Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true product...

how you leverage the autonomy and ambiguity intertwined into most modern knowledge sector jobs, you might be surprised by the degree to which you do have the power to transform the pace of your work

After graduating, Miranda took a job as a substitute teacher. His father urged him to apply to law school.

also allowed him to explore and develop as both a creative and a human being.

but I also knew that the immediate pressures of MIT would, if unchecked, push me away from this goal.

In response, I detailed a vision of how I wanted the next half decade to unfold.

I would, I decided, find a way to keep publishing books while...

it gave me the breathing room I needed to feel comfortable even when progress wasn’t immediately being made.

Because my vision was established on the scale of multiple years, I could tolerate busy periods in which academic demands left little room for writing.

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.

But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place. A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.

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.

Toning down your seasonal and long-term plans won’t help if you persist in filling every hour of the current day

All three timescales must be tamed together. To create more reasonable workdays, I have two suggestions: first, reduce the number of tasks you schedule, and second, redu...

“one for you, one for me” strategy. Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an equal amount of time that day to protect.

you ensure that unavoidable peaks in intensity will be followed by more leisurely troughs.

how Miranda would take long, aimless walks with his dog through the streets of New York City, listening to backing music for a new song on a loop in his headphones, waiting for melodic inspiration to strike. A period during which Miranda was taking his time.

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.

Even just listing O’Keeffe’s résumé during this period is tiring. Living it must have been downright exhausting. Somehow throughout these years of hustle, O’Keeffe managed, off and on, to keep studying and developing her emerging abstract artistic style, but these efforts weren’t easy. She would take long breaks

“Gosh! What days & nights we’ve had together. Calm beautiful

Mad static ones.—Dream hours.—Hours & days of quiet wonder.”

“days of quiet ...

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 don’t need access to thirty-six acres of rural lakefront property to cultivate a beneficial seasonality.

at the core of quiet quitting is a pragmatic observation: you have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload. The tactics of quiet quitters are straightforward. They suggest, for example, that you don’t volunteer for extra work, actually shut down at five o’clock, be comfortable saying no, and dilute an expectation of being constantly accessible over email and chat.

these little changes can make a big difference on the psychological impact of your workload.

Fleming made a deal with Kemsley that required him to work only ten months each

Each year, in fulfillment of his wartime promise to himself, he could now escape the dreary London winters to revel in the intentional slowness of life at Goldeneye.

Initially, Fleming’s retreats were purely hedonistic. When on the island, he would snorkel in the morning,

enduring characters of modern genre literature, much as Georgia O’Keeffe discovered her signature artistic style in the southern Adirondacks.

We can imagine a similar relief and creative charge if only we, too, could find a way to spend extended time away from our normal professional routines each year.

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

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.

Sullivan typically posts a midsummer essay about his impending vacation, often rich in enthusiastic anticipation. He then returns with new energy several weeks later, much to the satisfaction of both him and his readers.

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.

No Meeting Mondays

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.

day. If you feel guilty about this decision, it helps to remember all of the extra hours you’ve spent checking email in the evening or working on your laptop over the weekend.

Missing the occasional weekday afternoon only balances this ledger.

The key observation here is that even a modest schedule of weekday escapes can be sufficient to diminish the exhaustion of an otherwise metronome-regular routine.

To compensate, block off some afternoons later in that month to, say, finally watch Francis Ford Coppola’s entire

The key is to obtain a proportional balance. Hard leads to fun. The more hardness you face, the more fun you will enjoy soon after.

You can propose the idea of making cycles a formal policy, pointing to the Basecamp handbook as support. Or, if you worry about how this suggestion will be received, you can quietly implement cycles without anyone knowing.

Part impressionistic travelogue, part meditation on the philosophy of the Beat Generation, Kerouac’s bestseller was defined by its jazz-inspired, fluid, stream-of-consciousness

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.