Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

Proposition: Embrace Seasonality

SCHEDULE SLOW SEASONS

DEFINE A SHORTER WORK YEAR

IMPLEMENT “SMALL SEASONALITY”

No Meeting Mondays

See a Matinee Once a Month

Schedule Rest Projects

Work in Cycles

One of Basecamp’s more striking policies is the consolidation of work into “cycles.” Each such cycle lasts from six to eight weeks. During those weeks, teams focus on clear and urgent goals. Crucially, each cycle is then followed by a two-week “cooldown” period in which employees can recharge while fixing small issues and deciding what to tackle next.

Proposition: Work Poetically

sometimes cultivating a natural pace isn’t just about the time you dedicate to a project, but also the context in which the work is completed. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space, we shouldn’t underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality. In discussing the role of a home, for example, Bachelard famously quipped, “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”32 The stairway is not simply a collection of raised steps, arranged in a regular order, but instead where you played as a child with your siblings on rainy summer afternoons. Its surfaces and details are tangled into a complicated web of human experience.

MATCH YOUR SPACE TO YOUR WORK

Professional writers, in some sense, were the original remote workers, and what you find when you study their habits, I noted, is that they often go way out of their way to find somewhere—anywhere—to work that’s not inside their own homes. Even if it meant putting up with the clanging hammers of a furnace repair shop.

What counted was their disconnection from the familiar.

In this account of ancient Greek Mystery cults, we learn something important about rituals in general. Their power is found not in the specifics of their activities but in the transformative effect these activities have on the mind.

My advice here has two parts. 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.

“I turned down a million-dollar bonus. As a homeless kid.”

Story of the singer Jewel

“Hardwood grows slowly.”

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.

When Jobs started as interim CEO in 1997, the company had just come off a quarter in which its sales fell 30 percent. Jobs quickly assessed that Apple’s problem was connected to its sprawling product lines. (In response to retailer demands, the company had developed numerous different variations of its core computers, including a dozen different versions of its once-vaunted Macintosh.) 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. There would be no confusion about which Apple machine was right for you.

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

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste …. But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making, isn’t so good … it’s not quite that good …. If you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you gotta know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work …. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. In the context of writing, this might mean you’ve sold multiple books and proven there’s a robust audience for your characters. In entrepreneurship, by contrast, this might mean that your side hustle generates a steady stream of sales. 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 procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated just the material I had to deal with in a given day or week,”6 McPhee explains. “It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.”

Read the beginning of the chapter about McPhees process on writing. Reminds of software design document or architectural design record approach. True embodiment of the measure many times but cut once approach

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

And if somebody says to me, “You’re a prolific writer”—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

John McPhee, The Paris Review, 2010