Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

send an acknowledgment message that formally acknowledges the project that you’re committing to complete, but that also includes the following three pieces of extra information: (1) a request for any additional details you need from the source before you can start the project, (2) a count of the number of existing projects already on your lists, and (3) an estimate of when you expect to complete this new work.

We often believe those we work with care only about getting results as fast as possible. But this isn’t true. Often what they really want is the ability to hand something off and not have to worry about whether or not it will be accomplished. If they trust you, they’ll give you latitude to finish things on your own terms. Relief, in other words, trumps expediency.

Simulating a pull-based workflow works only if you maintain transparency.

when it comes to our understanding of productivity, timescale matters. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the efforts of historic thinkers like Copernicus and Newton can seem uneven and delayed. When instead viewed at the slow scale of years, their efforts suddenly seem undeniably and impressively fruitful.

scientists tended to adopt a perspective on their professional efforts that was more philosophical than instrumental. In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities. The general lifestyle of the scientist, by this logic, had a worthiness of its own, independent of any specific accomplishments in the moment. Little value was to be gained in rushing, as the work itself provided reward.

Our exhausting tendency to grind without relief, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, is more arbitrary than we recognize. It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster.

Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.

Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.

It’s here that we find the justification for the second principle of slow productivity. Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. In the moment, it might exude a false sense of usefulness, but when continued over time, it estranges us from our fundamental nature, generates misery, and, from a strictly economic perspective, almost certainly holds us back from reaching our full capabilities. A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.

The idea that adding more plans to your life can help you slow down might seem paradoxical. The magic here is in the way that this strategy expands the timescales at which you’re evaluating your productivity.

If you instead give yourself more than enough time to accomplish your objectives, the pace of your work can fall into a more natural groove. A simple heuristic to achieve this latter state is the following: take whatever timelines you first identify as reasonable for upcoming projects, and then double their length.

A reality of personal productivity is that humans are not great at estimating the time required for cognitive endeavors.

We seem to seek the thrill that comes from imagining a wildly ambitious timeline during our planning: “Wow, if I could finish four chapters this fall, I’d really be ahead of schedule!” It feels good in the moment but sets us up for scrambling and disappointment in the days that follow.

The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place.

A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.

To create more reasonable workdays, I have two suggestions: first, reduce the number of tasks you schedule, and second, reduce the number of appointments on your calendar. In other words, cut back on what you plan to accomplish while increasing your available time.

apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

A subtler alternative is to instead implement a “one for you, one for me” strategy. Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an equal amount of time that day to protect. If I schedule thirty minutes for a call on Tuesday, I’ll also find another thirty minutes that day to block off on my calendar as protected for myself.

working at a natural pace will still include periods of intense busyness and effort. There will be days, in other words, where you have to go from one meeting to another, again and again, because you’re trying to finalize an important deal, or get your arms around an unexpected crisis. There might also be days when every minute needs to be filled with last-minute tasks. But by thinking about these daily scheduling heuristics as a default approach to be deployed whenever possible, you ensure that unavoidable peaks in intensity will be followed by more leisurely troughs.

If you’re exhausted, you tell yourself, you can’t be accused of laziness. I want to push back on this reaction. Not only is it unsustainable, but it won’t, in the long run, get you any closer to producing work that matters. It’s okay if your efforts to take longer sometimes temporarily lead you off your chosen path. It happens to everyone who has ever tried to accomplish something important.

Forgive yourself. Then ask, “What’s next?” The key to meaningful work is in the decision to keep returning to the efforts you find important. Not in getting everything right every time.

To work without change or rest all year would have seemed unusual to most of our ancestors. Seasonality was deeply integrated into the human experience.

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.

The act of creation can be decomposed into a series of spontaneous eruptions of new possibilities, which must then be filtered against some ineffable understanding of what works and what doesn’t—the visceral intuition that we call taste.

There’s a fundamental frustration embedded in this reality. 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.

keep putting in the work, as it’s only through this deliberate effort that the gap will close.

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.

quality requires you to slow down.

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.

temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question.

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.

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.

Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.

Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind.