Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

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.

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.

accomplishment without burnout not only is possible, but should be the new standard.

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

“The intersection of work and life needs some work,”

It seems like the benefits of technology have created the ability to stack more into our day and onto our schedules than we have the capacity to handle while maintaining a level of quality which makes the things worth doing …. I think that’s where the burnout really hurts—when you want to care about something but you’re removed from the capacity to do the thing or do it properly and give it your passion and full attention and creativity because you’re expected to do so many other things.

There’s a personal satisfaction in grimly pointing out the flaws in a system, but sustainable change, Petrini came to believe, requires providing people with an enjoyable and life-affirming alternative.

“Those who suffer for others do more damage to humanity than those who enjoy themselves,”

Slow Food wasn’t looking backward to escape the present, but instead to find ideas to help reshape the future.

Slow Food. Slow Cities. Slow Medicine. Slow Schooling. Slow Media. Slow Cinema. All movements built on the radical but effective strategy of offering people a slower, more sustainable alternative to modern busyness that draws from time-tested wisdom.

What we’re looking for, however, is not a blueprint to follow exactly, but general ideas that we can export from this exotic territory to the more pragmatic constraints of standard twenty-first-century knowledge sector jobs.

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

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.

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.

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.

If our workloads were entirely determined by all-powerful managers looking to maximize profits, we might expect, as paradoxical as this sounds at first, to have less on our plates.

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.

overload is not fundamental to knowledge work. It’s instead largely a side effect of the crude ways in which we self-manage our work volume.

doing fewer things is the key to producing good work. This recognition, however, is not enough on its own to support the transformation of your professional life.

Intentional limits set concurrently at all three of these scales are more likely to succeed than focusing on just one scale in isolation. If you have multiple major professional missions, for example, you’ll struggle to limit the pool of ongoing projects they generate. Similarly, if you have too many ongoing projects, you’ll struggle to prevent your daily schedule from becoming overstuffed.

It’s hard to specify the optimal number of missions, but generally, less is better than more.

Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. You’ll likely also have meetings to attend, emails to answer, and administrative nonsense to subdue (we’ll talk more about these smaller tasks in the upcoming proposition about containing the small). 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.

taming the impact of small details in your professional life opens up space to pursue bigger goals.

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.

A key refinement to support this task-centric version of autopilot scheduling is to leverage rituals and locations.

Moving obligations out of your mind and into trusted systems—the foundation of GTD—will make you less anxious and more organized.

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.

office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussion 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.

docket-clearing meetings.30 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.

When you separate work from the ad hoc conversations that surround it, what you’re left with might not be all that intimidating.

Instead of allowing colleagues to effortlessly lob requests in your direction like hand grenades, leaving you to clean up the mess generated by their productivity-shredding shrapnel, they must now do more work themselves before they can commandeer your attention.

At first, these strategies for making the burden of task assignments more symmetric can feel self-indulgent.

In reality, however, if you’re diplomatic in your phrasing, and deploy sufficient self-deprecation, you can introduce these systems without attracting too much ire. Indeed, your peers might end up appreciating the added structure, as it provides clarity about how or when their requested work will actually be accomplished.

It’s natural to focus on taming the pile of tasks you’ve already built up. Equally effective containment strategies, however, can be found upstream in your workflow, before obligations are generated in the first place.

once you understand the havoc wreaked by an overstuffed to-do list, it makes sense that the task footprint of a project should be taken just as seriously.

The client conference, in other words, is a task engine—an efficient generator of numerous urgent small things to do. The market report, on the other hand, represents a different type of energy investment. It will require regular long blocks of time in which you must gather data, process it, and reflect on what it all means. This will be mentally demanding and, at times, perhaps tedious. But it will generate very few urgent small tasks and therefore make few demands on your attention outside of the blocks of time you’ve already set aside to work on it. Writing the report might not be easy, but the decision to choose it over the task engine represented by the messy event organization project should be.

Every effective entrepreneur I know shares a similar commitment to paying people who know what they’re doing so they don’t have to do the work, at a lower level of quality, all by themselves.

Don’t spend more than you can afford. But recognize that a practitioner of slow productivity cannot afford to spend nothing.

Working on fewer things can paradoxically produce more value in the long term: overload generates an untenable quantity of nonproductive overhead.

For many, the redemption found in doing fewer things goes well beyond the professional. It’s also about finding an escape hatch from a psychologically untenable relationship with your work. To be overloaded is not just inefficient; it can be, for many, downright inhumane.

a three-strep strategy for implementing a simulated pull system as an individual without control over the habits of your colleagues or clients. Such an individualized system, of course, is not as effective as having everyone on the same page about abandoning pushes, but it’s still much better than the default response of throwing up your hands and letting work be flung toward you from all directions, sighing in frustration as your metaphorical tray of samples begins to overflow.