“Paradoxically, if you keep adding big, deep work projects to your plate, eventually you get a log jam where you can't make progress on any deep work project… Once you say yes to a big project, you're saying yes to a thousand emails. You're saying yes to 25 meetings. You're saying yes to 16 conversations per week in the hallway.”
Deep Questions with Cal Newport · October 2026
Newport discusses a coaching client who had too much on her plate to change anything. He says every big project carries a fixed administrative overhead, and past a certain point those costs leave no time for the projects themselves. Knowledge work, he notes, rarely tracks workload at all.
Transcript
So in this case, Sarah, you ended up parting ways, essentially. She became kind of intractable and she saw this. I'm not going to be able to fix this. And then she went her separate way.
…was something else that got put on her plate that was really overwhelming. And it just, you know, also trying to factor in the coaching. And frankly, the work of working with a coach, the work of trying to do things differently, just lost out. There just wasn't any capacity for it at the time. And
…been harder for me to make even a little bit progress on any of them. And I bet something like this was going on here as well, because we don't track workload in the knowledge work context in any sort of systematic way. We just assume it's better to have more on your plate than less because then you'll have no downtime. You can just choose what you work on. And we don't factor the fact that once you say yes to a big project, you're saying yes to a thousand emails. You're saying yes to 25 meetings. You're saying yes to 16 conversations per week in the hallway. You are actually allocating a lot of time outside of the deep work itself. And that time, that time is limited. So that comes to mind as well. This might have been a workload log jam as well. And some of that's company culture. Like, hey, don't say no. We'll notice if you say no. No one knows how much stuff you're working on, but you better say yes to the thing I'm saying here.
Yes, absolutely. The log jam, 100%.
I'm, see, you got me preaching here now, Haley. It's okay. I can't.
I appreciate it because you're backing us up, right? Like, I think everybody ends up in that spot at some point. And it can be really hard to know how to unravel it. It feels like a house of cards, right? Like, what happens if you start saying no?
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