Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

you have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload.

What if we stopped positioning quiet quitting as a general response to the “meaninglessness of work,” and instead saw it as a more specific tactic to achieve seasonality? What if, for example, you decided to quiet quit a single season each year: maybe July and August, or that distracted period between Thanksgiving and the New Year? You wouldn’t make a big deal about this decision. You would just, for lack of a better word, quietly implement it before returning without fanfare to a more normal pace.

Don’t schedule appointments on Mondays. You don’t need to make a public announcement about this decision. When people ask when you’re free for a meeting or a call, just stop suggesting slots on that particular day. Because Monday represents only 20 percent of your available time, you can usually implement a meeting ban of this type without other people feeling like you’re excessively unavailable. The benefit to you, however, is significant, because it allows a more gradual transition from the weekend back into the week. Sunday nights become less onerous when the calendar for your next day is gloriously uncluttered. This reduced distraction also provides a consistent block of time each week to support progress on the types of hard but important projects that make your work more meaningful. Other days, of course, could also work just as well. Perhaps keeping Fridays clear of meetings works better for the pace of your particular job, or you find more value in maintaining a clear day in the middle of the week. The key to this idea is maintaining some bastion of peace amid an otherwise cluttered calendar.

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. My suggestion is to try to put aside an afternoon to escape to the movies once per month, protecting the time on your calendar well in advance so it doesn’t get snagged by a last-minute appointment. In most office jobs, no one is going to notice if once every thirty days or so you’re gone for an afternoon. If someone asks where you were, just say you had a “personal appointment.” Which is true. You should, of course, be reasonable in this planning to make sure that you’re not missing something important. If an emergency comes up, or a week proves unusually filled with urgency, you can reschedule your mini-break for another 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. To receive the benefits of this advice, it’s not necessary that you see a film. Other activities can work as well. In my own experience, for example, I’ve also found similar benefits visiting museums and going on hikes. The key observation here is that even a modest schedule ...

MATCH YOUR SPACE TO YOUR WORK 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. Mary Oliver’s nature-themed poetry, for example, was well served by long walks in the very style of woods that she described in her poems. Oliver is not alone in seeking this symmetry. Many writers leverage the details of their surroundings to support specific properties of their work. 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 Heights and the home of Aaron Burr during his vice presidential years.

Professional writers, in some sense, were the original remote workers, and what you find when you study their habits, I noted, is that they often go way out of their way to find somewhere—anywhere—to work that’s not inside their own homes. Even if it meant putting up with the clanging hammers of a furnace repair shop.

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’s important about these observations is that the aesthetics of their outside-the-home work spaces didn’t really matter. Mary Oliver may have found depth in wandering the scenic New England woods, but Maya Angelou achieved a similar effect amid the forgettable blandness of cheap hotels. 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.

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

and a radical change of mind (diatethenai).” In this account of ancient Greek Mystery cults, we learn something important about rituals in general. Their power is found not in the specifics of their activities but in the transformative effect these activities have on the mind. The more striking and notable the behaviors, the better chance they have of inducing useful changes.

My advice here has two parts. First, form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important. Second, in doing so, ensure your rituals are sufficiently striking to effectively shift your mental state into something more supportive of your goals. The second principle of productivity asks that you work at a more natural pace. It’s suitable that this suggestion about rituals closes this chapter, as there are few strategies that will 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.

A bidding war erupted, eventually leading to a million-dollar signing bonus being put on the table. It’s here that Jewel made the move that will render her story relevant to our discussion of slow productivity. Overwhelmed by this tumultuous turn in her life—feeling simultaneously ambitious and terrified—she came to an unexpected decision. She would sign a deal, but she didn’t want the money. “I turned down the advance,” she recalled. “I turned down a million-dollar bonus. As a homeless kid.”

“I had to put myself in an environment and a position to win as a singer-songwriter,” she recalled thinking, and the way to do that was to be cheap. 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. “I was just doing it to put myself in a position to make my art first,” she later explained. “To not leverage my art unduly.” She adopted a motto for her intentional approach: “Hardwood grows slowly.”

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.

The sine qua non of knowledge work is instead the juggling of many different objectives. As a professor, I teach classes, I submit grants, I deal with the paperwork involving existing grants, I supervise students, I sit on committees, I write papers, I travel to present these papers and struggle to format them for publication. In the moment, everything seems important. Most other jobs in this sector are 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 matter for us. If we haven’t notably advanced our academic specialty, no amount of to-do list martyrdom can save us. Other knowledge work positions have similar core activities lurking inside the whirlwind.

What is my core activity at work?

the graphic designer ultimately has to produce effective artwork, the development director has to bring in dollars, the marketer has to sell products, and the manager has to lead a well-functioning team.

The third and final principle of slow productivity asks that you obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life. The goal here is not about becoming really good for the sake of being really good at your job (though this is nice). As I’ll argue next, you should be focused on the quality of what you produce because quality turns out to be conne...

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs explained.

A research director named Abby told me a similar story. She had been “fractured across a million projects,” which she found exhausting, so when she moved to a new position, she decided to adopt a different strategy: she would focus her energy on exactly two major goals. This clarity allowed her to step away from a more frenetic, overloaded busyness.

2 main goals at a time for work

The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane nor pragmatic approach to organizing your work. 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. In other words, this third principle helps you stick with the first. As we’ll see next, however, as we return to the story of Jewel, this relationship between quality and doing less also includes another, more subtle layer.

We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.

Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about, but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection.

Pseudo-productivity began to spiral toward unsustainability once the front office IT revolution made endless work available and removed any natural restrictions on the pace of these efforts.