Emma Goto
I used to love reading productivity hack blogs back in the 2010s, which were all about min-maxing your life to get the most out of every day. Nowadays there’s a lot more talk about burnout, especially during and post-COVID, and I think the productivity space has pivoted a bit more into a healthy direction which recognises that we need to be kinder to ourselves. Cal Newport has hooked onto this idea with his latest book about the concept of “slow productivity”. The overall premise is that taking things at a slower pace in the short-term can lead to better results in the long-term, as you give your ideas enough time to mature and turn into something really great.
I did feel the book started to lose itself a bit towards the end, but overall it raises some fairly solid points, which were split into 3 principles:
Principle #1: Do fewer things
You should be limiting yourself to 3 projects. Each project you take on comes with invisible overhead. As a programmer, things like kick-off meetings, chats with designers and PMs to clarify scope and so on comes to mind. The more projects you work on, the more directions your brain is being pulled in, and so the quality of each project you are working on simultaneously will drop.
Of course life isn’t that simple, and you probably have a lot of little tasks you need to do - so he gives a bunch of tactics you can use here like outsourcing work to a software (i.e. solving your problem with money) and pushing back when people give you vague tasks, and asking them to give you more information upfront.
He also mention the concept of time blocking, where you get all those little things and complete them all in one chunk of time. Another interesting one was if you have a task you need to do each week, blocking that time off on your calendar and turning it into a ritual (grab a coffee, walk to a nearby cafe) so that you can just complete it on auto-pilot without having to worry about it piling up amongst all of your other tasks.
Finally there’s the “push-pull method”, which is about how the optimal way of working would be to “pull” a new task only after you have completed your old one. But in a workplace generally you will keep having new tasks “pushed” to you and the ensuing pile-up decreases your productivity. Since you can’t really stop being “pushed” to in a workplace, your best bet would be to only focus on your top 3 items, and communicate clearly to whoever gives another task - “I need to work on a, b and c first, so I expect x, y, z to be done in 6 weeks”. Once they see your priorities, they may go and try and give the task to someone else, or after time passes the task might become less important and not need to be done at all.
Principle #2: Work at a natural pace
I’m sure like me you’ve read a productivity life hack blog or two where it’s all about squeezing the optimal amount of work out of every day - we are biased towards evaluating productivity at these small scales. But when we look to the accomplishments of great scientists, they took years to develop and publish their ideas - so in the short-term, it looks like they are doing nothing at all. But when we zoom out, they accomplished a lot.
Newport brings up a couple of examples of scientists and artists (Marie Curie, Benjamin Franklin, Lin Manuel Miranda) who have achieved great things, yet might have taken long summer breaks to recover, or gave a project or scientific idea room to breathe while they work on other things. His point is that giving a project the time it needs and doing it more slowly will lead to something much better in the long-term.
I would have liked to understand a bit better how principles 1 and 2 are supposed to tie together, because it felt a bit contradictory at first. You’re supposed to focus on finishing your top 3 projects before starting any more, but in this case you’re seemingly starting and dropping projects as you go.
Another piece of advice he gives is to double your project estimates:
“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.”
Definitely something I’m guilty of!
Of course just taking a long break is probably not achievable for most readers of this book (who work regular 9 to 5s) so he suggests trying this concept of working in “seasons” at a smaller scale. For example, scheduling your work in a way where you do a large chunk of it in 4 weeks, and then work at a leisurely pace for another 2, before you start the cycle again. It does require you to be quite tactical (or I suppose you could even call it sneaky) with how you do your tasks though, but I can relate to this in a sense, since some weeks my code output is a lot higher than other weeks where I take it more chill. He also suggests “quiet quitting” for a month each year, which wouldn’t be noticed by your boss (hmm, not sure about that).
Principle #3: Obsess over quality
As part of taking things at a slower pace, you might miss out on opportunities in the short-term, but it can lead to the perfect artwork or science paper (or whatever you are working on) in the longer term if you give yourself that time to make something as perfect as it can be.
The first thing that popped into my mind for this principle was - how do you know when something’s good enough to be released? Personally as a blogger I wouldn’t recommend this tactic at all. People forever procrastinate on starting a blog because they don’t think their posts are “good enough”, and so I’m more of the opinion that you should just keep putting out new content (even if you don’t think it’s that great), and over time the more posts you write, naturally your ability to write increases.
Newport does try to address this point, but I don’t think he’s able to give any good strategies, which is sort of fair since it’s a pretty hard question to answer. But his solution is to:
“Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. […] Progress is what matters, not perfection.”
His follow-on example is the author Stephanie Meyer, who would write in the small snatches of time after her kids had gone to bed, and after 6 months had produced the smash-hit Twilight.
For me this principle and example is where I felt the point of the book fell apart a bit. Stephanie Meyer was a full-time stay at home mum of 4. How is doing this slow productivity? Newport does notice the contradiction, and caveats that this is okay in the short-term if it’s for a temporary amount of time, because it can lead to something big and worth it (like a book deal). Honestly, I’m really not convinced. I think he should have been a bit more honest here that in some scenarios, the concept of slow productivity doesn’t work - and you’re just going to have to hustle to get shit done.
I’ll admit this also planted a seed of doubt for the whole premise of the book - there’s some great examples of where slow productivity has worked for people, but I suppose you could cherry-pick the other way and write a book where people maxed out their productivity and produced great things as well?
Conclusion
Overall though this book is good at reassuring the reader that it’s ok to be kind to yourself, and to not fall into the trap of trying to maximise your productivity. It’s a bit of a hard book to write and give advice on, since there’s a wide range of people (creatives, scientists, 9-to-5ers) who are all going to have varying amounts of flexibility in how they can change their working styles, but I think there were some good takeaways for me as a programmer.
What I would take away from this book are:
- Be more mindful of the tasks you take on. Create a short-list of projects you will focus on and if you’re given a task by someone else, be sure to communicate where that falls in the list of priorities.
- Use time-blocking: Batch small tasks, and schedule reoccurring ones.
- Double the amount of time you expect something to get done. And if that’s a really long time that’s ok - don’t try and squeeze something out in 6 months, let it take a whole year, and you will probably end up with something better if you gave that project the time to breathe.
… which is honestly sort of a vague list of takeaways that you could probably get in any other productivity book? But I do think this was a nice read just in terms of the food for thought it generated.
I think the one thing that I wish I could wave a magic wand and solve is just how many things I am interested in and want to work on - which doesn’t really fit into the “3 projects” approach. But I think I will take a closer look at trying to time-block my life and see how that works out.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
I used to love reading productivity hack blogs back in the 2010s, which were all about min-maxing your life to get the most out of every day. Nowadays there’s a lot more talk about burnout, especially during and post-COVID, and I think the productivity space has pivoted a bit more into a healthy direction which recognises that we need to be kinder to ourselves. Cal Newport has hooked onto this idea with his latest book about the concept of “slow productivity”. The overall premise is that taking things at a slower pace in the short-term can lead to better results in the long-term, as you give your ideas enough time to mature and turn into something really great.
I did feel the book started to lose itself a bit towards the end, but overall it raises some fairly solid points, which were split into 3 principles:
Principle #1: Do fewer things
You should be limiting yourself to 3 projects. Each project you take on comes with invisible overhead. As a programmer, things like kick-off meetings, chats with designers and PMs to clarify scope and so on comes to mind. The more projects you work on, the more directions your brain is being pulled in, and so the quality of each project you are working on simultaneously will drop.
Of course life isn’t that simple, and you probably have a lot of little tasks you need to do - so he gives a bunch of tactics you can use here like outsourcing work to a software (i.e. solving your problem with money) and pushing back when people give you vague tasks, and asking them to give you more information upfront.
He also mention the concept of time blocking, where you get all those little things and complete them all in one chunk of time. Another interesting one was if you have a task you need to do each week, blocking that time off on your calendar and turning it into a ritual (grab a coffee, walk to a nearby cafe) so that you can just complete it on auto-pilot without having to worry about it piling up amongst all of your other tasks.
Finally there’s the “push-pull method”, which is about how the optimal way of working would be to “pull” a new task only after you have completed your old one. But in a workplace generally you will keep having new tasks “pushed” to you and the ensuing pile-up decreases your productivity. Since you can’t really stop being “pushed” to in a workplace, your best bet would be to only focus on your top 3 items, and communicate clearly to whoever gives another task - “I need to work on a, b and c first, so I expect x, y, z to be done in 6 weeks”. Once they see your priorities, they may go and try and give the task to someone else, or after time passes the task might become less important and not need to be done at all.
Principle #2: Work at a natural pace
I’m sure like me you’ve read a productivity life hack blog or two where it’s all about squeezing the optimal amount of work out of every day - we are biased towards evaluating productivity at these small scales. But when we look to the accomplishments of great scientists, they took years to develop and publish their ideas - so in the short-term, it looks like they are doing nothing at all. But when we zoom out, they accomplished a lot.
Newport brings up a couple of examples of scientists and artists (Marie Curie, Benjamin Franklin, Lin Manuel Miranda) who have achieved great things, yet might have taken long summer breaks to recover, or gave a project or scientific idea room to breathe while they work on other things. His point is that giving a project the time it needs and doing it more slowly will lead to something much better in the long-term.
I would have liked to understand a bit better how principles 1 and 2 are supposed to tie together, because it felt a bit contradictory at first. You’re supposed to focus on finishing your top 3 projects before starting any more, but in this case you’re seemingly starting and dropping projects as you go.
Another piece of advice he gives is to double your project estimates:
“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.”
Definitely something I’m guilty of!
Of course just taking a long break is probably not achievable for most readers of this book (who work regular 9 to 5s) so he suggests trying this concept of working in “seasons” at a smaller scale. For example, scheduling your work in a way where you do a large chunk of it in 4 weeks, and then work at a leisurely pace for another 2, before you start the cycle again. It does require you to be quite tactical (or I suppose you could even call it sneaky) with how you do your tasks though, but I can relate to this in a sense, since some weeks my code output is a lot higher than other weeks where I take it more chill. He also suggests “quiet quitting” for a month each year, which wouldn’t be noticed by your boss (hmm, not sure about that).
Principle #3: Obsess over quality
As part of taking things at a slower pace, you might miss out on opportunities in the short-term, but it can lead to the perfect artwork or science paper (or whatever you are working on) in the longer term if you give yourself that time to make something as perfect as it can be.
The first thing that popped into my mind for this principle was - how do you know when something’s good enough to be released? Personally as a blogger I wouldn’t recommend this tactic at all. People forever procrastinate on starting a blog because they don’t think their posts are “good enough”, and so I’m more of the opinion that you should just keep putting out new content (even if you don’t think it’s that great), and over time the more posts you write, naturally your ability to write increases.
Newport does try to address this point, but I don’t think he’s able to give any good strategies, which is sort of fair since it’s a pretty hard question to answer. But his solution is to:
“Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. […] Progress is what matters, not perfection.”
His follow-on example is the author Stephanie Meyer, who would write in the small snatches of time after her kids had gone to bed, and after 6 months had produced the smash-hit Twilight.
For me this principle and example is where I felt the point of the book fell apart a bit. Stephanie Meyer was a full-time stay at home mum of 4. How is doing this slow productivity? Newport does notice the contradiction, and caveats that this is okay in the short-term if it’s for a temporary amount of time, because it can lead to something big and worth it (like a book deal). Honestly, I’m really not convinced. I think he should have been a bit more honest here that in some scenarios, the concept of slow productivity doesn’t work - and you’re just going to have to hustle to get shit done.
I’ll admit this also planted a seed of doubt for the whole premise of the book - there’s some great examples of where slow productivity has worked for people, but I suppose you could cherry-pick the other way and write a book where people maxed out their productivity and produced great things as well?
Conclusion
Overall though this book is good at reassuring the reader that it’s ok to be kind to yourself, and to not fall into the trap of trying to maximise your productivity. It’s a bit of a hard book to write and give advice on, since there’s a wide range of people (creatives, scientists, 9-to-5ers) who are all going to have varying amounts of flexibility in how they can change their working styles, but I think there were some good takeaways for me as a programmer.
What I would take away from this book are:
- Be more mindful of the tasks you take on. Create a short-list of projects you will focus on and if you’re given a task by someone else, be sure to communicate where that falls in the list of priorities.
- Use time-blocking: Batch small tasks, and schedule reoccurring ones.
- Double the amount of time you expect something to get done. And if that’s a really long time that’s ok - don’t try and squeeze something out in 6 months, let it take a whole year, and you will probably end up with something better if you gave that project the time to breathe.
… which is honestly sort of a vague list of takeaways that you could probably get in any other productivity book? But I do think this was a nice read just in terms of the food for thought it generated.
I think the one thing that I wish I could wave a magic wand and solve is just how many things I am interested in and want to work on - which doesn’t really fit into the “3 projects” approach. But I think I will take a closer look at trying to time-block my life and see how that works out.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.