Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

📝 Notes

Introduction

1: The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-Productivity

Being busy and overworked is not being productive
“Work” is a vague thing that employees do in an office. More work creates better results than less. It’s a manager’s job to ensure enough work is getting done, because without this pressure, lazy employees will attempt to get away with the bare minimum. The most successful companies have the hardest workers.
For all of our complaining about the term, knowledge workers have no agreed-upon definition of what “productivity” even means.
As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work. It’s why we gather in office buildings using the same forty-hour workweeks originally developed for limiting the physical fatigue of factory labor, and why we feel guilty about ignoring our inboxes, or experience internalized pressure to volunteer or “perform busyness” when we see the boss is nearby.

3: Do Fewer Things

This lesson, that doing less can enable better results, defies our contemporary bias toward activity, based on the belief that doing more keeps our options open and generates more opportunities for reward.

Administrative Overhead Creep

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished.

Remote Work reduces efficiency in comms

The shift to remote work also made collaboration somewhat less efficient, increasing the time required to satisfy the demands of this new overhead tax. If we’re working in the same building, and I have a question for you about a project, I can wait until I see your office door is open and then swing by for an impromptu five-minute chat. If I’m working from home, by contrast, we might instead set up a Zoom meeting, which due to the format of most digital calendars will likely require that we set aside at least thirty minutes.

Report Prep Example

$Effortfor1Report=7SH$
Full focus on 1 single report per day => We produce 1 report per day (day has 8 Hours of Work)
$SCE(SwitchContextEffort)=30mins$
Focus on 4 Reports per day
$4\times SCE=120mins=2Hours$
only 6 StaffHours of the day left => I cannot complete one report per day.
In this example, doing fewer things ends up producing more results

Focus also increases quality

The advantage of doing fewer things, however, is about more than just increasing the raw number of hours dedicated to useful activity; the quality of these hours also increases. When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility. Maybe you’re able to identify a clever new business strategy, devise an elegant algorithm, or come up with a bold advertising campaign that would have eluded you in a more fragmented state of attention. There are boring physiological and neurological explanations for this effect involving the mind-constricting impacts of cortisol when your schedule becomes unrealistically full, or the time required to excite rich semantic connections among your brain’s neurons. But we don’t need science to convince us of something that we’ve all experienced directly: our brains work better when we’re not rushing.

$Dofewerthings\ne Accomplishfewerthings$

It’s easy to mistake “do fewer things” as a request to “accomplish fewer things.” But this understanding gets things exactly backward. Whether your task list is overflowing or sparse, you’re still working more or less the same number of hours each week. The size of your todo list affects only how usefully the hours you work produce results.

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.
How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation.
People use the overwork card to support workload management in the office. Many times they lie about it just to look good.

We’ve established that overload is not fundamental to knowledge work. It’s instead largely a side effect of the crude ways in which we self-manage our work volume. We further established that toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things, as it chokes our schedule in administrative kudzu and splinters our attention into fragments too small to support original thinking. What was true for Jane Austen in the eighteenth century is true for those who stare at computer screens in the twenty-first: doing fewer things is the key to producing good work.

LIMIT MISSIONS

If you have multiple major professional missions, for example, you’ll struggle to limit the pool of ongoing projects they generate. Similarly, if you have too many ongoing projects, you’ll struggle to prevent your daily schedule from becoming overstuffed.
Mission: any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life.
But missions, once adopted, demand effort. If your professional life is top heavy, you’ll unavoidably face an onerous workload. Any attempt to succeed with our first principle of slow productivity, therefore, must begin with the reduction of your main objectives.

LIMIT PROJECTS

Missions require that you initiate “projects,”
Project: 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.

How to refuse a project

it’s hard for someone to rebut you, unless they’re willing to challenge your calculations, or demand that you expand your working hours to accommodate their specific request.

To gain credibility estimate how much time new projects 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.

The power of this approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment.
Filling every available minute of your workday with projects can still lead to a level of busyness that’s incompatible with slow productivity, even if it is feasible to execute. This can be solved by limiting the time you make available for project work.

LIMIT DAILY GOALS

Smallest scale of work that we’ll consider for our limiting strategies: the projects you decide to make progress on during the current day.
My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day.
There’s a calibrated steadiness to working on just one major initiative a day. Real progress accrues, while anxiety is subdued. This pace might seem slow in the moment, but zooming out to consider the results that eventually accrue over many months reveals the narrowness of this concern.
This advice is unified by the notion of containment. Several of these ideas focus on containing the overhead tax of tasks you cannot avoid tackling. 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.

Free yourself from the small

Slow productivity requires that you free yourself from the constraints of the small so that you can invest more meaningfully in the big. This is a messy, detail-oriented conflict, largely fought on the battleground of old-fashioned productivity tactics and systems.

Leverage rituals and locations

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 .

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.”

Reduce collaboration overhead replacing asynchronous communication with real-time conversations.

Docket-clearing meetings.

Like Daily SCRUM
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. An easy way to organize these sessions is to maintain a shared document of tasks to discuss. Team members can add items to the list as they come up in between meetings. One thirty-minute docket-clearing session can save a team from hours of highly distracting inbox checking and back-and-forth emailing.

Reverse task list.

It works as follows: Create a public task list for each of the major categories of tasks you tackle in your job. You can use a shared document for this purpose. (If you’re feeling more advanced, a shared Trello board is perhaps even better.) When someone asks you to take on some small obligation, direct them to add it themselves to the relevant shared task list; writing it, for example, into the shared doc, or creating a new card for it on the shared Trello board. Critically, make it clear that all of the information you’ll need to complete the task should be included in their entry.
Reverse task lists require people to spend more time specifying exactly what they need from you, which simplifies the later execution of their requests. You can also use these public lists to keep people updated on the status of the tasks you’re currently handling, saving them from having to bother you with “How’s it going?” messages. Finally, these lists clearly communicate your current workload. If a colleague encounters an overstuffed reverse task list, they might think twice about giving you something new to do.

Task engine

An efficient generator of numerous urgent small things to do. Some projects seem simple at first but they are task engines.

Broad Institute and the bottleneck problem

The solution the Broad Institute came up with wasn’t new, but instead an adaptation of a technique common in the world of industrial manufacturing: switching the flow of their genetic sequencing process from “push” to “pull.” 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. At Broad, this pull methodology was implemented in a simple manner. Each stage maintained a tray to place the completed samples. The next stage would pull in new samples from this same tray. If the outgoing tray at a given stage began to fill, then the technicians filling it would slow down their work. In some cases, they would even offer their assistance to the next stage to help them catch up.
source:: kanban, Toyota Production system (TPS)

SIMULATED PULL, PART 1: HOLDING TANK AND ACTIVE LISTS

pull-based workflow
Tracking your current projects on a list divided into two sections:

• holding tank similar:: Backlog
• active similar:: Sprint Scope
  New projects - > holding tank
  Active < 3 projects at once origin:: WIP Limit

Schedule from Active only
When 1 project complete - - > pull from holding tank

If project is large - - split to smaller chunks and only activate the chunks. The rest remains in the holding tank

SIMULATED PULL, PART 2: INTAKE PROCEDURE

When adding a new project to your holding tank, it’s important to update the source of this new obligation about what they should expect. To do so, 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.
   After sending this message, label the project with the time estimate you included in your acknowledgment message so you won’t later forget. Notice, when making this estimate, you can look at the estimates on all of your existing projects to help inform a realistic prediction.

If you fall behind on a project, update your estimate and inform the person who originally sent you the work about the delay. The key here is transparency. Be clear about what’s going on, and deliver on your promises, even if these promises have to change. Never let a project just drop through the cracks and hope it will be forgotten. If your colleagues and clients don’t trust you to deliver, they won’t stop bothering you.

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. These cleaning sessions also provide a good opportunity to remove from your holding tank projects that are languishing. If you’ve delayed the same project again and again, for example, this might be a good sign that you’re not really equipped to handle it, or that it falls outside your comfort zone.
In these cases, consider just bluntly asking the original source of the project to release you from your obligation.

4: Work at a Natural Pace

Double Estimates of effort

By deploying a blanket policy of doubling these initial estimates, you can counter this instinct toward unjustified optimism. The result: plans that can be completed at a more leisurely pace. The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place. 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

We arrive, finally, at the smallest timescale relevant to our discussion of taking longer: the individual day. One of the central joys of slowing down your work pace is that it frees you from needing to attack every day with frantic intensity. To reap this benefit, however, you actually have to simplify your daily schedule. Toning down your seasonal and long-term plans won’t help if you persist in filling every hour of the current day with more work than you can hope to complete. All three timescales must be tamed together. To create more reasonable workdays,
I have two suggestions:

1. reduce the number of tasks you schedule,
2. reduce the number of appointments on your calendar.
   In other words, cut back on what you plan to accomplish while increasing your available time.

One for you, one for me time slots

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

These strategies, of course, aren’t meant to apply to every day without exception. An idea we’ll explore later in this chapter is that working at a natural pace will still include periods of intense busyness and effort. There will be days, in other words, where you have to go from one meeting to another, again and again, because you’re trying to finalize an important deal, or get your arms around an unexpected crisis. There might also be days when every minute needs to be filled with last-minute tasks. But by thinking about these daily scheduling heuristics as a default approach to be deployed whenever possible, you ensure that unavoidable peaks in intensity will be followed by more leisurely troughs.

FORGIVE YOURSELF

An important coda to this discussion about taking longer is to acknowledge its psychological perils. Timing work is tricky. Especially when it comes to complicated projects. Sometimes you might let something drag on too long: you miss deadlines or opportunities; you realize you’ve fallen behind on your vision; you imagined you were Lin-Manuel Miranda slowly cultivating a masterpiece, but then one day realize you’ve actually just been procrastinating. It’s tempting to react to these periods of depressed productivity by assigning yourself a penance of crushing busyness. If you’re exhausted, you tell yourself, you can’t be accused of laziness.
I want to push back on this reaction. Not only is it unsustainable, but it won’t, in the long run, get you any closer to producing work that matters. It’s okay if your efforts to take longer sometimes temporarily lead you off your chosen path. It happens to everyone who has ever tried to accomplish something important.

Tactics of Quiet Quitters

The tactics of quiet quitters are straightforward. They suggest, for example, that you don’t volunteer for extra work, actually shut down at five o’clock, be comfortable saying no, and dilute an expectation of being constantly accessible over email and chat.

Slow dow for certain periods of time

the key observation motivating this advice is that in most knowledge work employment situations, it’s possible to surreptitiously slow down for a handful of months each year without any major consequences. A boss might notice if you’re always deflecting projects, and a client might become concerned if you’re rarely available to take on new work, but a month or two of a relatively slower pace is unlikely to be noticed.

Small escapes help your work motivation

The key observation here is that even a modest schedule of weekday escapes can be sufficient to diminish the exhaustion of an otherwise metronome-regular routine.
Pair each major work project with a corresponding rest project. The idea is simple: after putting aside time on your calendar for a major work project, schedule in the days or weeks immediately following it time to pursue something leisurely and unrelated to your work.

Basecamp Work 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. “It’s sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cooldown period to fit in more work,” explains the Basecamp employee handbook. “But the goal is to resist this temptation.”

Take care in your choice of physical spaces and rituals

mention Oliver to illustrate my final proposition about the second principle of slow productivity: 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.
similar:: The Extended Mind - Annie Murphy Paul

By taking care in your choice of physical spaces and rituals, you can not only transform the experience of your efforts into something more interesting and sustainable, but more fully tap into your latent brilliance.

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.
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. When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (aka our bedroom), our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on whatever pressing work needs to get done. This phenomenon is a consequence of the associative nature of our brains.

This is why Benchley retreated to the furnace factory and McCullough to his garden shed. They sought a more advantageous mental space to produce meaningful work. By calming their relational-memory system, they could slow their perception of time and allow their attention to mold itself more completely around a singular pursuit. What’s important about these observations is that the aesthetics of their outside-the-home work spaces didn’t really matter.

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. The second principle of productivity asks that you work at a more natural pace. It’s suitable that this suggestion about rituals closes this chapter, as there are few strategies that will more effectively transform your perception of time, pushing your experience away from anxiety and toward the more sublimely natural, than to add a dash of poetic mystery to your efforts.

5: Obsess Over Quality

This principle is the glue for Slow Productivity

There’s a reason why this principle is presented last: it’s the glue that holds the practice of slow productivity together. Doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are both absolutely necessary components of this philosophy, but if those earlier principles are implemented on their own, without an accompanying obsession with quality, they might serve only to fray your relationship to work over time—casting your professional efforts as an imposition that you must tame. It’s in the obsession over what you’re producing that slowness can transcend its role as just one more strategy on the arid battlegrounds of work-life wars and become a necessary imperative—an engine that drives a meaningful professional life.

Find a hobby to complement your learning habits

Mad Max: Fury Road single focal point shots

Did you know, for example, that in Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller and cinematographer John Seale (who came out of retirement for the film) purposefully positioned the focal point of every shot in the center of the frame, defying cinematic convention but making the fast-cut action much more legible to the audience? Learning about this center-framing technique, in an article written by cinematographer Vashi Nedomansky, completely changed my appreciation for Miller’s masterpiece.
There’s nothing special about cinema in this case study. The bigger observation is that there can be utility in immersing yourself in appreciation for fields that are different from your own. It can be daunting to directly study great work in your profession, as you already know too much about it. Confronting the gap between what the masters produce and your current capabilities is disheartening. When you study an unrelated field, the pressure is reduced, and you can approach the topic with a more playful openness.

START YOUR OWN INKLINGS

In the mid-1930s, C. S. Lewis, then a professor of English literature at Magdalen College at Oxford University, started an informal writing and discussion club. He invited his friends to attend, including, notably, J. R. R. Tolkien, also a professor at Oxford at the time. At first, they met every week or so at Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen, where they would read works in progress and discuss their literary ambitions. They later added the tradition of meeting one morning a week for a beer and discussion at the Eagle and Child, a pub in the center of Oxford. They called themselves the Inklings.

Get good tools to work with

The pursuit of quality is not a casual endeavor. 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.

Beatles and the origin of Sgt. Peppers Album

It was this decision by the Beatles to stop performing that ended up transforming pop music the next year, in 1967
The result of all of these creative and painstaking efforts was twelve tracks, spanning a little more than half an hour, representing one of the first commercial concept albums in the history of popular music. The Beatles titled it Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It would go on to sell 2.5 million copies during its first three months and reach the number one spot on the Billboard charts, where it remained for three months, the longest stay at the top spot for any Beatles album. Perhaps more important, it almost single-handedly destroyed the long-dominant culture of pop song singles and hit parade charts. It made the album the defining artistic output of the popular music scene and ushered in a new era of progressive music and sonic experimentation.

Balance obsession and perfectionism

Here we find as good a general strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism as I’ve seen: 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.

📋 Table of Contents

Introduction
PART 1 | FOUNDATIONS
Chapter 1
The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-Productivity
Chapter 2
A Slower Alternative
PART 2 | PRINCIPLES
Chapter 3
Do Fewer Things
Chapter 4
Work at a Natural Pace
Chapter 5
Obsess Over Quality
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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