Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

Finally, when cleaning your lists, look for projects that have become redundant or have been rendered obsolete by subsequent developments.

Simulating a pull-based workflow works only if you maintain transparency.

These great scientists of times past were clearly “productive” by any reasonable definition of the term.

someone literally changes our understanding of the universe?

the same time, however, the pace at which they toiled on their momentous discoveries seemed, by modern standards, to be uneven,...

It then took another three decades before he finally published his masterwork, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,

classic observations on the bright comet that crossed the night skies of Europe in 1577 weren’t fully analyzed and published until 1588.

this piece, I observed that when it comes to our understanding of productivity, timescale matters.

When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the efforts of historic thinkers like Copernicus and Newton can seem uneven and delayed. When instead viewed at the slow scale of years, their efforts suddenly seem undeniably and impressively fruitful.

1896 countryside vacation was far from her mind when Marie Curie took the stage in Stockholm seven years later to rece...

In contemporary work, it became clear, our bias is toward evaluating our efforts at the fast scale.

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.

Without a manager looking over their shoulder, or clients pestering them about responding to emails, they didn’t feel pressure to be maximally busy every day. They were instead comfortable taking longer on projects and adopting a more forgiving and variable rhythm to their work.

Curie wasn’t unique in her decision to retreat for a summer of reflection and recharging. Galileo enjoyed visits to a villa owned by his ...

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.

The general lifestyle of the scientist, by this logic, had a worthiness of its own, independent of any specifi...

Little value was to be gained in rushing, as the work itse...

Renaissance-style understanding of professional efforts as one element among many that combine to cr...

“He studied literature and poetry, attended the theatre regularly and continued to play th...

In the sixteenth century, Galileo’s professional life was more leisurely and less intense than that of the average twenty-first-century knowledge worker. Yet he still managed to change the course of human intellectual history.

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’s a reason, it will turn out, why all of these scientists converged on the same, more considered approach to their efforts: it’s much more natural than the homogenized busyness that defines the modern workday.

clever timeline heuristics and simulated quiet seasons.

Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency.

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.

have walked the earth for roughly three hundred thousand years.

For all but the last ten thousand or so of these many years, we lived as seminomadic hunters and gatherers.

As researchers like Lee are quick to emphasize, these extant foraging groups are not left over from an ancient age, but are instead modern individuals living in, and connected to, the modern world.

fuller understanding of the daily realities of hunting and gathering as a primary means of survival,

After fifteen months of field research, extending from the fall of 1963 into the early winter of 1965, Lee was ready to present his results to the world.

His data validates Lee’s claim that hunter-gatherers enjoy more leisure time than agriculturalists, though perhaps not to the same extreme as what was originally reported.

how this leisure time was distributed throughout the day. As Dyble explained, while the farmers engaged in “monotonous, continuous work,” the pace of the foragers’ schedules was more varied, with long respites interspersed throughout their daily efforts. “Hunting trips required a long hike through the forest, so you’d be out all day, but you’d have breaks,”

A busy start to a fishing expedition might also involve a long nap in the boat during the midday doldrums.

Compared with the activities of their foraging brethren, these farming efforts struck Dyble as “monotonous.”

This side-by-side comparison underscores the degree to which our experience of work has transformed during the recent past

hunting and gathering to agriculture—the Neolithic Revolution—only really picked up speed somewhere aro...

completely disappeared from the human story. This reorientation toward agriculture threw most of humanity into a state similar to that of the rice-fa...

continuous monotony of unvarying work, all day...

agriculture didn’t demand this homogenized effort...

Humanity soon developed rituals to structure and make sense of these on-and-off rhythms. Harvest festivals encouraged the intense work required each fall to bring in the crops, while elaborate winter celebrations helped a...

ancient Germanic peoples, for example, the multiday feasts surrounding Yule, replete with animal sacrifices and the veneration of the dead around bright-burning fires, transformed ...

The Industrial Revolution stripped away those last vestiges of variatio...

every day a harvest day—continuous, monotonous labor ...

his theory of Entfremdung (estrangement), which argued that the industrial order alienated us from our basic human nature.

this invisible factory we’d constructed for ourselves we didn’t have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits. Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence:

Our estrangement from the rhythms of work that dominated the first two hundred eighty thousand years of our species’ existence was now complete.

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.

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.