Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

“To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me,” he explained. “It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”

It couldn’t have existed, however, without McPhee’s willingness to put everything else on hold, and just lie on his back, gazing upward toward the sky, thinking hard about how to create something wonderful.

Literally lay on a picnic table for 2 weeks just thinking, spent 2 yrs to write a single article

Between the spring of 2020 and the summer of 2021, a period spanning less than a year and a half, at least four major books were published that took direct aim at popular notions of productivity. These included Celeste Headlee’s Do Nothing, Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even, Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist, and Oliver Burkeman’s delightfully sardonic Four Thousand Weeks.

But eventually an insistent realization emerged. McPhee was productive. If you zoom out from what he was doing on that picnic table on those specific summer days in 1966 to instead consider his entire career, you’ll find a writer who has, to date, published twenty-nine books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards.

There’s no reasonable definition of productivity that shouldn’t also apply to John McPhee, and yet nothing about his work habits is frantic, busy, or overwhelming.

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality.

this philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride.

It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.

this vignette provides a stereotypical case study about the various ways the knowledge sector came to think about productivity during the twentieth century: “Work” is a vague thing that employees do in an office. More work creates better results than less. It’s a manager’s job to ensure enough work is getting done, because without this pressure, lazy employees will attempt to get away with the bare minimum. The most successful companies have the hardest workers.

Assembly lines are dreary for workers, but when Henry Ford switched his factory in Highland Park, Michigan, to this method in 1913, the labor-hours required to produce a Model T dropped from 12.5 to around 1.5—a staggering improvement.

The story of economic growth in the modern Western world is in many ways a story about the triumph of productivity thinking.

“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” argued Peter Drucker in his influential 1967 book, The Effective Executive. “He can only be helped. But he must direct himself.”

It was from this uncertainty that a simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. If you can see me in my office—or, if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly—then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something. The more activity you see, the more you can assume that I’m contributing to the organization’s bottom line.

Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.

PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

(One particularly damning analysis, conducted by the software company RescueTime, and based on log data from over ten thousand knowledge workers, revealed that the subjects they studied checked their inbox once every six minutes on average.)

Like John McPhee waiting on the picnic table for insight on his article structure, Zuiker’s efforts point toward a definition of meaningful and valuable work that doesn’t require a frenetic busyness. Its magic instead becomes apparent at longer timescales, emanating from a pace that seems, in comparison with the relentless demands of high-tech pseudo-productivity, to be, for lack of a better word, almost slow.

It was amid this unrest that a seasoned activist and journalist named Carlo Petrini launched a new movement that he called Slow Food. A corresponding manifesto defined its goals:

Reaction to opening a massive McDonalds at foot of Spanish Steps n Rome

As I began grappling with the issues surrounding knowledge work and pseudo-productivity, however, Carlo Petrini’s bid for deliberativeness at the table entered my thinking in a surprisingly major way.

Similarly, begs the thought of similar in reading, educatjon. "Slow Reading"?

I discovered that Slow Food is about more than meals, it’s an instantiation of two deep, innovative ideas that can be applied to many different attempts to build a reform movement in response to the excesses of modernity.

There’s a personal satisfaction in grimly pointing out the flaws in a system, but sustainable change, Petrini came to believe, requires providing people with an enjoyable and life-affirming alternative. Petrini didn’t simply write a sharply worded op-ed about the corruptive forces of McDonald’s, he instead promoted an appealing new relationship with food that would make fast food seem self-evidently vulgar. “Those who suffer for others do more damage to humanity than those who enjoy themselves,” Petrini explained. The

Beautiful way of thinking. Apply for Slow Reading! Also helps explain/ align with my distaste for Awareness booKs. Thats fine, but whats the alternative?

second idea intertwined with Slow Food is the power of pulling from time-tested cultural innovations. There’s a temptation in activism to propose radically new ideas, as this preserves the utopian possibility of a pristine solution. Petrini recognized, however, that when it came to presenting an appealing alternative to fast food, he would be wise to draw from traditional food cultures that had developed through trial-and-error experimentation over many generations.

Traditions that survived the gauntlet of cultural evolution, he believed, are more likely to catch on.

Slow Food wasn’t looking backward to escape the present, but instead to find ideas to help reshape the future.

Again, analogy to deep reading, Commonplace Books. Its not about old school, write on papet, etc. Its about the depth of thinking you get from that level of reflection that gives you better ideas for the future

Once isolated, Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements—focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—are obviously not restricted to food in any fundamental sense.

Notes on how to build a reform movement

Slow Food. Slow Cities. Slow Medicine. Slow Schooling. Slow Media. Slow Cinema. All movements built on the radical but effective strategy of offering people a slower, more sustainable alternative to modern busyness that draws from time-tested wisdom.

I might not be able to spend two full weeks lying on a picnic table in my backyard, but there’s a key insight lurking in that story about the value of slowing down to prepare to tackle a hard project.

A particularly entertaining diversion is uncovering the eccentric spaces where famous novelists would hide away to write.

The second part of this book is dedicated to elaborating a philosophy of slow productivity—an

Wait, thats it? Nothing on modern productivity/efficiency bros online? Rise and Grind culture? Missing out

You’ll learn, for example, about Jane Austen, Ben Franklin, and Galileo, in addition to somewhat more modern figures such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Mary Oliver.

For all of these, what about counter examples like Musk, Hamilton, Napoleon?

I want to reassure you that slow productivity doesn’t ask that you extinguish ambition.

Humans derive great satisfaction from being good at what they do and producing useful things. This philosophy can be understood as providing a more sustainable path toward these achievements.

Satisfaction framework

Few people know, for example, how long it actually took Isaac Newton to develop all the ideas contained in his masterwork, the Principia (over twenty years). They just know that his book, once published, changed science forever. The value of his ideas lives on, while the lazy pace at which they were produced was soon forgotten.

Slow productivity supports legacy-building accomplishments but allows them to unfo...

But when we turn our focus to the topic of productivity, James’s portrayal of his aunt becomes suddenly disquieting. It seems to endorse a model of production in which better results require you to squeeze ever more work into your schedule. The obstacle standing between you and your own Sense and Sensibility, it implies, is a willingness to do more. Austen used small gaps between interminable social visits to write on scraps of paper in her sitting room, so why can’t you wake up at 5:00 a.m. or make better use of your lunch hour?

The classic side hustle. Can tack onto this Stephen King myth

But it’s clear that Austen did not grow up like a character in one of her books, spending her days in a well-appointed sitting room, taking visitors while servants prepared lavish meals. She had work to do. Though Austen was a voracious reader and, encouraged by her father, began dabbling in writing at a young age, she was much too busy with the daily work of running her family’s house, farm, and school to seriously explore the craft.

In 1800, this period of greatly reduced responsibilities abruptly ended when Austen’s parents decided, seemingly out of nowhere, to shut down the house in Steventon and move to the resort town of Bath.

Persuasion

Austen was not able to produce creatively during the crowded periods of her life. It was only when, through circumstance and contrivance, her obligations were greatly reduced that Austen was able, finally, to complete her best work.

PRINCIPLE #1: DO FEWER THINGS Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.

A work trends report published by Microsoft revealed that time spent in meetings had increased by a factor of 2.5 during the first year of the pandemic, while the quantity of instant message chats and emails received also exploded. As the report summarizes, “The digital intensity of workers’ days has increased substantially.”

When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility.

But we don’t need science to convince us of something that we’ve all experienced directly: our brains work better when we’re not rushing.

Focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new, is objectively a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output.

How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation. If you turn down a Zoom meeting invitation, there’s a social-capital cost, as you’re causing some mild harm to a colleague and potentially signaling yourself to be uncooperative or a loafer. But, if you feel sufficiently stressed about your workload, this cost might become acceptable: you feel confident that you’re close to becoming unsustainably busy, and this provides psychological cover to skip the Zoom. You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party.

The problem with deploying this stress heuristic, of course, is that you don’t start turning away incoming tasks until you find yourself already creeping up to the edge of unsustainable workloads.

A ten-year-old Andrew Wiles comes across a book that introduces him to the theorem. He’s entranced. “Here was a problem that I, a ten-year-old, could understand,” he told Singh. “And I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it.”

LovE this. It can happen as young as 10

I’ll outline a specific approach that I’ve found to be particularly useful: applying limits at different scales of work at the same time, from your overarching missions, to your ongoing projects, to your daily goals.

The term mission can sound grandiose. For our purposes, we’ll demote it to a more pragmatic definition: any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life. Andrew Wiles had a mission to solve Fermat’s last theorem. Winning grants, effectively managing HR requests, producing new creative briefs, and crafting elegant computer programs are all missions as well. They’re what ultimately decide where you aim your attention in your job.

Two or three missions are more tractable and still quite minimalist.

My immediate thoughts: 1) immersing myself in RE/ CDR industries, 2) writinging a book on education/reading, 3) finding 1 meaningful civic engagement outlet (volunteering, Board)

Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session.