Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

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.

there’s a social-capital cost, as you’re causing some mild harm to a colleague and potentially signaling yourself to be uncooperative or a loafer. But, if you feel sufficiently stressed abo...

provides psychological cover to skip the Zoom. You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party.

It ensures that you’ll remain permanently in this exhausting liminal space that immediately precedes the overhead tax tipping point.

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

“The focus and attention I have given to my reports, and the preparation required to withstand hostile depositions and cross-examination, has helped me produce the best work of my career thus

when his company put in place a policy that gave its consultants allotments of nonbillable hours that they could use for whatever they wanted. “This has been life changing,” he explained. “I was able to learn and branch out into new areas . . . it reengaged me in the field . . . it has reminded me why I enjoy all this in the first place.”

decided to instead break up this nearly complete work into smaller pieces, publishing one short paper every six months or so. “This

For five years, he toiled in secret, often in his attic office, systematically avoiding larger projects and obligations.

Crucially, he was systematic in this reduction.

He didn’t resolve, in some generic fashion, to try to take on less; he instead put in place specific rules (e.g., no conferences), habits (e.g., work from home as much as possible), and even ploys (e.g., trickling out his already completed research)—all directed toward minimizing the number of big items tugging at his attention.

applying limits at different scales of work at the same time, from your overarching missions, to your ongoing projects, to your daily goals.

What follows, then, are three limit strategies, one for each of these three scales.

any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional

They’re what ultimately decide where you aim your attention in your job. It’s easy to let your collection of missions expand, as the embrace of a big new goal can be exciting in the moment.

Any attempt to succeed with our first principle of slow productivity, therefore, must begin with the reduction of your main objectives.

It’s hard to specify the optimal number of missions, but generally, less is better than more.

There’s a romance to focusing on a single pursuit, but this level of simplicity is typically accessible only to the most purely creative fields—Hemingway at Key West, banging...

Three missions still feel compatible with slow productivity, especially if I’m careful to control it (see the next proposition for more on that), but, if I’m honest, I’m nostalgic for the simplicity of two, and salivate over the idea of one.

slashed her income streams and reduced her staff to only three part-time employees. She now works, on average, twenty hours a week and takes off two full months each year for vacation.

likely, of course, that Blake would be making more money if she hustled to support more missions. When you’re enjoying twenty-hour workweeks, however, it’s hard to care too much about such possibilities.

Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session.

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time . . . it needs a lot of concentration . . . if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everybody I don’t do anything.

There are only so many times you can offer an unqualified no without either losing your job or being sidelined as an unreliable curmudgeon.

appeal to the hard but unimpeachable reality of your actual available time.

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,”

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.

This can be solved by limiting the time you make available for project work (remember Jenny Blake’s twenty-hour workweeks)

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,

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.

But when it comes to expending efforts on important, bigger initiatives, stay focused on just one target per day.

preferred to get lost in a single project at a time, obsessing over it until she could release it fully to move on to what came next. I was convinced that the slowness of working on just one important thing per day would hold me back.

I was, of course, wrong and she was right. 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.

Hall became Franklin’s foreman, handling the affairs of the shop with a skill and efficiency that not even the fastidious Franklin could fault.

But Franklin was happy with this trade of money for time to pursue more meaningful projects. Indeed, a certain joy in this newfound freedom infuses Franklin’s correspondence from this period. “I am settling my old accounts and hope soon to be quite a master of my own time,” he wrote to a friend in London in 1748, before elaborating:

am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give my self, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness, leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large . . . on such points as may produce something for the common benefit of mankind, uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.

Franklin’s optimistic predictions for the potential of life without “tasks” and the “little cares and fatigues of business” proved accurate. In 1748, he began an obs...

Soon after, in part owing to his sudden celebrity, Franklin was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly, thrusting him, for the first time, into provincial politics in a serious way. We all know what happened next.

What makes Benjamin Franklin’s colonial midlife crisis notable to a modern audience is his general belief that taming the impact of small details in your professional life opens up space to pursue bigger goals.

“The phone rings, the doorbell sounds, there’s shopping to be done or an urgent email demanding a reply.”

Surrounding these books are numerous pages of articles and hours of podcast discussions where I’ve also tackled this topic in depth.

culled from my years of experience battling distracting task lists. This advice is unified by the notion of containment.

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 impa...

Slow productivity requires that you free yourself from the constraints of the small so that you can invest more meaningfully in the big.