Work And Life With Stew Friedman

Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. He is the author of six other books, including Deep Work (see our earlier conversation), which argued that our ability to concentrate without distractions is becoming rare. He sold his first book to Random House in the summer after his junior year of college. You won't find him on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, but you can often find him at home with his family in Washington, DC, or writing essays for his popular website calnewport.com.Stew and Cal discuss Cal’s research on digital decluttering and how it increases one’s productivity, maximizes the return on one’s investment in technology use, improves one’s overall happiness, and enhances genuine social connections.  Cal talks about the ways in which social media companies (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), in order to increase their value for initial public offerings, strategically engineered their