Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

only did he write his book in a three-week burst of frenzied energy, but he typed the manuscript onto a long continuous scroll of teletype paper, allowing him to compose his words without having

As his brother-in-law, John Sampas, later detailed, “So he just rolled it along, almost breathlessly, quickly, fast, because the road is fast, to quote Jack.”

But] that’s not true. I mean, he was really a supreme craftsman and devoted to writing and the writing process.” Put another way, On the Road reads fast, but the pace at which it was composed, like most work that stands the test of time, was actually quite slow.

Well, as I say, I don’t like buildings. The only record I broke in school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot, with books—Whitman in the knapsack—but I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me, and then worked them into poems, later.

in The Poetics of Space, we shouldn’t underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality.

“Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”

instead where you played as a child with your siblings on rainy summer afternoons. Its surfaces and details are tangled into a ...

These forces affect our professio...

This outdoor context pulled on rich threads from her past, resulting in a perception of work that was more alive, varied, and natural in its pace than if she had spent those exact same ...

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.

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.

When composing Hamilton, for example, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrangled permission to write in the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the oldest surviving house in Manhattan, which served as both the headquarters for George Washington during the Battle of Harlem

make a living writing thrillers based on preposterous mysterious conspiracies, it might be exactly what you need to find your rhythm.

this same principle can be applied with similar effect to many nonwriting professions:

Dual clock; development

an advertising executive might find inspiration in mid-century modern, Mad Men–style office decor;

his various production offices over the years. He used to love tinkering with electronic gizmos as a kid, and thinks the presence of the tools helps recenter him on the primal importance of building things from scratch.

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

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 tr...

this context, work tumbles forward as one stress-inducing...

This is why Benchley retreated to the furnace factory and McCullough to his garden shed. 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 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.

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.

Strange is powerful, even if it’s ugly. When seeking out where you work, be wary of the overly familiar.

“In a superb summary of the religious process, Aristotle would later make it clear that the mystai did not go to Eleusis to learn (mathein) anything,” summarizes Armstrong, “but to have an experience (pathein) and a radical change of mind (diatethenai).”

but in the transformative effect these activities have on the mind.

more striking and notable the behaviors, the better chance they have of inducing useful changes.

As her mileage increased and she journeyed deeper into a forest setting that pulled on so many emotional anchor points, her mental state transformed...

Presumably, if she had instead simply sat just inside the wood’s edge, the impact would have been blunted. The ritual of the long walk was as necessa...

First, form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important.

doing so, ensure your rituals are sufficiently striking to effectively shift your mental state into something more supportive of your goals.

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.

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.

Soon after that, record executives began showing up in limousines to hear the young sensation. “Every label came down, every label,” Jewel recalled. Then they began flying her to meetings in fancy offices. A bidding war erupted, eventually leading to a million-dollar signing bonus being put on the table.

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.

This focus on quality over quick returns became obvious with her choice of producer.

At one point, she even signed on with a group called Earth Jam, which would provide her free transportation to her evening gigs if she agreed to participate in an environmentally themed showcase they put on for local high schools during the day.

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.

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.

similarly varied. 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.

When professors go up for promotion, for example, most of what occupies our days falls away from consideration. The decision comes down to exhaustive confidential letters, solicited from prominent scholars, that discuss and debate the importance and impact of our research on our field.

In the end, great research papers are what...

no amount of to-do list martyrdom can save us. Other knowledge work positions have similar core activitie...

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.

This same effect applies to many different fields: obsessing over quality often demands that you slow down, as the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness.

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.

quality and slowness exists at smaller scales as well. My

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