Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

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 adjustments as needed, of course, for unusually busy periods. Although this approach is designed to prevent you from accepting more work than you have time to handle, filling every available minute of your workday with projects can still lead to a level of busyness that’s incompatible with slow productivity, even if it is feasible to execute. This can be solved by limiting the time you make available for project work (remember Jenny Blake’s twenty-hour workweeks) as well as by padding your estimates to make sure you have more than enough time to complete, without frenzy or rush, whatever work you do accept.