Cal Newport

Author of various books on personal productivity and work culture. Also a professor of computer science at Georgetown, researching distributed systems.

I’m curious: how effective is Cal as a researcher, as opposed to as a self-help author? As of early 2022, I see that he’s an associate prof with an endowment—the chair is a good sign. It’s hard to look into the impact of his academic work on Google Scholar because those papers are drowned out by his pop stuff. Hard for me to evaluate the contributions myself—distributed systems aren’t my field.

Last updated 2023-07-13.