Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

missives, reply, “Happy to help! Grab me during one of my upcoming office hours and we’ll figure out the details.” This approach can also be adapted for teams in the form of a related strategy that I call docket-clearing meetings. Like office hours, these meetings happen at the same times on the same days, each week. Unlike office hours, they’re attended by your entire team. During these sessions, your team churns through any pending tasks that require collaboration or clarification. The group moves through the tasks one at a time, figuring out for each what exactly needs to be done, who is working on it, and what information they need from others. An easy way to organize these sessions is to maintain a shared document of tasks to discuss. Team members can add items to the list as they come up in between meetings. One thirty-minute docket-clearing session can save a team from hours of highly distracting inbox checking and back-and-forth emailing. It’s hard to overemphasize the sense of relief granted by these two simple synchronization methods. When you separate work from the ad