So I say yes on this project, we have to send emails about it, we have to do meetings about it. The thing that I think is particularly deranging for people

is when they say yes to too many things, all of that administrative overhead builds up and aggregates. And at some point you cross a threshold where all you have left is time to handle the administrative overload without actually getting to the actual projects itself. And then you fall farther and farther behind. So it's, it's a kind of low grade busyness that doesn't actually achieve the truly important things. With knowledge work, those emails, that thing,

it can be done anytime. It could be done on Sunday morning. It can be done at any time, which makes that switch off very difficult for many people. Yeah, I mean, imagine if you worked on an assembly line and you were like assembling magnetos for the alternator. And now imagine that the company is like, you know what? We put a bunch of magneto parts at your house

and it's up to you, but like while you're at home, you could probably build a few more of the, and now we're not saying you have to, but like, you know, we are counting the magnetos and if you maybe build a few while you're at home. And by the way, when you go to like your kid's sports games or this or that, we're just gonna have a guy who follows behind with a cart full of Magneto.

Hey, it's up to you, but you might wanna build a couple. That's what email is. The activity is how I demonstrate my value. And now I have the opportunity to do activity at any time in any place. I now have to fight an internal battle constantly. Constantly. I have to fight the battle. And it's draining. Yeah.

It's draining that battle. Yeah.. I have to fight the battle. And it's draining. Yeah. It's draining that battle. Yeah. There's research, isn't there, that says if your smartphone is there on the table, you are exerting willpower just to not pick it up and look at it. Yeah. It's not neutral. It's almost like a torture device in the sense that what do humans care about?

Their tribes. We're a community-based species, right? If someone in our tribe, historically speaking, needs something from us, we better take care of that. We do not want to ignore in the Paleolithic era, someone in our tribe is like, I tap it on your shoulder. You don't want to ignore that person

because it's going to break perhaps the relationship and they're not going to share food when there's the next famine. But what is an email inbox, as far as our more primitive social circuits are concerned, what is an email inbox if not a bunch of members of your tribe needs something from you? And if you're ignoring it, now you're in danger. So like an email inbox that is slowly filling at all times is like a social psychological

torture device. It's like, I dare you not to go and check this. It's pulling on some of our deepest instincts. Once you think about what do I do with all these requests coming in that I need to deal with, how do I deal with all those requests? You've already lost the battle. The real war here is how do I stop so many of those requests

from showing up in the first place? Like that's, you gotta go upstream. So if you're just like a standard knowledge worker, that's where having less active projects helps. Because now there's less things generating emails for you to actually receive. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're like you or I running like a little media concern, there's other types of things you can do to try to be very intentional about what goes where. But I really do not like unscheduled incoming messages

that requires a response. That's the killer. Although I think so, productivity is probably at least initially written for the workplace, because it's about work and how do we work in a much more meaningful way in the 21st century. To me, it's so much more than that. I think it's a revolutionary manifesto for a slower way of life. But I also think there's a huge health component, which is really interesting to me as a doctor, that if you are feeling overwhelmed every day at your job, if at the end of the work day, you feel a sense of incompleteness, that nothing really meaningful got done. Well, what do

you do? Yes, you go to social media, you go to alcohol, you go to sugar, you go to junk food, you go to takeaways, right? And I've been really thinking deeply about what are the root causes of all these poor lifestyle choices that so many of us are making. I don't think knowledge is the answer. Giving people more knowledge about the harmful effects of too much sugar. Everyone knows that. It's because of the state of our nervous systems because of the way we're living

and the way that we're working, we have to soothe it. So I would argue that your book in many ways is a health book, because if you can work in that much more slower and meaningful way, I think you are naturally going to make better health choices as well. I think that's so right. Well let's get into some of those specifics then because that was one of my big questions

is, who is this exactly for? If you have autonomy over your working day, like a lot of entrepreneurs perhaps do, perhaps they may feel it's easier to make some of these changes, as you say, compared to someone who's got a boss and they're accountable for certain things. So let's go into those three core ideas in the book, maybe explain what they are, and then let's get into actually how do people do this in real life? Yeah, because I'll preface it by saying, so if you work for someone else, you actually have a lot more autonomy than you think.

Right, so autonomy is baked into knowledge work. What we do today is management by objectives. Make it clear what I want you to do, but how you do it is up to you, right? So knowledge work has a ton of autonomy. That can cut both ways. Yeah. So it's what allows us to get super overloaded into these absurd workloads,

because again, there's no set system that we use of here's how we manage how much you're working on. Here's how we decide, you know, what's a reasonable amount to work on. We don't have any systems like that. So people can get into a lot of trouble. You keep saying yes to things. The next thing you know, you're overloaded.

But it cuts the other way as well. Because there's no set way, this is how we work and here's how many things you work on and here's exactly how you do it. You have a lot of flexibility. Right? So we have more autonomy than we think. It's just a matter of flexing that autonomy in a way that is palatable, that doesn't bring negative attention to you and I think it's completely possible. And so like the three principles we can talk about, all three of them are very implementable within the autonomy that most knowledge workers already have.

Okay, great, well, let's go through them. Okay, so number one, this is the one that scares people the most when they hear it, do fewer things, right? The quick summary of that is that it doesn't mean accomplish fewer things, but what it does mean is actively work on fewer things at the same time. So your concurrent work reduce that. That way of working, small number of things at a time, you pull in something once you finish something you're working on, as opposed to everything you agree to working on it at opposed to everything you agree to

working on it at the same time. It's much more sustainable, produces better quality work, and you actually finish things faster. So things come through this queue of projects actually much faster than if you try to work on them all at the same time, right? The pushback is though, as you say, people are gonna go, yeah, but my boss has given me these 10 things

that I need to do. So what do you mean, Cal, when you say do fewer things? Yeah, yeah. So for an entrepreneur, it might be less initiatives, right? These are the struggles you and I might have. It's like, okay, how do I prevent having a podcast, for example, from metastasizing over the rest of my schedule? Do I want to add this new product?

I don't know. I want to do fewer things. If you work for someone else, this becomes less about saying yes and no, and more about the marketing active versus waiting. So what I mean by this is imagine you work for someone else, right, and you don't have a lot of leeway on saying yes or no.

Imagine that you maintain a public list, like on a shared document, and it's split in half, right? At the front of the list is here are the things, the projects, major tasks that I'm actively working on. And there's like two or three of those. All right, the big dividing line. Here's the order queue of other things I'm going to do in the order in which I'm going to do them

as I finish my active work. And so as I finish an active project, I pull the next thing off the front of that list. And you know, as soon as it makes it on the actively working on, I'm gonna contact you. Okay, I'm working on this now. Let's talk about it. I'm here.

Let me know your thoughts. We can talk about it. This thing, for example, this simple idea, makes a major difference because what are you doing when you divide between these two categories? Everything in the waiting list is no longer generating administrative overhead. Those you've agreed to them, but they're not generating emails and they're not generating meetings categories, everything in the waiting list is no longer generating administrative overhead.

You've agreed to them, but they're not generating emails and they're not generating meetings and they're not pulling out your cognitive cycles because they're not in your active list yet. Yeah. And you're also making the invisible visible. Which I think is one of the other big issues is that because it's all screen-based and it goes into that, you know, the big ether of the worldwide web, no one knows what anyone else is doing.

No one knows. I mean, I really liked that tip because then you're making the invisible visible. Everyone around you knows what's going on. But I think you also gave this nice example in the book where if your boss gives you another task to do, because it's all open, you can say, hey, no problem. This sounds really, really interesting. When do you want it? Which one of these current tasks would you like me to stop working on so that I can deliver on this? Which then goes back to your boss and you boss, oh, actually, you know what? That one's actually more important. We don't need that

one. So it's a very, I think it's a very clever way without, you know, you're not trying to be problematic at work. You just want to be open and transparent. Transparency makes such a big difference. I mean, this is one of the big drivers of overload is that workload management is obfuscated. I have no idea what you're working on. You have no idea what I'm working on. You're just some sort of vessel that like receives work and does it for me.

As soon as you make it transparent, a lot of good things happen. and what's key about these types of strategies and I have a bunch of them But what's key about these types of strategies is you're not putting a burden on someone else, right? Right, so you're not saying to someone else you now have to do something more complicated as part of my new system That doesn't go over well, but I'm not asking you to do anything different I'm just giving you more information if you choose to look at it, right? So you're not adding a burden. You're also demonstrating that you're organized.

Now, here's what I think is really going on in the workplace because one of the big fears I hear from people is that, no, no, no, what my boss wants is me to do something right away because that makes his life easier and he won't tolerate anything less. I think that's actually not true in most cases. Here's what's really happening.

The problem you're solving for your boss is that they have this thing that entered their world that needs to get done. It's a source of stress for them until it gets done, right? Because it's in their mind taking up space, right? And so if they're gonna enlist you to help them get gets done, right? Because it's in their mind taking up space, right? And so if they're gonna enlist you to help them get this done, the problem you're solving for them

is taking their stress away. Now, if they don't know anything about your workload, if they don't know anything about your work process, they would rather you just did it right away because they can't release this till you finish it because they don't know what happens once they give it to you. So like, I've sent this to you, but I don't know if you're gonna do this or not.

I'd rather you just do it because I'm gonna still be stressed about this. If you're organized, if it's sure, I'm happy to do it. I've put it in position seven on this list, which you can look at and watch it, but I'm happy to move it somewhere else if you want to. You've solved the same problem. They're not stressed about it.

Great, you have this, you're taking care of it. You've taken my stress away. That's what I needed from you. Not that you about it. Great, you have this, you're taking care of it. You've taken my stress away. That's what I needed from you. Not that you did it right away, but that you took my stress away right away. So if you're organized, your system can really work in your favor

and people will be okay with it as long as it solves their problem. As long as they trust when they give you something, it's gonna get done. They can see it's gonna get done. They don't need it tomorrow, but they need their stress to go away right now. Yeah. I think that's such a good point about sending out this signal that you're on top

of things, that you are organized, that you've got stuff you're working on. I think it's really, really important. I think it's also important in how you say no to things, isn't it? I think you use that example in the book that, again, if you can very clearly and be transparent, why you cannot say yes to something, it probably makes it go away faster. Is that fair to say? Yeah, so if you're at a level

where you can actually just turn things down, so now you don't have to entirely just rely on something like this transparent cue or everything goes, clarity is everything. Yeah. Yeah. So as they say, apologize is fine, but don't give wiggle room on whether you can do it or not. Just be clear. Like what people need is clarity.

I want you to do this thing for me. It would be great if you could. Don't leave me dangling. Either come back and say, this looks great, thanks. I can't leave me dangling. You know, either come back and say, this looks great, thanks, I can't do it right now, really sorry about that, nice thing, nice thing, nice thing. Don't come back and say, for example, well, I'm really busy and you know,

I have this other thing going on and hope that the other person will then let you off the hook because the other person won't, they really want you to do whatever they're asking you. They're not gonna say no to themselves. So if you just describe your busyness, they're like, oh, we could fit it in, don't worry about it. Or if you say, well, I'm really busy right now doing X.

They're like, great, I'll get right back to you as soon as X is over. Oh my God, I've been there, like many of us so many times. Then we have work at a natural pace. That's the second one, work at a natural pace. Right, and there's two elements to that. One is you need much more variety and intensity. Yeah, then we have work at a natural pace. That's the second one, work at a natural pace. Yes, right. And there's two elements to that. One is you need much more variety and intensity.

Humans aren't meant to work all out every day, all week long, all year long. We're just not wired for that. We need variation in intensity and accompanying that, we should stretch out the time scale in which we think about productivity and say, what am I producing this season? What am I producing this year? Make those productivity timescales longer, changes the way that you think about work. It allows more of that variety in pace.

So companies are now starting to experiment with ways to have more variation, which I applaud, right? One is the idea of sabbaticals. More and more companies are introducing this idea of sabbaticals. More and more companies are introducing this idea of sabbaticals for employees. You have a hard few years, you do some cool things, take two months off paid to recharge and rethink and then come back again, paid sabbaticals.

That's becoming a bigger thing. I think it's a great idea. Another idea that's out there, Basecamp, the company Basecamp does this. They do cycles. So work unfolds in cycles. You're on an on cycle, which could be four to six weeks where you're really focused on one or two things, right?

Then you have an off cycle. This can be like a two week period where you purposely don't do a lot of things. It's all about trying to close up the loose ends on what you're just working about. And more importantly, thinking about with space to reflect what is most important for me to do next? And the employee handbook for Basecamp says,

resist the temptation to just push more work into the off cycles. You have to actually cycle down your workload before you cycle it back up. So I love ideas like that. What can individuals do if they don't work for one of those companies? You can do this internally without telling anybody.

Pick times of the year, these three weeks in the middle of the summer, like before the holidays and whatever, I'm gonna wind down a little bit during those periods. I'm not gonna make an announcement about it. I'm just gonna, when I, how I schedule things, what projects I have in and when I have new projects start, the hours I'm actually gonna be like putting in work,

I'm just gonna down cycle for a while, right? At a smaller time scale, you can do things like pick a day of the week and say, I'm just not going to schedule any meetings on that day. And again, I'm not going to announce it. It's just when people ask me when I'm free, I'll offer lots of dates. They just won't happen to be on that day, right? So that that day can be quieter. Again, something I've been thinking about recently is this idea of our life have that there are several buckets, you know, there's friends, there's family, there's work, there's personal passions and projects, there's health.

And you know, it may be hard to keep all of the buckets full at the same time, but you've got to at least try and at least be aware when you're neglecting one of those buckets so that neglect doesn't go on for too long. Yes. And I think that's the key, isn't it? You know, there are times in our life where actually, you know, we do get a little overwhelmed, we do have deadlines, and we do have a little bit too much going on. I think we can handle that for short periods of time. It's acute stress. We are wired for acute stress,

but not for the chronic stress. Yeah, yeah. I think that's the way. And also when you're looking at all those buckets at the same time, you begin to find much more creative solutions for the problems of your life. And then the third principle, obsess over quality.

So for these two things to work, you have to couple it with this third idea of I really care about how well I'm doing the thing I do best. And I wanna get better at that thing and craft matters to me. And that's ultimately gonna be my ticket to autonomy is doing something really well.

That's gonna give you two benefits. One, it's gonna naturally make busyness seem anathema. It's gonna make pseudo productivity and the freneticism that defines work, that's gonna suddenly seem unnatural to you. At the same time, as you get better at things that are valuable, you get more control over your career and you can more fight back against the busyness.

Cause as you get better at things, you're more valuable. You get more control. So that's kind of the engine that's gonna drive your ability to do these other principles. Earning the ability to have a slower notion of productivity is that you can under emphasize it. Yeah.

Those three principles, they really work beautifully in harmony with each other. Right? Because if you take principle three, obsess over quality without do fewer things, you've got a big problem. If you've got 10 things that you're obsessing about to be perfect, you're gonna be overloaded. So they all kind of feed each other quite nicely, don't they? And you get the flip side too, which is if you're just like, say, trying to do fewer things,

but not caring about the quality of your work, then it just becomes a game where you begin to get this antagonistic relationship with your work of, less is better than more, and how many things can I take off my plate? And that can have its own sort of nihilism to it. Like they need the counterbalance. I want to do fewer things so that I can do the things I care about better, right? You need those. It's the glue. I call that principle the glue that holds the whole thing together.

Just to finish off Cal, for someone who has heard this conversation, I think, yeah, you know what? I am overloaded. I'm one of those 88%. My life feels too much. I'm sick of being overwhelmed all the time. Where would you advise them to start? I would start with workload. Doing fewer things at once

is gonna give you the most immediate benefits. I mean, I think when you say, or I'm going to look at this big list of things I'm actively working on, I'm going to take 30% off my plate. For the 70% that remains, I'm going to divide it between these are the two

I'm working on for the next couple of weeks and the rest are just going to sit here and I'm not going to give them active work until I'm finished with something over here and I'll pull it in. Do the workload changes first. You're gonna get breathing room. And then once you have breathing room,

everything else begins to seem possible. When you have too much to do, it's like you're drowning. And when you're drowning, you can't actually get enough air to make any changes. So if you reduce that workload first, it's gonna feel like I can finally catch my breath and you can get some solitude, some reflection. You can think about your pace.

You can think about quality. You can think about doing what you do best even better. What do I wanna do different in life? So solitude is critical, right? The definition of solitude that matters is you alone with your own thoughts, taking in the world around you and thinking about things, right? This is how with your own thoughts, taking in the world around you and thinking about things, right?

This is how people make sense of their lives in the world. You have experiences, that's step one. Step two, you sit there and you grapple with them, right? Because we build in our heads these sort of hidden schemas, these frameworks for understanding our life and our journey, what has happened to us, where are we going next? How do we understand what's important to us and what's not important to us?

All of that takes time in your own head. Also, solitude is easy. It's not, you don't have to go to a meditation room. You don't have to like put aside time. You don't have to go to a gym. You're already going to work in the morning. Just don't put something in your ears. You're already walking the dog. Just like do a dog walk without, you know, reading something on your phone at the

same time. I mean, solitude is just about activities you're already doing. Just be doing that activity and let your mind go where it's going to go. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.