[[Cal Newport]] [[lit/kindle/Slow Productivity|Highlights]] > \[Slow Productivity] rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything. Slow productivity is 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." Newport opens his latest book with a great summary of how "knowledge work" arose in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the resulting rise in "pseudo-productivity," a reaction by workers to their increasing autonomy and the inability of managers to measure knowledge work outputs. Pseudo-productivity is "the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort." ## Do fewer things Typically people say "yes" until they reach a stress level that makes saying "no" less uncomfortable than taking on that one extra task. Because knowledge workers are so autonomous, it's easy to mis-manage workload and even easier to ask our colleagues for one more thing. When we say "yes" to so many things, the overhead tax of administering them all eats up all of our productive time. People greatly overestimate what they can do in a day and wildly underestimate what they can do over a decade or more (most people don't even think about what they could accomplish over these timeframes). By trying to do too much in the short term, often in the service of pseudo-productivity, knowledge workers cripple their ability to accomplish big things. Instead, Newport suggests reducing your obligations to only what you can easily imagine accomplishing with time to spare. > [!NOTE] > Newport expounds further on the idea that knowledge workers' ability to flood their colleagues with requests is the key reason why productivity systems like Getting Things Done cannot work in his piece for the New Yorker [[The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done]]. GTD can help you as an individual worker manage the requests that come in but the problem is one of the organization not the individual. Specifically, Newport suggest tactics including - Limit the number of really big commitments ("missions") to only 2-3 at most. Newport includes examples from Andrew Wiles, who solved Fermat's Last Theorem to Richard Feynman, who refused almost all work that wasn't related to his pursuit of physics. - Work on one and only one thing per day. - Automate what you can and create routines for yourself and your colleagues, such as office hours for your availability. - Make other people think twice before putting more work on your plate. - Avoid "task engines", projects with many small tasks like organizing a conference. - Spend money to solve the problem, hire an expert rather than take something on yourself. Newport also describes a pull-based rather than push-based organizational structure for managing work across a team. ## Work at a natural pace Many of the scientists and artists we know today we know for accomplishments that took a lifetime (and sometimes more), such as Copernicus, Newton, and Curie. Newport argues that we too shouldn't rush our important work and instead allow it to unfold along a sustainable timeline. Until very recently, productivity revolved around the seasons. Working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 45 years is artificial and unsustainable. Newport recommends returning to a more natural pace: scheduling slow seasons in your year, defining a shorter work year, varying productivity across the week and month, working in cycles (Basecamp uses an 6-week cycle with a 2-week cool down), scheduling rest projects, and taking breaks. Newport's tactics for working at a natural pace include - Make a five-year plan - Double project timelines - Reduce your task list for the day by 25-50% - Be empathetic with yourself - Align work to your environment - Embrace the poetic mystery of your efforts ## Obsess over quality Newport's vision is not simply about doing less, but doing the right things at a high level of quality. Focusing on quality both demands and enables slowness. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he asked the leadership which Mac he should recommend to a friend. Because the executives couldn't answer that simple question, he slashed the product line and focused on quality, resulting in the products that are so successful today. However, for perfectionists this can be a major stumbling block. By seeing your work in the context of a longer timeframe, you can think of it as an intermediate step, not a final product that needs to be perfect. You don't finish work, you "release" it. Obsessing over quality is the idea that makes Newport's philosophy on slowness a philosophy of productivity. To Newport, productivity is self-evidently worthwhile (he has written multiple books, is a regular contributor to the *New Yorker*, has a media company called the Deep Life with podcasts and a YouTube channel, releases weekly essays on his newsletter, and is a professor at Georgetown). Slow Productivity is not a post-capitalist manifesto for working less. This principle seems both obvious and problematic. The tactics Newport recommends are dubious, from "write after the kids go to bed" to "attract an investor" to "announce a deadline." These all sound like ways to increase business and stress, not decrease them. Ultimately, however, the final point Newport makes is that employing these principles and tactics is to bet on oneself, which I applaud. Those who want to produce high-quality work over a lifetime must find sustainable modes of work. Slow Productivity offers one such vision.