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by
Cal Newport
Read between
March 17 - March 28, 2024
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.
Ejercicio
Schedule Rest Projects
The more hardness you face, the more fun you will enjoy soon after. Even if these rest projects are relatively small compared with the work that triggers them, this back-and-forth rhythm can still induce a sustaining experience of variation.
sometimes cultivating a natural pace isn’t just about the time you dedicate to a project, but also the context in which the work is completed.
we shouldn’t underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality.
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.
Ejercicio
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.
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. 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 on whatever pressing work needs to get done. This 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
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Inportante
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’s important about these observations is that the aesthetics of their outside-the-home work spaces didn’t really matter.
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.
In my 2021 essay, I used these observations to argue for a separation between remote work and working from home. 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. By freeing these workers from the drag of the familiar, overall productivity and satisfaction would rise. Here I’m arguing that you keep something similar in mind during your individual efforts to create more poetic environments for your work. Strange is powerful, even if it’s ugly. When seeking out where you work, be wary of
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Importante remote work ambiente
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.
Importancia rituales
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
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Ejercicio rituales
The minuscule size of the crowd didn’t stop Jewel from “bleeding my heart out.” As she recalls: 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.
“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
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Jewel’s strategy of prioritizing art over fame provides a nice case study of the third and final principle of slow productivity: obsess over quality. As captured in the definition below, when you concentrate your attention on producing your best possible work, a more humane slowness becomes inevitable:
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.
Quality demands that you slow down. Once achieved, it also helps you take control of your professional efforts, providing you the leverage needed to steer even further away from busyness.
Doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are both absolutely necessary components of this philosophy, but if those earlier principles are implemented on their own, without an accompanying obsession with quality, 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.
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.
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 connected in unexpected ways to our desire to escape pseudo-productivity and embrace something slower.
Equally important, this simplification allowed Apple to focus its efforts on quality and innovation: making its small number of products stand out. This was the period, for example, in which Apple’s colorful, bulbous iMac and whimsical clamshell iBook were released. The decision to trade complexity for quality worked. 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.
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. “Keeping those two big-picture goals in mind helps me figure out what to say no to and how to pace myself,” she explained.
“A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled on top of frantic work.”
Importante
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.
Importante
As we previously established, pursuing higher quality requires you to slow down.
If you’re fortunate enough for your entrepreneurial endeavors to begin to succeed, he argues, leverage this success to gain more freedom instead of more revenue.
Importante
In his book, Jarvis asks that you consider an alternative. 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. It would of course be nice to earn a seven-figure payday ten years from now, but given all the stress and hustle required to build a business of the necessary size, it’s not clear that you would really end up in a more remarkable place than the scenario in which
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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.
Importante
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.
Importante
Obsessing over quality isn’t just about being better at your job. It’s instead a secret weapon of sorts for those interested in a slower approach to productivity.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. . . . But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making, isn’t so good . . . it’s not quite that good. . . . If you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you gotta know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. . . . Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re gonna finish one story. . . . It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually
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In his exposition, Glass focuses on the gap that often exists between taste and ability—especially early on in a creative career. It’s easier to learn to recognize what’s good, he notes, than to master the skills required to meet this standard.
There’s a fundamental frustration embedded in this reality. 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. His exhortation to those just beginning their careers is to keep putting in the work, as it’s only through this deliberate effort that the gap will close.
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.
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.
The most useful exercise of all, however, was to simply pick a well-regarded movie, read a half dozen or so reviews and essays on it, and then watch the full film.
Ejercicio
Confronting the gap between what the masters produce and your current capabilities is disheartening. When you study an unrelated field, the pressure is reduced, and you can approach the topic with a more playful openness. When I read great nonfiction writers, I often find myself white-knuckling the book, trying to figure out what they’re doing that I’m not. This is useful, but also exhausting. When I’m studying a great film, by contrast, I can just enjoy it without reservation, and in doing so find a refreshing jolt of inspiration.
“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. This follows, in part, from the diversity of approaches that people take toward creation in a given field. When you combine the opinions of multiple practitioners of your craft, more possibilities and nuance emerge. There’s also a focusing effect that comes from performing for a crowd. When you want to impress other people, or add to the conversations in a meaningful way, your mind slips into a higher gear than what’s easily accessible in solo
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Ejercicio
The general idea that quality tools can increase the quality of your work is not unique to my early academic career. Novelists find a burst of energy when they switch from a generic word processor to professional writing software like Scrivener, just as screenwriters feel more capable when they buy Final Draft to compose their movies. It’s true that these more expensive tools include more features than their cheaper counterparts, but the “I’m a professional now” vibe they induce is arguably just as valuable. We see a similar effect in podcasters who buy the $300 Shure microphone famously used
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The pursuit of quality is not a casual endeavor. If you want your mind on board with your plans to evolve your abilities, then investing in your tools is a good way to start.
Ejercicio
Obsession requires you to get lost in your head, convinced that you can do just a little bit better given some more time. Greatness requires the ability to subsequently pull yourself out of your self-critical reverie before it’s too late.
When your output is only one step among many on a collaborative path toward creative progress, the pressure to get everything just right is reduced. Your goal is instead reduced to knocking the metaphorical ball back over the net with enough force for the game to proceed. Here we find as good a general strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism as I’ve seen: 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
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Importante ejercicio
Morissette’s decision to walk away from upbeat pop shares obvious similarities with Jewel’s decision to turn down a million-dollar record deal—both artists were willing to take risks in pursuit of a larger goal. The details of these decisions, however, differ in subtle but important ways. Jewel turned down the big money because she knew she needed more time to develop herself into a professional musician. This personifies my earlier claim that quality requires you to slow down. Morissette, by contrast, was already a successful professional musician when she left pop. Her change was instead a
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This proposition argues that betting on yourself in this manner—with nontrivial stakes for failure but attractive rewards for success—is a good general strategy for pushing the quality of your work to a new level.
Simply by placing yourself in a situation where there exists pressure to succeed, even if moderate, can provide an important accelerant in your quest for quality.
