Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.

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.

As you’ll learn in the pages ahead, 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.

for all of our complaining about the term, knowledge workers have no agreed-upon definition of what “productivity” even means.

As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work.

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

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. They can apply to any setting in which a haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience.

To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

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.

slow productivity doesn’t ask that you extinguish ambition.

Slow productivity supports legacy-building accomplishments but allows them to unfold at a more human speed.

This lesson, that doing less can enable better results, defies our contemporary bias toward activity, based on the belief that doing more keeps our options open and generates more opportunities for reward.

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.

My goal in this chapter is to persuade you not to give up on this aspirational vision of engineered simplicity. It is possible in most modern work settings, if you’re willing to be creative—and perhaps, at times, even radical—in how you think about selecting and organizing your work.

As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished. At moderate workloads, this effect might be frustrating: a general sense that completing

your work is taking longer than it should. As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new. This feedback loop can quickly spiral out of control, pushing your workload higher and higher until you find yourself losing your entire day to overhead activities: meeting after meeting conducted against a background hum of unceasing email and chat. Eventually the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions added after hours—in the evenings and early mornings, or over the weekend—in a desperate attempt to avoid a full collapse of all useful output. You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.

The advantage of doing fewer things, however, is about more than just increasing the raw number of hours dedicated to useful activity; the quality of these hours also increases. 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.

our brains work better when we’re not rushing. We’ve now refuted a common confusion about the first principle of slow productivity: it’s easy to mistake “do fewer things” as a request to “accomplish fewer things.” But this understanding gets things exactly backward. Whether your task list is overflowing or sparse, you’re still working more or less the same number of hours each week. The size of your list affects only how usefully these hours produce results. It’s here that we find the primary argument for why doing fewer things is as important for modern knowledge workers as it was for Jane Austen. It’s not just because overload

is exhausting and unsustainable and a miserable way to exist—though it certainly is—but because doing fewer things makes us better at our jobs; not only psychologically, but also economically and creatively. 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.

Most workers who are fortunate enough to exert some control over their efforts—such as knowledge workers, small-business entrepreneurs, or freelancers—tend to avoid taking on so much work that they crash and burn, but also tend to avoid working a reasonable amount. They exist at that point of maximum sustainable overhead tax that seems to represent the worst of all configurations, as it maintains the pain of having too much to do, but keeps this pain just manageable enough to avoid reform.

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. It ensures that you’ll remain permanently in this exhausting liminal space that immediately precedes the overhead tax

tipping point. This is why so many knowledge workers feel vaguely overloaded all the time, and why we were so vulnerable to collapsing into full burnout when pushed by unexpected disruptions: the informal manner in which we manage our workloads ensures we always have dangerously too much to do.

To the unenlightened, your commitment to do less might be received as laziness or diminished work ethic.

This first proposition suggests that you follow Andrew Wiles’s example and implement a systematic plan for limiting significant commitments in your own professional life. There are many ways to pursue this goal. In the strategies that follow, 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. Intentional limits set concurrently at all three of these scales are more likely to succeed than focusing on just one scale in isolation.

LIMIT MISSIONS 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.

It’s easy to let your collection of missions expand, as the embrace of a big new goal can be exciting in the moment. But missions, once adopted, demand effort. If your professional life is top heavy, you’ll unavoidably face an onerous workload. Any attempt to succeed with our first principle of slow productivity, therefore, must begin with the reduction of your main objectives. It’s hard to specify the optimal number of missions, but generally, less is better than more. There’s a romance to focusing on a single pursuit, but this level of simplicity is typically accessible only to the most purely creative

fields—Hemingway at Key West, banging out his morning pages on his Corona typewriter. Two or three missions are more tractable and still quite minimalist.

Moving in the other direction, it’s hard to maintain five or more missions without the feeling you’re drowning in unavoidable work. This might sound like a lot of objectives to take on, but it’s easier than you might imagine to allow your commitment count to grow over time.

No amount of clever time management or streamlining tactics can keep the work required to maintain ten missions tractable.

LIMIT PROJECTS Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session. Some projects you complete once and then are done, such as updating the sales copy on a product website. Other projects are ongoing, meaning they unfold without any clear stopping point, such as answering support queries from clients. Projects create many of the concrete tasks that take up your time during the day. It follows that limiting them is critical to limiting your overall work volume. A crude approach to accomplishing this goal is to adopt the persona of someone who is eccentric and unresponsive, eventually driving your colleagues to redirect their requests and assignments elsewhere.

“Irresponsibility requires eternal vigilance,”

A plan to simply become too unpleasant to be bothered, it seems, isn’t sustainable. There are only so many times you can offer an unqualified no without either losing your job or being sidelined as an unreliable curmudgeon. This leaves us with a more nuanced option for limiting projects: appeal to the hard but unimpeachable reality of your actual available time. If someone asks you to do something, and you appeal to some vague sense of busyness to get out of it, you’re unlikely to consistently succeed. “We’re all busy,” they might reply, “but I really need you to do this for me.” If you instead have a reputation as someone who is careful

about managing their time and can quantify your busyness more concretely, you have a better chance of avoiding the new work. 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. Block off the hours as you would for a meeting. If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you don’t have enough time for it. Either decline the project, or cancel something else to make room. The power of this approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment. 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 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 (remembe...

For now, 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. There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer. LIMIT DAILY GOALS We’ve arrived at the smallest scale of work that we’ll consider for our limiting strategies: the projects you decide to make progress on during the current day. 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.

But when it comes to expending efforts on important, bigger initiatives, stay focused on just one target per day.

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.

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.

Slow productivity requires that you free yourself from the constraints of the small so that you can invest more meaningfully in the big. This is a messy, detail-oriented conflict, largely fought on the battleground of old-fashioned productivity tactics and systems. But it’s a battle that must be fought if you hope to, as

Benjamin Franklin lauded, become the master of your own time.

PUT TASKS ON A...

In the context of knowledge work, it turns out, autopilot schedules provide an effective means to contain tasks. Instead of setting regular times each week for completing school assignments, you can set times for accomplishing specific categories of regularly occurring tasks.

Once you get used to accomplishing a specific type of task at the same times on the same days, the overhead required for their execution plummets. A key refinement to support this task-centric version of autopilot scheduling is to leverage

rituals and locations. If you can connect a regularly recurring task block to a specific location, perhaps paired with a little ritual that helps initiate your efforts, you’re more likely to fall into a regular rhythm of accomplishing this work.

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

Containing tasks is not about escaping the small. It’s instead about making these efforts as painless as possible. Seeking, as I once put it, that “low-stress sweet spot.”

David Allen’s carefully organized lists don’t help the project manager who must reply to dozens of emails an hour. From a slow productivity perspective, however, there’s good news embedded in this otherwise discouraging account. If much of your perceived busyness comes from talking about tasks instead of actually executing them, you might be less overloaded than you realize. In other words, if you can reduce the footprint of these conversations, the pile of actual, concrete obligations that remains might not be so forbidding. A direct strategy for reducing collaboration overhead is to replace asynchronous communication with real-time conversations.

The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussions that can be used to resolve many different issues. Set aside the same thirty to sixty minutes every afternoon, and advertise this time to your colleagues and clients. Make it clear that you’re always available during this period—your door is open, Zoom activated, Slack channels monitored, phone on—to chat about any and all relevant questions or requests. If someone sends you an ambiguous message, instead of letting it instigate yet

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