Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

Maybe you always do your English lit reading after your 10:00 a.m. class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, using the same table, on the same floor of the same nearby library.

But if this task is on his autopilot schedule for the current day, he will, without much consideration, simply work on it. “Once you get to the point where your regular work is getting done with minimum of thinking,”

“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.

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.

Containing tasks is not about escaping the small. It’s instead about making these efforts as painless as possible. Seeking, as I once put it, that “low-stress sweet spot.”

docket-clearing meetings.

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.

In general, people are often too focused on their own problems to care about how you’re solving your own.

Organizing the conference is also simpler in the sense that it doesn’t require hard thinking, while the report will require the mastery of complicated information and the development of confident predictions.

And yet, in this scenario, I would definitely choose the report option for a simple reason: it will generate many fewer tasks.

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, ...

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 bloc...

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.

could do all of this work on my own. Indeed, I used to when the show was new.

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.

Working on fewer things can paradoxically produce more value in the long term:

overload generates an untenable quantity of nonproductive overhead.

Under a pseudo-productivity regime, by contrast, such demands are more implicit and self-reinforced. You’re judged on how much total work you visibly tackle from a never-ending supply of available tasks, but no one is going to tell you specifically how much is enough—that’s up to you. Good luck! This

your job, like so many in the era of pseudo-productivity, leaves it up to you to manage your own load, then you have every right to step up to this challenge with intention and determination.

also provides a response for those who feel like their work is corroding away all the other attributes of their existence.

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.

Any engineer could push a new idea into consideration at any time, and because the engineers were smart, they came up with lots of ideas. The system soon became bogged down by its own excessive ambition.

could be pushed onto their plate haphazardly to one in which they would pull in new work only when they were ready for it.

The key is to simulate a pull-based assignment system in such a way that the people you work with don’t even realize you’re trying something new.

as an individual without control over the habits of your colleagues or clients.

is tracking all projects to which you’re currently committed on a list divided into two sections: “holding tank” and “active.”

You can use a text file on

The active position of the list, by contrast, should be limited to three projects at most.

When scheduling your time, you should focus your attention only on the projects on your active

When you complete one of these projects, you can remove it from your list. This leaves open a free slot that you can fill by pulling i...

In maintaining these two lists, you’re simulating the core dynamic of a pull-based workflow. The number of things on which you’re actively working is limited to a fixed, small quantity,

acknowledgment message that formally acknowledges the project

(1) a request for any additional details you need from the source before you can start the project, (2) a count of the number of existing projects already on your lists, and (3) an estimate of when you expect to complete this new work.

Be clear about what’s going on, and deliver on your promises, even if these promises have to change.

We often believe those we work with care only about getting results as fast as possible. But this isn’t true. Often what they really want is the ability to hand something off and not have to worry about whether or not it will be accomplished.

If they trust you, they’ll give you latitude to finish things on your own terms.

Relief, in other words, trumps...

It’s common, for example, for a boss to shoot off an idea to an employee on a whim.

When this request gets formalized, however, and the boss sees that they need to provide you with more information,

“On second thought, let’s put a pin in this one for now.” Sometimes, a little friction is all it takes to slow ...

You should update and clean your lists once a week.

Prioritize what’s due soon, and send updates for any work that you know you’re not going to finish by the time promised.

remove from your holding tank projects that are languishing. If you’ve delayed the same project again and again, for example, this might be a good sign that you’re not really equipped to handle it, or that it falls outside your comfort zone.

consider just blunt...

I know I said I would work on the new client section of our website, but I’ve found myself, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed, delaying this work again and again. I think this is a sign that I don’t really know enough about what we’re trying to accomplish here to make progress. Unless you object, I would like to take this off my list for now. I think we probably need to engage help from the web development team to make real progress on this goal.