Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Metadata

• Title: Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
• Author: Cal Newport
• Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B0C7716FW1?tag=malvaonlin-20
• Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B0C7716FW1
• Last Updated on: Thursday, March 28, 2024

Highlights & Notes

It couldn’t have existed, however, without McPhee’s willingness to put everything else on hold, and just lie on his back, gazing upward toward the sky, thinking hard about how to create something wonderful.

There’s no reasonable definition of productivity that shouldn’t also apply to John McPhee, and yet nothing about his work habits is frantic, busy, or overwhelming.

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.

A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality.

this philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.

On first encounter, this vignette provides a stereotypical case study about the various ways the knowledge sector came to think about productivity during the twentieth century: “Work” is a vague thing that employees do in an office. More work creates better results than less. It’s a manager’s job to ensure enough work is getting done, because without this pressure, lazy employees will attempt to get away with the bare minimum. The most successful companies have the hardest workers.

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In knowledge work, by contrast, individuals are often wrangling complicated and constantly shifting workloads. You might be working on a client report at the same time that you’re gathering testimonials for the company website and organizing an office party, all the while updating a conflict of interest statement that human resources just emailed you about. In this setting, there’s no clear single output to track. And even if you do wade through this swamp of activity to identify the work that matters most—recall Davenport’s example of counting a professor’s academic publications—there’s no easy way to control for the impact of unrelated obligations on each individual’s ability to produce. I might have published more academic papers than you last year, but this might have been, in part, due to a time-consuming but important committee that you chaired. In this scenario, am I really a more productive employee?

“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” argued Peter Drucker in his influential 1967 book, The Effective Executive. “He can only be helped. But he must direct himself.”

These realities created a real problem for the emergent knowledge sector. Without concrete productivity metrics to measure and well-defined processes to improve, companies weren’t clear how they should manage their employees. And as freelancers and small entrepreneurs in the sector became more prevalent, these individuals, responsible only for themselves, weren’t sure how they should manage themselves. It was from this uncertainty that a simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. If you can see me in my office—or, if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly—then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something. The more activity you see, the more you can assume that I’m contributing to the organization’s bottom line. Similarly, the busier I am as a freelancer or entrepreneur, the more I can be assured I’m doing all I can to get after it.

As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work. It’s why we gather in office buildings using the same forty-hour workweeks originally developed for limiting the physical fatigue of factory labor, and why we feel guilty about ignoring our inboxes, or experience internalized pressure to volunteer or “perform busyness” when we see the boss is nearby. In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness, we also gravitate away from deeper efforts toward shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list. Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy. In her response to my reader survey, a social worker who identified herself only as N described the necessity of “not taking breaks, rushing, and hurrying all day,” while a project manager named Doug explained that doing his job well reduced to “churning out lots of artifacts,” whether they really mattered or not. This switch from concrete productivity to this looser proxy heuristic is so important for our discussion to follow that we should give it a formal name and definition:

PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

Many people would rather pretend to be busy in an air-conditioned office than stamp sheet metal all day on a hot factory floor.

It seems like the benefits of technology have created the ability to stack more into our day and onto our schedules than we have the capacity to handle while maintaining a level of quality which makes the things worth doing… . I think that’s where the burnout really hurts—when you want to care about something but you’re removed from the capacity to do the thing or do it properly and give it your passion and full attention and creativity because you’re expected to do so many other things.

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“My clients are very busy, but are often so overwhelmed by everything they want or have to do, that it becomes difficult to recognize what the priorities are for them,” she told me. “So they just try to work on a lot and hope they make progress that way.”

Like John McPhee waiting on the picnic table for insight on his article structure, Zuiker’s efforts point toward a definition of meaningful and valuable work that doesn’t require a frenetic busyness. Its magic instead becomes apparent at longer timescales, emanating from a pace that seems, in comparison with the relentless demands of high-tech pseudo-productivity, to be, for lack of a better word, almost slow.

It was amid this unrest that a seasoned activist and journalist named Carlo Petrini launched a new movement that he called Slow Food. A corresponding manifesto defined its goals: Against those—or, rather, the vast majority—who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment. Appropriately, we will start in the kitchen, with Slow Food. To escape the tediousness of “fast-food,” let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines.

“Those who suffer for others do more damage to humanity than those who enjoy themselves,” Petrini explained.

Once isolated, Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements—focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—are obviously not restricted to food in any fundamental sense. They can apply to any setting in which a haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience. This claim is validated by the many new slow movements that arose in the wake of Slow Food’s original success, targeting other aspects of our culture that were suffering from an unthinking haste.

maybe when it comes to combating the inhumanity of our current moment of professional overload, what we really need—more so than righteous disdain or brash new policy—is a slower conception of what it even means to be productive in the first place.

KNOWLEDGE WORK (GENERAL DEFINITION) The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.

To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality.

Before diving into these specifics, however, I want to reassure you that slow productivity doesn’t ask that you extinguish ambition. Humans derive great satisfaction from being good at what they do and producing useful things. This philosophy can be understood as providing a more sustainable path toward these achievements.

Slow productivity supports legacy-building accomplishments but allows them to unfold at a more human speed.

Austen was not able to produce creatively during the crowded periods of her life. It was only when, through circumstance and contrivance, her obligations were

PRINCIPLE #1: DO FEWER THINGS Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.

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My goal in this chapter is to persuade you not to give up on this aspirational vision of engineered simplicity. It is possible in most modern work settings, if you’re willing to be creative—and perhaps, at times, even radical—in how you think about selecting and organizing your work.

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished.

The advantage of doing fewer things, however, is about more than just increasing the raw number of hours dedicated to useful activity; the quality of these hours also increases. When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility.

our brains work better when we’re not rushing.

It’s not just because overload is exhausting and unsustainable and a miserable way to exist—though it certainly is—but because doing fewer things makes us better at our jobs; not only psychologically, but also economically and creatively. Focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new, is objectively a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output.

Furthermore, as we just established, the dynamics of cognitive labor are different from those of physical labor. In a factory, pushing employees to work longer shifts might be directly more profitable. In knowledge work, by contrast, pushing employees into larger workloads can decrease both the quantity and quality of what they produce.

How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation.

A coach named Laura, for example, reported that she simplified her practice by reducing her offerings down to a few key services. “Since figuring this out,” she told me, “my brain is calmer, the quality of my interactions is stronger, and my work quality is higher.” As a result of this higher-quality work, she now makes the same amount of money working fewer hours. Ironically, as Laura admits, the original goal in doing less work was to find more balance with other parts of her life. The fact that she ended up making just as much money was a happy surprise.

doing fewer things is the key to producing good work.

Intentional limits set concurrently at all three of these scales are more likely to succeed than focusing on just one scale in isolation. If you have multiple major professional missions, for example, you’ll struggle to limit the pool of ongoing projects they generate. Similarly, if you have too many ongoing projects, you’ll struggle to prevent your daily schedule from becoming overstuffed.

The term mission can sound grandiose. For our purposes, we’ll demote it to a more pragmatic definition: any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life.

It’s easy to let your collection of missions expand, as the embrace of a big new goal can be exciting in the moment. But missions, once adopted, demand effort. If your professional life is top heavy, you’ll unavoidably face an onerous workload. Any attempt to succeed with our first principle of slow productivity, therefore, must begin with the reduction of your main objectives.

Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session. Some projects you complete once and then are done, such as updating the sales copy on a product website. Other projects are ongoing, meaning they unfold without any clear stopping point, such as answering support queries from clients. Projects create many of the concrete tasks that take up your time during the day. It follows that limiting them is critical to limiting your overall work volume.

If you instead have a reputation as someone who is careful about managing their time and can quantify your busyness more concretely, you have a better chance of avoiding the new work. When you say, “I don’t see any really significant swaths of open time to work on something like this for at least three weeks, and in the meantime, I have five other projects competing for my schedule,” it’s hard for someone to rebut you, unless they’re willing to challenge your calculations, or demand that you expand your working hours to accommodate their specific request.

To gain this credibility, I recommend, at first, when considering a new project, you estimate how much time it will require and then go find that time and schedule it on your calendar. Block off the hours as you would for a meeting. If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you don’t have enough time for it. Either decline the project, or cancel something else to make room. The power of this approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment. You don’t have to continue pre-scheduling your projects in this manner indefinitely. After you’ve executed this strategy for a while, you’ll develop an instinct for roughly how many commitments you can maintain at any point without overtaxing your time. Going forward, it becomes sufficient to just track your current project tally, and reject new work once you pass your limit—making adjustments as needed, of course, for unusually busy periods.

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For now, what’s important with this strategy is that you maintain clarity and control over your schedule, and deploy it to keep your workload reasonable, regardless of how you define this condition. There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.

My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day. To clarify, I don’t intend for this single daily project to be your only work for the day.

There’s a calibrated steadiness to working on just one major initiative a day. Real progress accrues, while anxiety is subdued. This pace might seem slow in the moment, but zooming out to consider the results that eventually accrue over many months reveals the narrowness of this concern.

When I go up north, I write in a room at the top of the house. If it’s cold, I’ll light the wood-burner. When the sun’s out, I often go for a walk and do my writing in the late afternoon or evening. When I hit a wall or a problem, a walk often brings sudden illumination.

Small tasks, in sufficient quantity, can act like productivity termites, destabilizing the whole foundation of what you’re trying to build. It’s worth going to great lengths to tame them.

In many cases, it’s not the actual execution of a small commitment that generates distraction, it’s instead the cognitive effort required to remember it, to worry about it, and to eventually find time for it in your schedule. If you can minimize this preparatory effort, you can contain the impact of the task itself. Other ideas will focus on containing tasks by preventing them from arriving on your lists in the first place. In both cases, the goal is limiting damage.

“Once you get to the point where your regular work is getting done with minimum of thinking,” I wrote in one of my early articles on this topic, “you’ve hit that low-stress sweet spot where you can start turning your attention to the bigger things.”

A freelancer, for example, might schedule sending invoices for Monday morning, while a professor might schedule reviewing grant reports for Fridays, right after lunch. Once you get used to accomplishing a specific type of task at the same times on the same days, the overhead required for their execution plummets.

A key refinement to support this task-centric version of autopilot scheduling is to leverage rituals and locations. If you can connect a regularly recurring task block to a specific location, perhaps paired with a little ritual that helps initiate your efforts, you’re more likely to fall into a regular rhythm of accomplishing this work.

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From a slow productivity perspective, however, there’s good news embedded in this otherwise discouraging account. If much of your perceived busyness comes from talking about tasks instead of actually executing them, you might be less overloaded than you realize. In other words, if you can reduce the footprint of these conversations, the pile of actual, concrete obligations that remains might not be so forbidding.

The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussions that can be used to resolve many different issues. Set aside the same thirty to sixty minutes every afternoon, and advertise this time to your colleagues and clients. Make it clear that you’re always available during this period—your door is open, Zoom activated, Slack channels monitored, phone on—to chat about any and all relevant questions or requests. If someone sends you an ambiguous message, instead of letting it instigate yet another stretched-out volley of back-and-forth missives, reply, “Happy to help! Grab me during one of my upcoming office hours and we’ll figure out the details.”

When you separate work from the ad hoc conversations that surround it, what you’re left with might not be all that intimidating.

The cure isn’t to be found in smarter task systems, but instead in a return to something simpler, and more human: regular conversation.

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In general, strategies that require people to do more work can prove effective for containing tasks. Consider, for example, a more palatable version of my New Yorker suggestion that I call the reverse task list. It works as follows: Create a public task list for each of the major categories of tasks you tackle in your job. You can use a shared document for this purpose. (If you’re feeling more advanced, a shared Trello board is perhaps even better.) When someone asks you to take on some small obligation, direct them to add it themselves to the relevant shared task list; writing it, for example, into the shared doc, or creating a new card for it on the shared Trello board. Critically, make it clear that all of the information you’ll need to complete the task should be included in their entry. Reverse task lists require people to spend more time specifying exactly what they need from you, which simplifies the later execution of their requests. You can also use these public lists to keep people updated on the status of the tasks you’re currently handling, saving them from having to bother you with “How’s it going?” messages. Finally, these lists clearly communicate your current workload. If a colleague encounters an overstuffed reverse task list, they might think twice about giving you something new to do.

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At first, these strategies for making the burden of task assignments more symmetric can feel self-indulgent. You might even worry that others will be offended by your brashness. In reality, however, if you’re diplomatic in your phrasing, and deploy sufficient self-deprecation, you can introduce these systems without attracting too much ire. Indeed, your peers might end up appreciating the added structure, as it provides clarity about how or when their requested work will actually be accomplished.

When selecting new projects, assess your options by the number of weekly requests, questions, or small chores you expect the project to generate. Prioritize options that minimize this number. Most people focus on the difficulty of a project, or the total amount of time it might require. But once you understand the havoc wreaked by an overstuffed to-do list, it makes sense that the task footprint of a project should be taken just as seriously.

And yet, in this scenario, I would definitely choose the report option for a simple reason: it will generate many fewer tasks. To organize the conference will require endless coordination with different clients, as well as the need to arrange room rentals and expert speakers, not to mention the hassle of catering, answering logistical questions, and so on. There will be last-minute issues to resolve and countless back-and-forth exchanges—with each obligation demanding its own slice of your mental energy. The client conference, in other words, is a task engine—an efficient generator of numerous urgent small things to do. The market report, on the other hand, represents a different type of energy investment. It will require regular long blocks of time in which you must gather data, process it, and reflect on what it all means. This will be mentally demanding and, at times, perhaps tedious. But it will generate very few urgent small tasks and therefore make few demands on your attention outside of the blocks of time you’ve already set aside to work on it. Writing the report might not be easy, but the decision to choose it over the task engine represented by the messy event organization project should be.

Another thing that caught my attention about Jenny was the pride she clearly took in her professional software subscriptions. As she writes in her book Free Time, one of the steps she took to reconfigure her business toward a slow productivity model was to spend more money on “going pro” with useful software services, instead of, as she put it, “squeezing everything I could out of their freemium editions.”

From the context of slow productivity, investments of this type make a lot of sense. The more you can tame the small commitments pulling at your attention, the more sustainably and effectively you can work on things that matter. There are, of course, many options beyond software services for trading your money for reduced task lists. I know many entrepreneurs who reclaim a substantial amount of time by hiring and training “operations managers” to take on more of their daily details of running their businesses. I wouldn’t be able to reasonably fit my podcast into my schedule, for example, if not for the producer I hired to come to my studio on recording days and take care of all the details surrounding the release of each week’s episode. I could do all of this work on my own. Indeed, I used to when the show was new. But I learned from experience that the number of annoying details this generates is sufficiently high that if I had to keep handling it myself, I’d probably have given up on the show altogether. Hiring professional service providers is another effective investment for keeping your task lists contained. Returning to my own example, I pay an accountant to manage my books, a professional agency to handle everything related to my podcast advertising, a web consultant to keep all of my online properties humming, and a lawyer to answer the many small questions that pop up in the normal course of running my writing-related business. Every effective entrepreneur I know shares a similar commitment to paying people who know what they’re doing so they don’t have to do the work, at a lower level of quality, all by themselves. In the short term, all of this costs money. If your company is new, or your income still modest, it can be unnerving to see a nontrivial percent of these earnings go right back out the door. But in the long term, this off-loading of the small can provide the mental space needed to make the types of large breakthroughs, and produce the type of value, that will make these monthly expenses suddenly seem trivial in scope. Don’t spend more than you can afford. But recognize that a practitioner of slow productivity cannot afford to spend nothing.

The first principle of slow productivity provides what is ostensibly professional advice. Working on fewer things can paradoxically produce more value in the long term: overload generates an untenable quantity of nonproductive overhead.

What was needed was time and space to adjust and grieve. What was provided instead were upgraded Zoom accounts and cheerful email exhortations to “stay productive.” It was crazy-making.

In a push-based process, each stage pushes work onward to the next as soon as it’s done. In a pull-based process, by contrast, each stage pulls in new work only when it’s ready for it. At Broad, this pull methodology was implemented in a simple manner. Each stage maintained a tray to place the completed samples. The next stage would pull in new samples from this same tray. If the outgoing tray at a given stage began to fill, then the technicians filling it would slow down their work. In some cases, they would even offer their assistance to the next stage to help them catch up. Shifting to a pull-based operation made backlogs impossible: the pace of the pipeline would adapt to whatever stage was running slowest. This transparency, in turn, helped the workers identify places where the system was out of balance. “A perpetually full pull box means either the downstream task is moving too slowly or the upstream one is moving too quickly,” write the authors. “An empty pull box at the end of the day means that something is wrong with the operation that feeds it.” The improvements yielded by this approach were quantifiable. The usage rate of the institute’s expensive sequencing machines more than doubled, while the average time to process each sample fell by more than 85 percent.

Inspired in part by this article, I’ve become convinced in recent years that pull workflows are a powerful tool to avoid overload in the knowledge work setting. If you’re in a position to change the way your company or team organizes its work, moving to a pull strategy, similar to that deployed by the technology development group at the Broad Institute, can yield spectacular returns. Not only will your organization complete projects at a faster rate, your team members will revel in their newfound liberation from the scourge of having too much to do.

SIMULATED PULL, PART 1: HOLDING TANK AND ACTIVE LISTS

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SIMULATED PULL, PART 2: INTAKE PROCEDURE

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SIMULATED PULL, PART 3: LIST CLEANING

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The great scientists of past eras would have found our urgency to be self-defeating and frantic. They were interested in what they produced over the course of their lifetimes, not in any particular short-term stretch.

Above all else, these scientists tended to adopt a perspective on their professional efforts that was more philosophical than instrumental. In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities.

Our exhausting tendency to grind without relief, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, is more arbitrary than we recognize. It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.

This approach is not only more sustainable and humane, it’s also arguably the better long-term strategy for producing results that matter.

PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.

There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.

This reorientation toward agriculture threw most of humanity into a state similar to that of the rice-farming Agta, grappling with something new: the continuous monotony of unvarying work, all day long, day after day.

Freed to work in any way they wanted, these traditional knowledge workers—not surprisingly—returned to the more varied effort levels for which humans are wired.

Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. In the moment, it might exude a false sense of usefulness, but when continued over time, it estranges us from our fundamental nature, generates misery, and, from a strictly economic perspective, almost certainly holds us back from reaching our full capabilities. A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.

The pseudo-productivity mindset is uncomfortable with spreading out work on an important project, as time not spent hammering on your most important goals seems like time wasted.

The second principle of slow productivity asks that you approach your work with a more natural pace.

what you would like to accomplish in the next five years or so.

The key to this suggestion, however, is that your time horizon should include at least several years.

The idea that adding more plans to your life can help you slow down might seem paradoxical. The magic here is in the way that this strategy expands the timescales at which you’re evaluating your productivity.

This slow but steady pace was only possible in the context of long-term vision.

If you’re too ambitious, your intensity will remain pegged at a high level as you scramble to try to hit your targets. If you instead give yourself more than enough time to accomplish your objectives, the pace of your work can fall into a more natural groove. A simple heuristic to achieve this latter state is the following: take whatever timelines you first identify as reasonable for upcoming projects, and then double their length.

A reality of personal productivity is that humans are not great at estimating the time required for cognitive endeavors. We’re wired to understand the demands of tangible efforts, like crafting a hand ax, or gathering edible plants. When it comes to planning pursuits for which we lack physical intuition, however, we’re guessing more than we realize, leading us to gravitate toward best-case scenarios for how long things might take. We seem to seek the thrill that comes from imagining a wildly ambitious timeline during our planning: “Wow, if I could finish four chapters this fall, I’d really be ahead of schedule!” It feels good in the moment but sets us up for scrambling and disappointment in the days that follow.

By deploying a blanket policy of doubling these initial estimates, you can counter this instinct toward unjustified optimism. The result: plans that can be completed at a more leisurely pace. The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place. A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand…

We arrive, finally, at the smallest timescale relevant to our discussion of taking longer: the individual day. One of the central joys of slowing down your work pace is that it frees you from needing to attack every day with frantic intensity. To reap this benefit, however, you actually have to simplify your daily schedule. Toning down your seasonal and long-term plans won’t help if you persist in filling every hour of the current day with more work than you can hope to complete. All three timescales must be tamed together. To create more reasonable workdays, I have two suggestions: first, reduce the number of tasks you…

The first suggestion is simple to implement: apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by…

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When it comes to taming appointments, a good target is to ensure that no more than half of the hours in any single day are…

A subtler alternative is to instead implement a “one for you, one for me” strategy. Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an…

An idea we’ll explore later in this chapter is that working at a natural pace will still include periods of intense busyness and effort.

I want to push back on this reaction. Not only is it unsustainable, but it won’t, in the long run, get you any closer to producing work that matters. It’s okay if your efforts to take longer sometimes temporarily lead you off your chosen path. It happens to everyone who has ever tried to accomplish something important.

But the humane response to this reality is obvious: Forgive yourself. Then ask, “What’s next?” The key to meaningful work is in the decision to keep returning to the efforts you find important. Not in getting everything right every time.

This seasonal approach to work, in which you vary the intensity and focus of your efforts throughout the year, resonates with many who encounter it.

As previously argued, for most of recorded human history, the working lives of the vast majority of people on earth were intertwined with agriculture, a (literally) seasonal activity. To work without change or rest all year would have seemed unusual to most of our ancestors. Seasonality was deeply integrated into the human experience.

you have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload.

For now, however, the key observation motivating this advice is that in most knowledge work employment situations, it’s possible to surreptitiously slow down for a handful of months each year without any major consequences.

She runs her own modest corporate-training business, and simply set up her contracts to keep two months of her year clear. This reduces her income, of course, but as Blake explained to me when we discussed her setup, her goal is not to maximize money, but instead to maximize the quality of her life. Adjusting her budget to survive on roughly 20 percent less income each year was a profoundly fair trade for the benefits of an annual extended escape.

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For those who work standard office jobs, with bosses and normal hours, the dream of fully escaping for weeks or months at a time is difficult to achieve. If you work for yourself, however, the main force pushing you into year-round labor is likely cultural convention. Nothing terrible happened to Fleming, Blake, Sullivan, or Young when they decided to step back from their normal work for extended periods. They may have earned somewhat less money in the short term, but I’d wager that, to a person, they found this sacrifice to be very much worth it.

Seasonality doesn’t refer only to slowing work for entire seasons. Varying your intensity at smaller timescales can also prove useful in achieving a more natural pace. The general goal for this proposition is to help you avoid working at a constant state of anxious high energy, with little change, throughout the entire year.

No Meeting Mondays

The key to this idea is maintaining some bastion of peace amid an otherwise cluttered calendar.

See a Matinee Once a Month

There’s something about entering a movie theater on a weekday afternoon that resets your mind. The context is so novel—“most people are at work right now!”—that it shakes you loose from your standard state of anxious reactivity. This mental transformation is cleansing and something you should seek on a regular basis.

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Schedule Rest Projects

The more hardness you face, the more fun you will enjoy soon after. Even if these rest projects are relatively small compared with the work that triggers them, this back-and-forth rhythm can still induce a sustaining experience of variation.

sometimes cultivating a natural pace isn’t just about the time you dedicate to a project, but also the context in which the work is completed.

we shouldn’t underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality.

By taking care in your choice of physical spaces and rituals, you can not only transform the experience of your efforts into something more interesting and sustainable, but more fully tap into your latent brilliance.

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An obvious heuristic for constructing a more effective space for your work is to match elements of your physical surroundings to what it is that you’re trying to accomplish.

Whenever I see a generic home office, with its white bookcases and office-supply-store wall hangings, I can’t help but think about all the ways in which its inhabitant could remake the setting into something more tailored to the work it supports.

The problem is that the home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly. When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (aka our bedroom), our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on whatever pressing work needs to get done. This phenomenon is a consequence of the associative nature of our brains. Because the laundry basket is embedded in a thick, stress-inducing matrix of under-attended household tasks, it creates what the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin describes as “a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get through to consciousness.”

• Inportante

They sought a more advantageous mental space to produce meaningful work. By calming their relational-memory system, they could slow their perception of time and allow their attention to mold itself more completely around a singular pursuit. What’s important about these observations is that the aesthetics of their outside-the-home work spaces didn’t really matter.

What counted was their disconnection from the familiar. A citadel to creative concentration need not be a literal palace. It just needs to be free of laundry baskets.

In my 2021 essay, I used these observations to argue for a separation between remote work and working from home. If organizations wanted to close down central offices, I proposed, they should reinvest this savings to help employees find places to work near their homes. By freeing these workers from the drag of the familiar, overall productivity and satisfaction would rise. Here I’m arguing that you keep something similar in mind during your individual efforts to create more poetic environments for your work. Strange is powerful, even if it’s ugly. When seeking out where you work, be wary of the overly familiar.

• Importante remote work ambiente

In this account of ancient Greek Mystery cults, we learn something important about rituals in general. Their power is found not in the specifics of their activities but in the transformative effect these activities have on the mind. The more striking and notable the behaviors, the better chance they have of inducing useful changes.

• Importancia rituales

My advice here has two parts. First, form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important. Second, in doing so, ensure your rituals are sufficiently striking to effectively shift your mental state into something more supportive of your goals. The second principle of productivity asks that you work at a more natural pace. It’s suitable that this suggestion about rituals closes this chapter, as there are few strategies that will more effectively transform your perception of time, pushing your experience away from anxiety and toward the more sublimely natural, than to add a dash of poetic mystery to your efforts.

• Ejercicio rituales

The minuscule size of the crowd didn’t stop Jewel from “bleeding my heart out.” As she recalls: When these people came, I just bore my soul. I just didn’t pull a punch. And they liked me. I know that sounds superficial, but it wasn’t. It was so authentically me… . It was so raw. And people would cry. And I would cry. And it was such a real connection. For the first time in my life, I had a real meaningful human connection and it wasn’t scary, it felt good.

“I had to put myself in an environment and a position to win as a singer-songwriter,” she recalled thinking, and the way to do that was to be cheap. If she didn’t cost the label much money, Jewel reasoned, they would be less likely to drop her if she wasn’t an immediate hit. This in turn would provide her the freedom needed to sharpen her craft and pursue something new and exceptional with her music. “I was just doing it to put myself in a position to make my art first,” she later explained. “To not leverage my art unduly.” She adopted a motto for her intentional approach: “Hardwood grows slowly.”

Jewel’s strategy of prioritizing art over fame provides a nice case study of the third and final principle of slow productivity: obsess over quality. As captured in the definition below, when you concentrate your attention on producing your best possible work, a more humane slowness becomes inevitable:

PRINCIPLE #3: OBSESS OVER QUALITY Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.

Quality demands that you slow down. Once achieved, it also helps you take control of your professional efforts, providing you the leverage needed to steer even further away from busyness.

Doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are both absolutely necessary components of this philosophy, but if those earlier principles are implemented on their own, without an accompanying obsession with quality, they might serve only to fray your relationship to work over time—casting your professional efforts as an imposition that you must tame. It’s in the obsession over what you’re producing that slowness can transcend its role as just one more strategy on the arid battlegrounds of work-life wars and become a necessary imperative—an engine that drives a meaningful professional life.

Even in knowledge work, however, if we look closer, we can often find hidden among our busy to-do lists one or two core activities that really matter most.

The third and final principle of slow productivity asks that you obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life. The goal here is not about becoming really good for the sake of being really good at your job (though this is nice). As I’ll argue next, you should be focused on the quality of what you produce because quality turns out to be connected in unexpected ways to our desire to escape pseudo-productivity and embrace something slower.

Equally important, this simplification allowed Apple to focus its efforts on quality and innovation: making its small number of products stand out. This was the period, for example, in which Apple’s colorful, bulbous iMac and whimsical clamshell iBook were released. The decision to trade complexity for quality worked. During Jobs’s first fiscal year, when his plan was still being implemented, Apple lost over a billion dollars. The next year, it turned a profit of $309 million. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs explained.

she decided to adopt a different strategy: she would focus her energy on exactly two major goals. This clarity allowed her to step away from a more frenetic, overloaded busyness. “Keeping those two big-picture goals in mind helps me figure out what to say no to and how to pace myself,” she explained.

“A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled on top of frantic work.”

• Importante

The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane nor pragmatic approach to organizing your work. This third principle’s focus on quality, however, transforms professional simplicity from an option to an imperative. Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable. In other words, this third principle helps you stick with the first.

• Importante

As we previously established, pursuing higher quality requires you to slow down.

If you’re fortunate enough for your entrepreneurial endeavors to begin to succeed, he argues, leverage this success to gain more freedom instead of more revenue.

• Importante

In his book, Jarvis asks that you consider an alternative. What if after your reputation spread, instead of growing the business, you increased your hourly rate to $100?Youcouldnowmaintainyoursame$100,000 a year salary while working only twenty-five weeks a year—creating a working life with a head-turning amount of freedom. It would of course be nice to earn a seven-figure payday ten years from now, but given all the stress and hustle required to build a business of the necessary size, it’s not clear that you would really end up in a more remarkable place than the scenario in which you’re right away able to reduce your work by half.

The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities.

• Importante

We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.

• Importante

Obsessing over quality isn’t just about being better at your job. It’s instead a secret weapon of sorts for those interested in a slower approach to productivity.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste… . But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making, isn’t so good … it’s not quite that good… . If you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you gotta know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work… . Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re gonna finish one story… . It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

In his exposition, Glass focuses on the gap that often exists between taste and ability—especially early on in a creative career. It’s easier to learn to recognize what’s good, he notes, than to master the skills required to meet this standard.

There’s a fundamental frustration embedded in this reality. Your taste can guide you toward the best work you’re capable of producing at the moment, but it can also fuel a sense of disappointment in your final result. Glass argues that it’s in our desire to squelch this uneasy self-appraisal—to diminish the distance between our taste and our ability—that improvement happens. His exhortation to those just beginning their careers is to keep putting in the work, as it’s only through this deliberate effort that the gap will close.

His success came not only from a drive to meet his own high standards, but also from his efforts to improve those standards over time.

It’s more exciting to focus on effort, drive, and diligence—but no amount of grinding away at your proverbial radio program or novel manuscript will lead to brilliance if you don’t yet have a good understanding of what brilliance could mean.

The most useful exercise of all, however, was to simply pick a well-regarded movie, read a half dozen or so reviews and essays on it, and then watch the full film.

• Ejercicio

Confronting the gap between what the masters produce and your current capabilities is disheartening. When you study an unrelated field, the pressure is reduced, and you can approach the topic with a more playful openness. When I read great nonfiction writers, I often find myself white-knuckling the book, trying to figure out what they’re doing that I’m not. This is useful, but also exhausting. When I’m studying a great film, by contrast, I can just enjoy it without reservation, and in doing so find a refreshing jolt of inspiration.

“The Inklings was, above all else, a collection of Lewis’s friends… . Like most ‘writers’ groups, their main function was as an audience, to listen and criticize and encourage.”

When you gather with other people who share similar professional ambitions, the collective taste of the group can be superior to that of any individual. This follows, in part, from the diversity of approaches that people take toward creation in a given field. When you combine the opinions of multiple practitioners of your craft, more possibilities and nuance emerge. There’s also a focusing effect that comes from performing for a crowd. When you want to impress other people, or add to the conversations in a meaningful way, your mind slips into a higher gear than what’s easily accessible in solo introspection. Forming a group of like-minded professionals, all looking to improve what they’re doing, provides a shortcut to improving your taste, an instantaneous upgrade to the standard of quality that you’re pursuing.

• Ejercicio

The general idea that quality tools can increase the quality of your work is not unique to my early academic career. Novelists find a burst of energy when they switch from a generic word processor to professional writing software like Scrivener, just as screenwriters feel more capable when they buy Final Draft to compose their movies. It’s true that these more expensive tools include more features than their cheaper counterparts, but the “I’m a professional now” vibe they induce is arguably just as valuable. We see a similar effect in podcasters who buy the $300 Shure microphone famously used by Joe Rogan. In most cases, their audience wouldn’t care about the minor quality difference between that professional mic and a cheaper USB option, but to the aspiring podcaster, it’s a signal to themselves that they’re taking the pursuit seriously. We also see these dynamics at play when computer programmers set up elaborate digital workstations featuring two or three monitors. These programmers will swear that the ability to see multiple windows at once increases productivity. This is true to an extent, but earlier generations of computer programmers seemed to be plenty productive before the recent introduction of graphic drivers capable of supporting multiple displays. Part of the power of these setups is found in their complexity, which puts the user in a specialized mindset, ready to do the hard work of writing efficient programs.

The pursuit of quality is not a casual endeavor. If you want your mind on board with your plans to evolve your abilities, then investing in your tools is a good way to start.

• Ejercicio

Obsession requires you to get lost in your head, convinced that you can do just a little bit better given some more time. Greatness requires the ability to subsequently pull yourself out of your self-critical reverie before it’s too late.

When your output is only one step among many on a collaborative path toward creative progress, the pressure to get everything just right is reduced. Your goal is instead reduced to knocking the metaphorical ball back over the net with enough force for the game to proceed. Here we find as good a general strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism as I’ve seen: Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about, but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection.

• Importante ejercicio

Morissette’s decision to walk away from upbeat pop shares obvious similarities with Jewel’s decision to turn down a million-dollar record deal—both artists were willing to take risks in pursuit of a larger goal. The details of these decisions, however, differ in subtle but important ways. Jewel turned down the big money because she knew she needed more time to develop herself into a professional musician. This personifies my earlier claim that quality requires you to slow down. Morissette, by contrast, was already a successful professional musician when she left pop. Her change was instead a high-stakes bet on her ability to be even better. Losing her record deal was scary, but this fear provided her the drive needed to push her abilities to the point where she was able to create something miraculous during those epic recording sessions in Glen Ballard’s home studio.

This proposition argues that betting on yourself in this manner—with nontrivial stakes for failure but attractive rewards for success—is a good general strategy for pushing the quality of your work to a new level.

Simply by placing yourself in a situation where there exists pressure to succeed, even if moderate, can provide an important accelerant in your quest for quality.

The goal in betting on yourself, as you’ll see, is to push yourself to a new level without accidentally also pushing yourself into an unnaturally busy workload.

These authors demonstrate one of the more approachable strategies for betting on yourself: temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question. The stakes here are modest: If you fail to reach the quality level that you seek, the main consequence is that during a limited period you’ve lost time you could have dedicated to more rewarding (or restful) activities. But this cost is sufficiently annoying to motivate increased attention toward your efforts.

This spare time strategy, of course, is not a sustainable way to work in the long term. Sacrificing too many of your leisure hours to extra work can violate both of the first two principles of slow productivity. But when deployed in moderation, dedicated to a specific project for a temporary period, this act of giving up something meaningful in pursuit of higher quality can become an effective bet on yourself.

Committing your free time to a project is one of the easier ways to bet on yourself. A more drastic option is to rely on the project for income. Few forces induce more focus than the need to pay bills. It’s here, however, that we wander into some potentially dangerous territory.

It’s in these details that we find a balanced strategy. Don’t haphazardly quit your job to pursue a more meaningful project. Wait instead to make a major change until you have concrete evidence that your new interest satisfies the following two properties: first, people are willing to give you money for it, and second, you can replicate the result.

• Importante

It might instead mean that you reduce your hours, or take an unpaid leave. The key is to harness the stark motivation generated by the need for a pursuit to really work out.

If you announce your work in advance to people you know, you’ll have created expectations. If you fail to produce something notable, you’ll pay a social cost in terms of embarrassment. Not surprisingly, this, too, can act as a powerful motivator.

There are few things we value more than the esteem of our fellow humans. Announcing a schedule for your work hijacks this quirk of our species’ evolution to sharpen our focus on producing the best work possible.

Assault on Precinct 13 is a cool film, but Halloween is great. The difference was the scale of investment supporting Carpenter. The easy explanation for this observation is that more money enables better production quality. This is partially true. Carpenter, along with his then unknown director of photography, Dean Cundey, spent nearly half of Akkad’s $300,000 on brand-new, lightweight Panavision cameras—a new technology at the time that allowed them to film in long, gliding Steadicam shots while maintaining a cinematic aspect ratio.

Attracting other people to invest in you and your idea is a dramatic bet on yourself and your ability to not let others down. In the drive to avoid this disappointment, greatness can be found.

Slowing down isn’t about protesting work. It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.

• Importante

Slow productivity is just one response among many to a much bigger problem: The world of cognitive work lacks coherent ideas about how our efforts should be organized and measured.

What’s needed is more intentional thinking about what we mean by “productivity” in the knowledge sector—seeking ideas that start from the premise that these efforts must be sustainable and engaging for the actual humans doing the work. Slow productivity is one example of this thinking, but it shouldn’t be the only one.

And if somebody says to me, “You’re a prolific writer”—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

• Importante

If you collect modest drops of meaningful effort for 365 days, McPhee reminds us, you’ll end the year with a bucket that’s pretty damn full. This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.

We’ve tried the fast approach for at least the past seventy years. It isn’t working. The time has come to try something slower.