Slow productivity

“Slow Productivity” by Cal Newport advocates for a sustainable and meaningful approach to knowledge work, in response to the modern obsession with pseudo-productivity. Newport’s philosophy is based on three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and obsessing over quality.

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1. Do Fewer Things: Taking on too many tasks leads to a high overhead tax and reduced efficiency. Overcommitment results in administrative chores that detract from deep work, creating a cycle of endless busyness without significant accomplishment. Reducing obligations will enable you to focus deeply on fewer, high-impact projects, thereby achieving more impactful results.

Strategies

1. Limit Missions and Projects: Focus on the projects that are likely to have the biggest impact. Limit your commitments to ensure you can dedicate full attention to each of your impactful projects.
2. Set Clear Priorities: Establish a small number of clear, achievable daily goals that align with your top priorities.
3. Avoid Multitasking: Concentrate on completing one project or task at a time. This will improve your focus and reduce errors.
4. Batch Similar Tasks: Group similar tasks together to minimize context switching and stay in the right mindset for each type of work. Establishing regular routines for repetitive tasks reduces the cognitive load and frees up mental space for more important work.
5. Make other people work more: Introduce processes that require your colleagues or clients to do more of the work associated with a given task.
6. Say No: Practice saying no to tasks and requests that do not contribute directly to your main objectives, helping you maintain focus on what truly matters.
7. Implement a "Public Pull List": Create a shared document with a list of your ongoing projects and responsibilities. This transparency helps others understand your workload and encourages them to prioritize before adding new tasks to your list.

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2. Work at a Natural Pace: Historical figures of the past, like great scientists and writers, worked at a varied, alternate and sustainable rhythm. On the contrary, the pace of modern work leads to burnout and dissatisfaction. Newport proposes to rediscover the work pace of the past by programming periods of intense focus followed by relaxation, which allows for creativity and long-term productivity and promotes a more balanced and sustainable workload.

Strategies

1. Alternate Intensity and rest: Implement periods of intense focus followed by rest. Schedule downtime. Plan monthly breaks.
2. Use time blocking for deep work: Designate specific time blocks for deep, focused work. Protect these blocks from interruptions to maintain full concentration.
3. Implement office Hours and no-Meeting Days: Reserve 30-60 minutes for quick conversations with colleagues. Make it very clear that you are available during these scheduled blocks of time. Implement recurring no-meeting days (e.g., Mondays) to focus on uninterrupted work.‍
4. Introduce Seasonality: Vary the intensity of your workload throughout the year. Plan periods of high activity followed by quieter months to recharge and maintain balance.

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3. Obsess Over Quality: Quality work demands time and focus, which are incompatible with the busyness encouraged by pseudo-productivity. Newport suggests that by prioritizing high-quality output we can gain more control over our schedules. This principle transforms simplicity from an option to a necessity, as quality work requires dedication and cannot be rushed. Obsessing over quality not only leads to more impactful professional outputs but also provides leverage for a more manageable and rewarding work life.

Strategies

1. Focus on Excellence: Shift from completing as many tasks as possible to dedicating time to ship high-quality results.‍
2. Seek Feedback and Learn Continuously: Regularly seek feedback from peers or mentors to refine your work and enhance quality. Seek cross-disciplinary learning to gain new perspectives and spark creativity.

In short, Slow Productivity encourages modern knowledge workers to emphasize depth over breadth, quality over quantity, and sustainability over short-term gains. By adopting these principles we can achieve more meaningful, impactful work without succumbing to the mad demands of modern productivity culture.

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Book Quotes

• "The relentless overload [...] is generated by a belief that "good" work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours."

• "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 a small number of projects that matter most."

• ‍"Focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new, is objectively a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output."

• LIMIT MISSIONS. "Missions, once adopted, demand effort. [...] Any attempt to succeed with our first principle of slow productivity, therefore, must begin with the reduction of your main objectives."

• LIMIT PROJECTS. "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."

• LIMIT DAILY GOALS. "My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day."

• "In many cases, it's not the actual execution of a small commitment that generates distraction, it's instead the cognitive effort required to remember it, to worry about it, and to eventually find time for it in your schedule."

• "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."

• "The great scientists of past eras [...] were interested in what they produced over the course of their lifetimes, not in any particular short-term stretch. Without a manager looking over their shoulder, or clients pestering them about responding to emails, they didn't feel pressure to be maximally busy every day."

• "Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. [...] A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term."

• "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."

• SCHEDULE SLOW SEASONS. "Arrange for major projects to wrap up before your simulated offseason begins, and wait to initiate major new projects until after it ends." [...] "Fleming made a deal with Kemsley that required him to work only ten months each year. The other two months would be taken as an annual vacation."

• "How will I ever get this all done? A clever way to balance this stress is to pair each major work project with a corresponding rest project. [...]. The key is to obtain a proportional balance. Hard leads to fun."

• ‍"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."

• "If we look closer, we can often find hidden among our busy to-do lists one or two core activities that really matter most."‍

• "Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable. In other words, this third principle helps you stick with the first."

• "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."

• "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."

• "Understand your own field, to be sure, but also focus on what's great about other domains. It's here that you can find a more flexible source of inspiration [...]"

• "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."

• "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."