Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

pull workflows are a powerful tool to avoid overload in the knowledge work setting.

When a new project is pushed toward you, place it in the holding-pen section of your list. There is no bound to the size of your holding tank. The active position of the list, by contrast, should be limited to three projects at most. When scheduling your time, you should focus your attention only on the projects on your active list. When you complete one of these projects, you can remove it from your list. This leaves open a free slot that you can fill by pulling in a new project from the holding tank.

A secondary benefit of a good intake procedure is that it often leads people to withdraw their requests. It’s common, for example, for a boss to shoot off an idea to an employee on a whim. When this request gets formalized, however, and the boss sees that they need to provide you with more information, and they’re confronted with the reality of your current workload, they might simply respond, “On second thought, let’s put a pin in this one for now.”

consider just bluntly asking the original source of the project to release you from your obligation:

the pace at which they toiled on their momentous discoveries seemed, by modern standards, to be uneven, and in some cases almost leisurely.

Newton began thinking seriously about gravity in the summer of 1655, after he fled the plague in Cambridge for the quiet countryside of Lincolnshire. It took him until 1670 before he felt he really had a handle on the inverse square law, and then another fifteen years or so before he finally publicized his paradigm-shifting theories.fn1

Equally striking was the observation that the Ju/’hoansi appeared to work less than the farmers around them. According to Lee’s data, the adults he studied spent, on average, around twenty hours a week acquiring food, with an additional twenty hours or so dedicated to other chores—providing abundant leisure time.

Missing from these high-level numbers, however, is an equally important observation: how this leisure time was distributed throughout the day. As Dyble explained, while the farmers engaged in “monotonous, continuous work,” the pace of the foragers’ schedules was more varied, with long respites interspersed throughout their daily efforts. “Hunting trips required a long hike through the forest, so you’d be out all day, but you’d have breaks,” Dyble told me. “With something like fishing, there are spikes, ups and downs … only a small per cent of their time is spent actually fishing.”

Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable.

grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time.

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.

available!”) 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. As a given day starts to fill up with appointments, it also fills up with protected blocks, making it increasingly harder to add something new.

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.

the aesthetics of their outside-the-home work spaces didn’t really matter. Mary Oliver may have found depth in wandering the scenic New England woods, but Maya Angelou achieved a similar effect amid the forgettable blandness of cheap hotels. What counted was their disconnection from the familiar.

The Mysteries were instead about the psychological state they induced. Many participants reported coming out of the rituals no longer afraid of death.

Aristotle would later make it clear that the mystai did not go to Eleusis to learn (mathein) anything,”41 summarizes Armstrong, “but to have an experience (pathein) and a radical change of mind (diatethenai).”

The ritual of the long walk was as necessary as its setting to spark her creativity.

Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire44 largely at night, catching up on her sleep during the day—the quiet darkness putting her into the right mindset to craft her gothic tale.

form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important.

This allowed Jewel to focus11 her energy on building a fan base through touring, which she began to do at a relentless clip, taking on what she described as “a tremendous workload.”

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.

As a professor, I teach classes, I submit grants, I deal with the paperwork involving existing grants, I supervise students, I sit on committees, I write papers, I travel to present these papers and struggle to format them for publication.

one or two core activities that really matter most.

obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life.

quality turns out to be connected in unexpected ways to our desire to escape pseudo-productivity and embrace something slower.

According to Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, Jobs began asking top managers a simple question: “Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?”15 When they couldn’t provide a clear answer, he made the decision to simplify their product line down to only four computers: a desktop and laptop for business users and a desktop and laptop for casual users.

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,”

the pursuit of quality demanded simplicity.

A consultant named Chris, for example, pushed the quality of his team’s client work “much higher” by relegating email to one hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening, while also demanding that his team observe a three-hour deep-work period each afternoon with no meetings, messages, or calls allowed.

Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable.

If you’re fortunate enough for your entrepreneurial endeavors to begin to succeed, he argues, leverage this success to gain more freedom instead of more revenue.

became, over time, good at core skills that were both rare and valuable in the particular field in which he worked.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re gonna finish one story …. It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

It’s easier to learn to recognize what’s good, he notes, than to master the skills required to meet this standard.

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.

there can be utility in immersing yourself in appreciation for fields that are different from your own.

there’s no doubt that this unusually expensive option played a disproportionate role in my productivity.

Part of the power of these setups is found in their complexity, which puts the user in a specialized mindset, ready to do the hard work of writing efficient programs.