Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown and author of Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, has spent years making that case. This is the second of three episodes from the archive that we're revisiting this month on the subject of time. In it, Cal joins Jessi to zoom out and ask: what does it really mean to get meaningful work done over the course of our weeks, our months, and even our years?

In this episode, Jessi and Cal discuss:

Why "pseudo-productivity" — using visible activity as a proxy for real work — was always a bad idea, and why mobile computing made it unsustainable

How the pandemic pushed knowledge work past a breaking point

The administrative overhead trap: why agreeing to too many things at once is slowing you down

How to say no to new work without actually saying no, and why transparency is the key

Why boredom is essential

What your phone has to do with short-circuiting the most human productivity tool we have

Cal's rule for his kids on smartphones and social media, and the age he thinks unrestricted internet access becomes safe

Why doing fewer things at once will get you to the finish line faster

What AI tools like ChatGPT are actually good for, and what Cal is waiting for them to do instead

The difference between technology that helps you do things faster and technology that takes things off your plate entirely

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Most of us are convinced we don't have enough time. Laura Vanderkam argues that we have enough time, we just aren’t using it with enough intention. This month, we're revisiting our series of episodes on time, and how we make the most of it. We’re starting here, with the bestselling author of numerous books on time management and the host of the daily four-minute podcast Before Breakfast.

In this episode, Jessi and Laura discuss:

Why 5 PM on Thursday is actually the exact midpoint of your week, and what that reveals about the time you're losing

How Laura has tracked every half hour of her life since April 2015, and what nine years of data taught her

The biggest time waster of all (it's not email or your phone)

Effortful fun versus effortless fun, and why doing a little of the first before the second changes everything

Why you should give yourself a bedtime, and how most adults are already getting more sleep than they think

The case for moving for 10 minutes by 3 PM every day

Why busy people need a hobby

The Friday punch list: how batching your small tasks protects your best hours for the work that actually matters

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Baratunde Thurston fired ChatGPT. And ChatGPT helped him do it. This week, the Emmy-nominated storyteller, writer and host of Life with Machines joins Jessi in the studio to talk about what it actually means to have agency in a moment when we’re still figuring out the rules and norms of AI.

In this episode, Jessi and Baratunde discuss:

Why Baratunde fired ChatGPT and what the chat bot taught him on his way out

What he means when he says we're not using a tool, we're entering a relationship

The "direction, not perfection" principle for navigating an imperfect landscape of AI companies and choices

Why switching platforms is itself a practice of agency, and proof that you can leave

What AI tools reveal about you that you didn't know you were sharing

The two people living inside every employee at an AI all-hands: the one on-program, and the one who's scared and skeptical

What the kids opting out of AI are trying to tell us

What the internet could look like if we treated it as a public utility instead of a commercial space

Why token-maxing is a "flagrant foul" in an era of climate change

What executives get wrong when rolling out AI, and the questions they should be asking their teams instead

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Daniel Pink is a seven-time New York Times bestselling author, a three-time Hello Monday guest, and one of the most trusted voices on motivation and performance. This week, he joins Jessi in the studio to talk about productivity and regret: how to actually get meaningful work done, how to protect your time and attention in an age of infinite distraction, and how to use the things you wish you'd done differently as a map for what you actually care about.

Jessi and Dan discuss:

Why productivity shouldn’t be measured in units of output, it should be measured in meaningfulness

The MIT method: why Daniel writes his single most important task at the top of his to-do list before anything else

How to design your environment for deep focus instead of trying to willpower your way there

The to-don't list: how to treat the things that drain your time with the same seriousness as the things you need to do

Why you probably overestimate how disappointed people will be when you say no, and how to say it cleanly

The SNL rule for shipping work: "We don't go on because we're ready. We go on because it's 11:30."

What to do when your boss keeps changing the priorities

The Pomodoro technique: whether it still holds up, and Dan thanked its inventor in the acknowledgments of one of his books

Why regret is one of the most misunderstood and underused emotions we have

The four core regrets that show up across 26,000 people in 130 countries, and what they reveal about what we actually value

This conversation was originally recorded live and broadcast to LinkedIn Premium members. Premium members can find the extended version here.

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Most of us approach a long break from work with some anxiety. Whether it’s a layoff, parental leave, or a season of caregiving, there’s tension around if and when we’ll return to work and how we’ll explain the gap on our résumé.

DJ DiDonna, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of the new book Big Time Off, wants to change that. This week, he joins Jessi to make the case that stepping away from routine work — for whatever reason, for however long — is one of the most strategic things you can do for your career and your life.

Jessi and DJ discuss:

What a sabbatical actually is, and why two-thirds of them happen because of a negative catalyst, not a choice

Why immediately job-searching after a layoff is like grocery shopping while hungry

The difference between a vacation, a corporate "sabbatical," and the real thing, and why it takes six to eight weeks just to feel like yourself again

What DJ calls "fertile emptiness," and why most of us never let ourselves get there

How to use a sabbatical to run experiments on possible future versions of yourself

The story of a CTO who went to Norway, built a text-to-speech app, and redesigned his entire relationship with work and money

Why functional workaholism is the thing most of us are living with

What AI has to do with the case for stepping back, and why learning from a place of fear versus curiosity makes all the difference

How Jessi's own three-month hiatus from the workplace, during which she wrote a book and raised a newborn, turned out to be a sabbatical she didn't know she was taking

How to start planning for a sabbatical five years from now, even if taking one today feels impossible

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