Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

This third principle’s focus on quality, however, transforms professional simplicity from an option to an imperative.

Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable.

Ccdr report jan u.s. Experience

this third principle helps you stick w...

Jarvis. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is that Jarvis does for a living, other than it seems to involve a computer screen and that it allows him to spend notable amounts of time outside, going on hikes and fiddling with his gardens. In some sense, as we’ll see, this inscrutability is the point.

What if after your reputation spread, instead of growing the business, you increased your hourly rate to $100? You could now maintain your same $100,000 a year salary while working only twenty-five weeks a year—creating a working life with a head-turning amount of freedom.

Before long, he was a busy web designer living in downtown Vancouver “in a glass cube in the sky.”

more revenue would mean a better apartment and more prestige.

As they discovered, frugality is easy when you’re living in the woods of Vancouver Island, as there aren’t that many opportunities to spend money.

Freed from the need to increase his income to keep up with city expenses, Jarvis leveraged his growing skills to keep his work responsibilities flexible and contained.

instead pursuing just enough work to engage his curiosity while supporting his slow, inexpensive lifestyle. “I

typically rise with the sun and haven’t ever owned an alarm clock,” Jarvis explains. “While my coffee brews, I stand at a window and watch wild rabbits frolic, hummingbirds buzz, or the occasional crafty raccoon attempt to ruin my garden.”

The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities.

Critical. Be so good you can be on your own terms

We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income

that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.

!! Tradeoff that i value highly.

consultant stripping meetings and email out of the heart of the workday, or Paul Jarvis walking the tree-lined path to his extensive gardens at his house

Glass correctly identifies “taste” as critical for achieving quality. The act of creation can be decomposed into a series of spontaneous eruptions of new possibilities, which must then be filtered against some ineffable understanding of what works and what doesn’t—the visceral intuition that we call taste.

“You don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that.”

Your taste can guide you toward the best work you’re capable of producing at the moment, but it can also fuel a sense of disappointment in your final result.

Glass argues that it’s in our desire to squelch this uneasy self-appraisal—to diminish the distance between our taste and our ability—that improvement happens.

it misses an equally critical element: the development of your

Glass’s taste in 2022 is more refined than it was in 1986. His success came not only from a drive to meet his own high standards, but also from his efforts to improve those standards over time.

instruction, which is minimal, but instead in the elite community they provide to the developing novelist. When you spend two years reading and critiquing and admiring work by other young writers pushing their prose in new and interesting directions, your standards for what writing can achieve sharpen. You don’t have to attend one of these programs, of course, to succeed in literature. Colson Whitehead, for example, is undoubtedly one of the most talented novelists of his generation, and yet he never studied beyond his bachelor’s degree. But there’s a reason why MFA programs are so common among successful writers: they provide an effective training regimen for literary taste. When we idolize an Ira Glass–style obsession with quality, we often overlook the importance of developing our internal filters first. It’s more exciting to focus on effort, drive, and diligence—but

no amount of grinding away at your proverbial radio program or novel manuscript will lead to brilliance if you don’t yet have a good understanding of what brilliance could mean.

What follows is a collection of practical suggestions designed to help improve your understanding of ...

It wasn’t until I turned forty, however, that I thought it might be fun to study the art of filmmaking more systematically.

my book Digital Minimalism, I had written extensively about the importance of high-quality leisure activities.

wasn’t until I hit that notable midlife birthday that I realized I wasn’t following my own advice. Between my work as a professor and writer, my role as a father, and a tendency to fill any remaining free time with reading, I didn’t really have anything I could identify as a serious ho...

As I read about his use of nonlinear narratives and reconstruction of genre tropes, I began to realize that my study of film was affecting the way I thought about my own writing.

The bigger observation is that there can be utility in immersing yourself in appreciation for fields that are different from your own.

When you study an unrelated field, the pressure is reduced, and you can approach the topic with a more playful openness.

met every week or so at Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen, where they would read works in progress and discuss their literary ambitions.

tradition of meeting one morning a week for a beer and discussion at the Eagle and Child, a pub in the center of Oxford. They called themselves the Inklings.

But as Edwards argues, such analysis was both “over-solemn” and “exaggerated.” As he elaborates, “The Inklings was, above all else, a collection of Lewis’s friends. . . . Like most ‘writers’ groups, their main function was as an audience, to listen and criticize and encourage.”

When you gather with other people who share similar professional ambitions, the collective taste of the group can be superior to that of any individual.

There’s also a focusing effect that comes from performing for a crowd.

mind slips into a higher gear than what’s easily accessible in solo introspection. Forming