[Book 44] Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Slow Productivity is a guide to producing high-quality work in an era of increased busyness. This philosophy is broken down into three components: 1) do fewer things, 2) work at a natural pace, and 3) obsess over quality.

Do Fewer Things
Limiting the number of tasks helps reduce the administrative burden of managing an extensive list. While most tasks can’t be completely ignored, techniques such as batching similar items and creating rituals for recurring tasks can minimize cognitive effort. It’s important not to confuse “do fewer things” with “accomplish fewer things”. Reducing the quantity of tasks creates space to increase the quality of those that remain; overall time spent remains similar.

Work at a Natural Pace
Cal explains that to work at a natural pace, we must recognize that while our jobs require us to produce more and be more accessible than ever, we’re taught very little about structuring our work schedules. This insight is crucial because it reveals that much of our anxiety stems from suboptimal scheduling and prioritization, not the work itself.

Without proper guidance and discipline, people tend to complete the easiest tasks first, neglecting longer-term and more challenging projects. This is a mistake because the latter usually provide significantly more value to employers and clients. Surprisingly, distinguishing between what truly matters and what simply needs to get done is often not trivial. For example, maintaining a trusting client relationship is imperative, but numerous one-off requests can hinder the ability to produce high-quality work for them. It may be beneficial to help clients understand the inherent trade-offs between constant availability and high-quality output, while ultimately respecting their preferences.

Obsess Over Quality
Obsessing over quality has several benefits, the first of which is counterintuitive: it provides a shield to deflect or delegate lower-value work. When you’re recognized as an expert in a particular domain, colleagues and clients understand that it’s unwise to waste your time on trivial matters.

To increase the quality of your work, surround yourself with people of similar professional ambitions and regularly discuss your approaches to work. The collective taste of the group will be superior to any individual, and over time you’ll train and learn from each other. Additionally, be curious and explore domains different from your core expertise. This will introduce new ways of thinking that you can weave into your existing approach. Both working alongside talented colleagues and exploring new domains offer evergreen ways to enhance your taste and working techniques.

This book has reminded me to proactively create space for high-quality work, focus on the highest-value opportunities, and partner with the most insightful people I can find. It was refreshing to finally read a productivity book that focused on quality over quantity of work.

You should read this book if you…

• feel stressed with too much work to do
• seek techniques on how to optimally organize your work to increase quality
• want proven methods to increase creativity

Favorite Quote

“It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness“

Additional Information

Year Published: 2024
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 10 – Superb – Changed the way I live my life
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 3 – Average
Key Highlights: link

Key Highlights

1. 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
2. As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work
3. Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy
4. 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
5. We’ve now refuted a common confusion about the first principle of slow productivity: 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 list affects only how usefully these hours produce results
6. 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. If you can minimize this preparatory effort, you can contain the impact of the task itself
7. A key refinement to support this task-centric version of autopilot scheduling is to 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
8. Shifting to a pull-based operation made backlogs impossible: the pace of the pipeline would adapt to whatever stage was running slowest. This transparency, in turn, helped the workers identify places where the system was out of balance
9. It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness
10. To create more reasonable workdays, I have two suggestions: 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
11. If we’re willing to push aside all of this digital posturing, at the core of quiet quitting is a pragmatic observation: you have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload
12. The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane nor pragmatic approach to organizing your work. This third principle’s focus on quality, however, transforms professional simplicity from an option to an imperative. Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable. In other words, this third principle helps you stick with the first
13. 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
14. 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
15. When you gather with other people who share similar professional ambitions, the collective taste of the group can be superior to that of any individual. This follows, in part, from the diversity of approaches that people take toward creation in a given field. When you combine the opinions of multiple practitioners of your craft, more possibilities and nuance emerge. There’s also a focusing effect that comes from performing for a crowd. When you want to impress other people, or add to the conversations in a meaningful way, your mind slips into a higher gear than what’s easily accessible in solo introspection. Forming a group of like-minded professionals, all looking to improve what they’re doing, provides a shortcut to improving your taste, an instantaneous upgrade to the standard of quality that you’re pursuing
16. When your output is only one step among many on a collaborative path toward creative progress, the pressure to get everything just right is reduced. Your goal is instead reduced to knocking the metaphorical ball back over the net with enough force for the game to proceed. 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
17. Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind. It’s not that these efforts are arbitrary: our anxious days include tasks and appointments that really do need to get done. But once you realize, as McPhee did, that this exhausted scrambling is often orthogonal to the activities that matter, your perspective changes. A slower approach to work is not only feasible, but is likely superior to the ad hoc pseudo-productivity that dictates the professional lives of so many today. If you collect modest drops of meaningful effort for 365 days, McPhee reminds us, you’ll end the year with a bucket that’s pretty damn full. This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way