Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout - By Cal Newport
Date read: 2024-03-17How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
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Arguably one of Cal's best books and a very close second to my favorite book of his, So Good They Can't Ignore You. Newport does an excellent job weaving in memorable and relatable stories in a very well structured and insightful book on the power of slow productivity. Recommended for anyone with burnout and looking to upgrade their skills to the next level.
Contents:
- PRINCIPLE #1: DO FEWER THINGS
- PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE
- PRINCIPLE #3: OBSESS OVER QUALITY
My Notes
Slowing down isn’t about protesting work. It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.
SLOW PRODUCTIVITY: 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.
PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY: The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. AKA, appearing busy or doing "busy work".
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 hard to specify the optimal number of missions, but generally, less is better than more. Try to limit the number of missions to 2-3 max.
How to say "no" to new requests: “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,”
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.
After you’ve executed this strategy for a while, you’ll develop an instinct for roughly how many commitments you can maintain at any point without overtaxing your time. Going forward, it becomes sufficient to just track your current project tally, and reject new work once you pass your limit—making adjustments as needed, of course, for unusually busy periods.
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.
Putting tasks on auto-pilot: Set times for accomplishing specific categories of regularly occurring tasks. A freelancer, for example, might schedule sending invoices for Monday morning, while a professor might schedule reviewing grant reports for Fridays, right after lunch. Once you get used to accomplishing a specific type of task at the same times on the same days, the overhead required for their execution plummets.
If you can connect a regularly recurring task block to a specific location, perhaps paired with a little ritual that helps initiate your efforts, you’re more likely to fall into a regular rhythm of accomplishing this work.
For example, as a college professor, perhaps on Fridays she plans to always eat lunch at the same dining hall in the student center, and then once done, 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. Maybe after she’s done, she returns to the student center to grab a coffee to bring back to her office (another ritual).
The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussions 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. 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.”
Try to avoid a task engine—an efficient generator of numerous urgent small things to do. For example, choosing to organize a 1 day client conference may seem easier than writing a report, but it requires more tasks and more coordination, thus consuming more of your time.
SIMULATED PULL, PART 1: HOLDING TANK AND ACTIVE LISTS
Creating a simulated pull system for tasks when you don't own intake. 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.
SIMULATED PULL, PART 2: INTAKE PROCEDURE
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.
Example:
Hi, Hasini, I wanted to follow up on our conversation from earlier this morning and confirm that I’ll take charge of updating the client section of our website. What I’ll need from you before getting started is a list of what elements you think the new section needs (or a link to another company’s site that you think does it right). At the moment, I have eleven other projects queued up ahead of this. Based on my commitments to these existing projects, my best guess is that I’ll be able to get to this in roughly four weeks after I get the needed information from you. I will, of course, update you if this estimate changes.
SIMULATED PULL, PART 3: LIST CLEANING
You should update and clean your lists once a week. In addition to pulling in new work to fill empty slots on your active list, you should also review upcoming deadlines. Prioritize what’s due soon, and send updates for any work that you know you’re not going to finish by the time promised.
When cleaning your lists, look for projects that have become redundant or have been rendered obsolete by subsequent developments.
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.
MAKE A FIVE-YEAR PLAN
Take whatever timelines you first identify as reasonable for upcoming projects, and then double their length.
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.
Simplify your workday: 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.
Reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.
A good target is to ensure that no more than half of the hours in any single day are dedicated to meetings or calls.
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.
What if we stopped positioning quiet quitting as a general response to the “meaninglessness of work,” and instead saw it as a more specific tactic to achieve seasonality? What if, for example, you decided to quiet quit a single season each year: maybe July and August, or that distracted period between Thanksgiving and the New Year? You wouldn’t make a big deal about this decision. You would just, for lack of a better word, quietly implement it before returning without fanfare to a more normal pace.
An advanced tactic here is to take on a highly visible but low-impact project during this season that you can use to temporarily deflect new work that comes your way.
The key is to choose a deflection project that itself doesn’t require a lot of collaboration, meetings, or urgent messages. Solo writing or research projects work well here.
IMPLEMENT “SMALL SEASONALITY” defined as mini-breaks vs. long, seasonal vacations.
Examples:
MATCH YOUR SPACE TO YOUR WORK
An advertising executive might find inspiration in mid-century modern, Mad Men–style office decor; a music executive might fill her office with instruments; the engineer could emphasize half-assembled gadgets.
Strange is powerful, even if it’s ugly. When seeking out where you work, be wary of the overly familiar (e.g., working from home in the same room).
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.
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.
The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities.
There can be utility in immersing yourself in appreciation for fields that are different from your own. For example, Cal Newport studying film to improve his writing.
If you want your mind on board with your plans to evolve your abilities, then investing in your tools is a good way to start. Invest in high-quality tools to improve your level of quality.
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.
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.
Temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question.
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.
ANNOUNCE A SCHEDULE - Create a deadline and announce it to force yourself to create good work and to see projects to completion.
When someone has invested in your project, you’ll experience amplified motivation to pay back their trust.
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.