Slow Productivity.
By Cal Newport
The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.
I loved this book! I’ve read a few of Cal Newport’s other books (A World without Email, Digital Minimalism, and my favourite – Deep Work); and have found them all to be both illuminating and practical. There’s something about the word “Productivity” that implies speed and pace, and using and incorporating the word “Slow” alongside it had considerable appeal for me when I saw the title. This book reminded me firstly of the necessity of doing less things in general, of the pride of doing things well, and the joy of crafting them rather than rushing them.
Key take outs for me:
· There is a growing anti-productivity sentiment among knowledge workers, who are experiencing exhaustion from an increasingly relentless busyness.
· What is interesting and surprising to me is realizing how much of this busyness is self-imposed, and how much we control ourselves.
· We need to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind, and work on changing our perspective. This book helps with that, hugely.
· Slowing down is not about protesting work – it’s about finding a better (and more enjoyable) way to do it. And doing it that way produces better results.
· Our efforts should be sustainable and engaging, and quality, as well as completion, is what will follow.
Cal Newport defines Slow Productivity as follows:
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.
Part 1: Foundations
1. The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-Productivity
Pseudo-Productivity can be defined as the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. This often translates to faster required responses, more meetings, more tasks, and more hours. The incessant need to check communications supercharges our sense of overload and distraction. This same onslaught prevents us from having the time to do deep work, think, write and contribute with high quality. There is a vagueness amongst knowledge workers around what productivity even means, and this makes it very difficult to specify and measure. We have complicated and constantly shifting workloads, made up of multiple projects, often with no single clear output to track. People often just try and work on a lot, and hope to make progress.
2. A Slower Alternative
Knowledge work can be defined as the economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact (or output) with market value, through the application of cognitive effort.
There is great value in slowing down to prepare to tackle a challenging project. Cal presents an alternative framework that knowledge workers can use to organize and execute tasks that sidesteps the hurry, and the ever-expanding workloads generated by pseudo-productivity.
· A sustainable way to integrate professional efforts into a life well lived.
· Reorienting our work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm.
Part 2: Principles
3. Do Fewer Things
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. Do not give up on this aspirational goal of engineered simplicity!
When you approach a project in an unhurried manner, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility. Quite simply; our brains work better when we are not rushing. Doing fewer things does not mean accomplishing less. Focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new is a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output. Toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things.
· Proposition: Limit the Big
o Limit Missions: Missions demand effort – try to choose two or three.
o Limit Projects: These are work related initiatives that cannot be completed in a single session. When you take on a project, estimate the time it will require and schedule it in your calendar by blocking the hours off. If you can’t find the time, either cancel a current project, defer this one, or decline it. Maintain clarity and control over your schedule, always.
o Limit Daily Goals: Work on one project per day, and stay focused on one important target per day. Be careful about the attention cost of switching back and forth. Pace may seem slow in the moment, but results will accumulate over time.
· Proposition: Contain the Small
o Put tasks on autopilot: Assign regularly occurring work to specific times and specific days. Leverage rituals and location. (i.e. Finance and Admin on Mondays in the office, Creative Projects on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in a stimulating space, Customer visits on Thursdays etc.)
o Synchronize: Solve through scheduled quality connections and conversations rather than back and forth emails and messages.
o Make other people work more: If people know what days you do things on and what information you like to be briefed with, they will adjust their expectations accordingly, and often improve the quality of their inputs to you.
o Avoid task engines: When selecting new projects, prioritize options that minimize the number of emails, weekly requests, questions and small chores you expect them to generate.
o Spend money: Consider contracting out services that eliminate or simplify administrative work. Offloading of the small provides the mental space needed to devise strategies and make breakthroughs.
· Proposition: Pull instead of Push
o The idea is to pull in new work only if you have spare capacity – and then overload becomes impossible.
o Have a holding tank for queued up projects, and an active list for projects you are actively working on. When scheduling your time, focus only on the active.
o When you add a project to the holding tank, update the source of the obligation as to what timing they can expect.
o Update and clean lists once a week; review upcoming deadlines and prioritize accordingly. Maintain transparency with all parties.
4. Work at a Natural Pace
We need time to make time to think too. Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the “most human and worthy of all activities”. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines, and poorly managed workloads. Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, and in settings conducive to brilliance.
· Proposition: Take Longer
o Make a 5-year plan: If your vision is established in years, you can tolerate busy periods in which other demands take time from your goal. Keep returning, again and again – time will take care of the rest.
o Double your project timelines: If you are too ambitious, your intensity will remain pegged too high. Double the timeline that you first identify. The pace of your work will follow a more natural grove. The path is long, so pace yourself!
o Simplify your workday: Reduce the number of tasks that you schedule, and reduce the number of appointments in your calendar. Every time a meeting is scheduled, schedule an equal amount of time for yourself or your projects.
o Forgive yourself: Then ask: What next?
· Proposition: Embrace Seasonality
o Schedule slow seasons: Vary the intensity and focus of your efforts throughout the year. Quietly implement a recuperative slow down, and then return without fanfare to your normal pace.
o Define a shorter work year: There is a relief and a creative recharge if we can find a way to spend extended time away from our normal professional routines.
o Implement “small seasonality”: Varying intensity at smaller timescales i.e. No meeting Mondays; a matinee/museum/hike once a month; working in cycles of 6 to 8 weeks with a 2-week cool down period.
· Proposition: Work Poetically
o Match your space to your work: Model your setting into something tailored to the work it supports.
o Strange is better than stylish: Be wary of familiar distractions, and seek an advantageous mental space to produce meaningful work.
o Rituals should be striking: Form your own personalized rituals around the work you make most important.
5. Obsess over Quality
Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if it 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.
Quality work is easier to produce if you are doing fewer things, and working at a more natural pace – of course. Obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life – not everything! Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.
Leverage your skills to enable more simplicity in your professional life. The greater your skill, the more freedom you have to dictate and stipulate your requirements – to others and yourself.
· Proposition: Improve your Taste
o Understand your own field, but also make a study of what is great in other domains. When you study and unrelated field, you will approach it with more openness and may find some insights that are relevant to your own field.
o Gather with others who share similar ambitions – the influence of collective taste can be superior to that of an individual person.
o Quality tools (i.e. a beautiful notebook) can increase the quality of your work, and can be a sign that we are taking our pursuit seriously.
· Proposition: Bet on Yourself
o Take risks in pursuit of your larger goal, and place yourself in situations where there exists pressure to succeed.
o Examples: Sacrificing leisure time to help you cover ground; earning less to focus on your priority; announcing a schedule to others to create expectation as a motivator; or satisfying an investor, thus creating pressure and drive to boost your quality and delivery.
LJ: None of these tools and ideas will work without the proper planning and implementation, and in my mind, this is well worth the time for the boost in qualitative, sustainable and satisfying productivity!