Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

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.

What’s important about these observations is that the aesthetics of their outside-the-home work spaces didn’t really matter.

A citadel to creative concentration need not be a literal palace. It just needs to be free of laundry baskets.

When seeking out where you work, be wary of the overly familiar.

RITUALS SHOULD BE STRIKING

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.

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.

Hardwood grows slowly.

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.

There’s a reason why this principle is presented last: it’s the glue that holds the practice of slow productivity together. 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.

The sine qua non of knowledge work is instead the juggling of many different objectives.

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.

This same effect applies to many different fields: obsessing over quality often demands that you slow down, as the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Taste, in this process, acts as the compass that guides you toward the peaks and away from the valleys in the fitness landscape of possible creations.

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.

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. All of this is solid advice, but it misses an equally critical element: the development of your taste in the first place.

When we idolize an Ira Glass–style obsession with quality, we often overlook the importance of developing our internal filters first. 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.

BECOME A CINEPHILE

The bigger observation is that there can be utility in immersing yourself in appreciation for fields that are different from your own. It can be daunting to directly study great work in your profession, as you already know too much about it. 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.

Understand your own field, to be sure, but also focus on what’s great about other domains. It’s here that you can find a more flexible source of inspiration, a reminder of what makes the act of creation so exciting in the first place.

START YOUR OWN INKLINGS

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 introspection. Forming a group of like-minded professionals, all looking to improve what they’re doing, provides a shortcut to improving your taste, an instantaneous upgrade to the standard of quality that you’re pursuing. BUY A FIFTY-DOLLAR NOTEBOOK

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.

Quality matters, but if it becomes everything, you may never finish.

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 masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection.

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.

Betting on yourself need not be as dramatic as losing a record deal or walking away from an Ivy League school. 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.

The goal in betting on yourself, as you’ll see, is to push yourself to a new level without accidentally also pushing yourself into an unnaturally busy workload. WRITE AFTER THE KIDS GO TO BED

These authors demonstrate one of the more approachable strategies for betting on yourself: temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question. The stakes here are modest: If you fail to reach the quality level that you seek, the main consequence is that during a limited period you’ve lost time you could have dedicated to more rewarding (or restful) activities. But this cost is sufficiently annoying to motivate increased attention toward your efforts.

This spare time strategy, of course, is not a sustainable way to work in the long term. Sacrificing too many of your leisure hours to extra work can violate both of the first two principles of slow productivity. But when deployed in moderation, dedicated to a specific project for a temporary period, this act of giving up something meaningful in pursuit of higher quality can become an effective bet on yourself.

REDUCE YOUR SALARY Committing your free time to a project is one of the easier ways to bet on yourself. A more drastic option is to rely on the project for income. Few forces induce more focus than the need to pay bills. It’s here, however, that we wander into some potentially dangerous territory. In American culture, there’s a romantic appeal to the idea of quitting your stultifying job to pursuing a grander dream.

There’s immense appeal in the possibilities of dramatically upending your professional situation, as it feels like you might, in one grand move, dispatch all that you dislike about your current grind. The problem, of course, is that for every Grisham there are a dozen other aspiring writers—or entrepreneurs, or artists—who end up slinking back to their old jobs, chastened and deeper in debt than when they started.

It’s in these details that we find a balanced strategy. Don’t haphazardly quit your job to pursue a more meaningful project. Wait instead to make a major change until you have concrete evidence that your new interest satisfies the following two properties: first, people are willing to give you money for it, and second, you can replicate the result.

Once you’ve passed these thresholds, however, take action. This doesn’t necessarily mean quitting your current job completely. It might instead mean that you reduce your hours, or take an unpaid leave. The key is to harness the stark motivation generated by the need for a pursuit to really work out.

ANNOUNCE A SCHEDULE Dedicating time or sacrificing money for a project are two obvious bets to push you toward higher-quality work. A natural third option is to leverage your social capital. If you announce your work in advance to people you know, you’ll have created expectations. If you fail to produce something notable, you’ll pay a social cost in terms of embarrassment. Not surprisingly, this, too, can act as a powerful motivator.

This strategy of announcing a schedule to inspire quality works at different scales. It could be as small as an aspiring screenwriter setting up a date with a cinema-savvy friend to read through the first draft of a script. Or something as large as an entrepreneur publicizing a release date for a new product. There are few things we value more than the esteem of our fellow humans. Announcing a schedule for your work hijacks this quirk of our species’ evolution to sharpen our focus on producing the best work possible. ATTRACT AN INVESTOR

When someone has invested in your project, you’ll experience amplified motivation to pay back their trust.

Attracting other people to invest in you and your idea is a dramatic bet on yourself and your ability to not let others down. In the drive to avoid this disappointment, greatness can be found.

Slowing down isn’t about protesting work. It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.

Slow productivity is just one response among many to a much bigger problem: The world of cognitive work lacks coherent ideas about how our efforts should be organized and measured. Using visible activity as a proxy for useful labor was at best a temporary fix, slapped together in the mid-twentieth century as managers struggled to reorient themselves amid the sudden emergence of a new economic sector.

Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind. It’s not that these efforts are arbitrary: our anxious days include tasks and appointments that really do need to get done. But once you realize, as McPhee did, that this exhausted scrambling is often orthogonal to the activities that matter, your perspective changes. A slower approach to work is not only feasible, but is likely superior to the ad hoc pseudo-productivity that dictates the professional lives of so many today. If you collect modest drops of meaningful effort for 365 days, McPhee reminds us, you’ll end the year with a bucket that’s pretty damn full. This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.