Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time . . . it needs a lot of concentration . . . if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time.

This leaves us with a more nuanced option for limiting projects: appeal to the hard but unimpeachable reality of your actual available time.

When you say, “I don’t see any really significant swaths of open time to work on something like this for at least three weeks, and in the meantime, I have five other projects competing for my schedule,” it’s hard for someone to rebut you, unless they’re willing to challenge your calculations, or demand that you expand your working hours to accommodate their specific request.

To gain this credibility, I recommend, at first, when considering a new project, you estimate how much time it will require and then go find that time and schedule it on your calendar.

All very "Effective @ Amazon guy

You don’t have to continue pre-scheduling your projects in this manner indefinitely. After you’ve executed this strategy for a while, you’ll develop an instinct for roughly how many commitments you can maintain at any point without overtaxing your time. Going forward, it becomes sufficient to just track your current project tally, and reject new work once you pass your limit—making

what’s important with this strategy is that you maintain clarity and control over your schedule, and deploy it to keep your workload reasonable, regardless of how you define this condition.

My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day. To clarify, I don’t intend for this single daily project to be your only work for the day. You’ll likely also have meetings to attend, emails to answer, and administrative nonsense to subdue

There’s a calibrated steadiness to working on just one major initiative a day. Real progress accrues, while anxiety is subdued. This pace might seem slow in the moment, but zooming out to consider the results that eventually accrue over many months reveals the narrowness of this concern.

This view of Franklin as the patron saint of busyness, however, misses a more nuanced story. While it’s true that his professional career began in a state of overload, it didn’t stay that way. Biographer H. W. Brands points out that as Franklin ground his way through his thirties, he began to burn out. “Part of Franklin’s problem,” writes Brands, “was that he was starting to stretch himself thin.” It’s here that Franklin made an unexpected and underreported swing toward slow productivity.

I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give my self, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness, leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large . . . on such points as may produce something for the common benefit of mankind, uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.

BEn Franklin after divesting himself of paper business

What makes Benjamin Franklin’s colonial midlife crisis notable to a modern audience is his general belief that taming the impact of small details in your professional life opens up space to pursue bigger goals.

Another way to interpret his tory: you have o grind it out at beginning until you gain certain evel of success to then slow down, mushroom out. Like Carnegie

Small tasks, in sufficient quantity, can act like productivity termites, destabilizing the whole foundation of what you’re trying to build. It’s worth going to great lengths to tame them.

Several of these ideas focus on containing the overhead tax of tasks you cannot avoid tackling. In many cases, it’s not the actual execution of a small commitment that generates distraction, it’s instead the cognitive effort required to remember it, to worry about it, and to eventually find time for it in your schedule.

I recommend capturing as many categories of regular tasks as possible into an increasingly elaborate autopilot schedule:

Setting up a dedicated time (and location) when you do certain tasks. He means this for the minutia of work/life, but what about doing this for work reading/research?

What makes his story interesting, however, is not only his rise, but also his subsequent fall. Roughly three years after starting 43 Folders, Mann grew disillusioned with the promises of systems like GTD to transform work. These styles of productivity hacks, he wrote, didn’t end up making him feel “more competent, stable, and alive.” He refocused 43 Folders away from pure productivity and toward the woollier goal of producing better creative work. Then he stopped posting altogether.

Is this just a cycle every man must go through in life? And the key is just realizing that and having the awareness to get thru it as quickly as you can?

If someone sends you an ambiguous message, instead of letting it instigate yet another stretched-out volley of back-and-forth missives, reply, “Happy to help! Grab me during one of my upcoming office hours and we’ll figure out the details.”

Hate this kind of stuff. What if everyone does this? Then we're all f'd again. Seems real solution is to simply have enough bandwidth to be aailable to bang this kinda thing out when it comes up and is truly important, or ignore it if it isnt until later

The cure isn’t to be found in smarter task systems, but instead in a return to something simpler, and more human: regular conversation.

Do agree ith element of this. Quick impromptu calls are the best

in the long term, this off-loading of the small can provide the mental space needed to make the types of large breakthroughs, and produce the type of value, that will make these monthly expenses suddenly seem trivial in scope. Don’t spend more than you can afford. But recognize that a practitioner of slow productivity cannot afford to spend nothing.

Be willing to spend money on things that free up your time (sufficiently)

The active position of the list, by contrast, should be limited to three projects at most. When scheduling your time, you should focus your attention only on the projects on your active list. When you complete one of these projects, you can remove it from your list. This leaves open a free slot that you can fill by pulling in a new project from the holding tank.

With this system, seperates tasks "single sittings" vs projects "more focused time blocks, multiple days"

an estimate of when you expect to complete this new work. After sending this message, label the project with the time estimate you included in your acknowledgment message so you won’t later forget. Notice, when making this estimate, you can look at the estimates on all of your existing projects to help inform a realistic prediction.

LiKe this, good tactical idea. All very similar to the tracker i developed with karl

If you fall behind on a project, update your estimate and inform the person who originally sent you the work about the delay. The key here is transparency. Be clear about what’s going on, and deliver on your promises, even if these promises have to change. Never let a project just drop through the cracks and hope it will be forgotten.

We often believe those we work with care only about getting results as fast as possible. But this isn’t true. Often what they really want is the ability to hand something off and not have to worry about whether or not it will be accomplished.

Simulating a pull-based workflow works only if you maintain transparency.

when it comes to our understanding of productivity, timescale matters. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the efforts of historic thinkers like Copernicus and Newton can seem uneven and delayed. When instead viewed at the slow scale of years, their efforts suddenly seem undeniably and impressively fruitful.

Repeat of a highlight from beginning of book

In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities. The general lifestyle of the scientist, by this logic, had a worthiness of its own, independent of any specific accomplishments in the moment. Little value was to be gained in rushing, as the work itself provided reward. This mindset supported a Renaissance-style understanding of professional efforts as one element among many that combine to create a flourishing existence.

Our exhausting tendency to grind without relief, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, is more arbitrary than we recognize.

it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.

PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.

Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.

Like the last line, turn of phrase

This reorientation toward agriculture threw most of humanity into a state similar to that of the rice-farming Agta, grappling with something new: the continuous monotony of unvarying work, all day long, day after day.

Sure, but also more security, certainty of success. There is a reason we made the switch

In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s story we find a clear example of one of the general patterns we identified earlier in the lives of the great scientists: he took his time.

Did he? Nothing about these details suggests that. Simply that it took 7 years. Not the same thing

College sophomore Miranda wasn’t confident, experienced, or interesting enough to produce a Broadway-caliber version of his show. His greatness needed to take its time before it could fully emerge.

MAKE A FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Me: "Long-term directional goals/objectives". Dont get too specific, bht have a sense of where youre trying to go to allow still for adaptability as circumstances, opportunities, interests change

A simple heuristic to achieve this latter state is the following: take whatever timelines you first identify as reasonable for upcoming projects, and then double their length.

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.

I like thijs framing. Its about being the tortoise, not the hare

We arrive, finally, at the smallest timescale relevant to our discussion of taking longer: the individual day.

And my guess, the longest. SMH

The first suggestion is simple to implement: apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

Weekly Goals

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. Even, on occasion, to Lin-Manuel Miranda. (We know about his grand successes, but we hear less about what I can only imagine to be an extensive portfolio of projects that he started in a pique of creative energy that then eventually faded.)

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.

LIke this: "keep returning to th work you find important"

Stieglitz’s family had purchased their estate on Lake George, which they called Oaklawn, in the 1880s. Alfred grew up spending summers at Oaklawn. “The lake is perhaps my oldest friend,” he once wrote. “Gosh! What days & nights we’ve had together. Calm beautiful hours. Mad static ones.—Dream hours.—Hours & days of quiet wonder.”

The Dream

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.

Novel idea

Fleming made a deal with Kemsley that required him to work only ten months each year. The other two months would be taken as an annual vacation.

There’s a romanticism to these stories about seasonal escapes that can be both immensely appealing and frustratingly impossible.

Summering at Lake George can disrupt this unnatural rhythm, but so can taking off a random weekday once or twice a month. I call these latter, more modest efforts small seasonality.

project, but also the context in which the work is completed. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space, we shouldn’t underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality. In discussing the role of a home, for example, Bachelard famously quipped, “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”

Whenever I see a generic home office, with its white bookcases and office-supply-store wall hangings, I can’t help but think about all the ways in which its 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.

YES. So true. Books

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.

Another good turn of phrase: "citadel to creative concentration"

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.

“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.”

This all ready very 50th Law, 50 Cent