Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party.

is that you don’t start turning away incoming tasks until you find yourself already creeping up to the edge of unsustainable workloads.

the informal manner in which we manage our workloads ensures we always have dangerously too much to do.

A coach named Laura, for example, reported that she simplified her practice by reducing her offerings down to a few key services.

toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things,

Wiles began serious work on Fermat’s last theorem in 1986. For five years, he toiled in secret, often in his attic office, systematically avoiding larger projects and obligations.

To prepare himself to focus on a single large and meaningful project, Wiles limited large pursuits and commitments that would compete for his time. Crucially, he was systematic in this reduction. He didn’t resolve, in some generic fashion, to try to take on less; he instead put in place specific rules (e.g., no conferences), habits (e.g., work from home as much as possible), and even ploys (e.g., trickling out his already completed research)—all directed toward minimizing the number of big items tugging at his attention.

limiting significant commitments in your own professional life.

applying limits at different scales of work at the same time, from your overarching missions, to your ongoing projects, to your daily goals.

Any attempt to succeed with our first principle of slow productivity, therefore, must begin with the reduction of your main objectives.

When I graduated from college, for example, with a major in computer science and a book deal with Random House, I decided to keep my work intensely focused on just these two missions: academic research and writing.

My friend Jenny Blake, for example, writes in her 2022 book, Free Time, about how her small consulting and training business kept expanding until, one day, exhausted by the demands of work, she looked up and realized she was supporting more than ten different sources of income, which she described as “legacies from years of experimenting.”

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.

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,

The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.

My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day.

Franklin introduced a theory of positive and negative flow, invented the battery, and built a rudimentary electric motor.

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.

“Once you get to the point where your regular work is getting done with minimum of thinking,” I wrote in one of my early articles on this topic, “you’ve hit that low-stress sweet spot where you can start turning your attention to the bigger things.”

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.

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

walk across the nearby campus green (a ritual) to the same carrel in the same small library (location), where she sits down and works through her grant reports.

I recommend capturing as many categories of regular tasks as possible into an increasingly elaborate autopilot schedule: when you review client request; when you check in on the contractors updating your website; when you prep for meetings; when you read emails or update project management websites. 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.”

soon you’re spending most of your time managing conversations, not executing individual tasks.

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 discussion that can be used to resolve many different issues.

If someone sends you an ambiguous message, instead of letting it instigate yet another stretched-out volley of back-and-forth missives, reply, “Happy to help! Grab me during one of my upcoming office hours and we’ll figure out the details.”

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. 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.

One thirty-minute docket-clearing session can save a team from hours of highly distracting inbox checking and back-and-forth emailing.

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.

Critically, make it clear that all of the information you’ll need to complete the task should be included in their entry.

An alternative is to announce a custom-built process that requires your team to do (slightly) more of this work before involving you.

In general, people are often too focused on their own problems to care about how you’re solving your own.

Equally effective containment strategies, however, can be found upstream in your workflow, before obligations are generated in the first place.

When selecting new projects, assess your options by the number of weekly requests, questions, or small chores you expect the project to generate.

And yet, in this scenario, I would definitely choose the report option for a simple reason: it will generate many fewer tasks.

The client conference, in other words, is a task engine—an efficient generator of numerous urgent small things to do.

As she writes in her book Free Time, one of the steps she took to reconfigure her business toward a slow productivity model was to spend more money on “going pro” with useful software services, instead of, as she put it, “squeezing everything I could out of their freemium editions.”

The sheet includes over fifty paid services, from Calendly to DocuSign to the professional version of Zoom, adding up to roughly $2,400 a month in subscription fees.

I know many entrepreneurs who reclaim a substantial amount of time by hiring and training “operations managers” to take on more of their daily details of running their businesses.

I wouldn’t be able to reasonably fit my podcast into my schedule, for example, if not for the producer I hired to come to my studio on recording days and take care of all the details surrounding the release of each week’s episode.

I pay an accountant to manage my books, a professional agency to handle everything related to my podcast advertising, a web consultant to keep all of my online properties humming, and a lawyer to answer the many small questions that pop up in the normal course of running my writing-related business.

To be overloaded is not just inefficient; it can be, for many, downright inhumane.

In a push-based process, each stage pushes work onward to the next as soon as it’s done. In a pull-based process, by contrast, each stage pulls in new work only when it’s ready for it.

Shifting to a pull-based operation made backlogs impossible: the pace of the pipeline would adapt to whatever stage was running slowest. This transparency, in turn, helped the workers identify places where the system was out of balance.

Any engineer could push a new idea into consideration at any time, and because the engineers were smart, they came up with lots of ideas. The system soon became bogged down by its own excessive ambition.

To accomplish this goal, they sketched a diagram on some unused wall space that included a box for each step of their design process, starting with the initial idea and continuing all the way through testing and deployment.

The full group would meet weekly to discuss the status of every Post-it stuck to the wall.

Similarly, it became easy to notice if a project was struggling, as its note would have stopped advancing.

An engineer could only pull in new work if they had sufficient spare capacity, a status that was easy to determine by surveying how often their name came up on the wall. Overload became impossible. Not surprisingly, after switching to this more structured pull strategy, the total number of projects underway in the technology development group fell by almost 50 percent, while the rate at which projects were completed notably increased.