I am both fascinated by self-help books and skeptical about them, so that was my mindset as I read Cal Newport’s latest, Slow Productivity.  I was surprised that there wasn’t more cognitive science on, for example, multi-tasking or flow, but those may have been already covered in some of his previous works (which I’ve skimmed standing up at a bookstore, I think).  The argument he makes is the argument he makes, and the “proof” is in case studies of famous accomplished people. Fair enough. So the tests I brought to this were: Did it resonate with me? Did I take away anything I could use?  “Yes” on both accounts.

Newport makes the case that our ideas about productivity are based on an industrial model that doesn’t translate very well to knowledge work.  As a result, he says, we end up using visible activity and the performance of busyness as proxies for actual productivity.  The alternative: “reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output” (p. 41). Slow productivity is “a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner” (p. 41), based on three principles:

1. Do fewer things.

2. Work at a natural pace.

3. Obsess over quality.

I found the arguments and strategies for the first two of those principles more convincing and useful than the third–useful enough that I took some notes to come back to over the next few months as I try out some strategies.  The strategies aren’t entirely novel, but in some ways, that made them more approachable and persuasive.  I will also admit to picking the ones I found appealing and intuitive for me. Here’s what I’m trying out for the next 6 weeks:

  • Scale back how many projects you attempt to work on in a 6 to 8 week period and work on one project per day. 
  • Reduce email with face-to-face meetings and auto-pilot small recurring tasks (e.g., answering emails) for a regular time of day and location.
  • Double project deadlines and reduce to-do lists by 25 to 50%.
  • When you add a meeting to your calendar, add an equivalent amount of time for a work session.
  • Work in cycles of 6 to 8 weeks on, then 2 weeks “off” (or at least lighten the load). Schedule slow seasons. Pair a work project with a rest project.

I was less taken with the advice about obsessing over quality.  I appreciate the balancing acts in this part of the book:  Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Progress matters, not perfection.  Give yourself reasonable pressure to succeed.  I just didn’t find the strategies for implementing this principle as useful and it felt as though the case studies in this section of the book both made and defied some of the points he used them to make.

So here I am committing in public to the bullet points above.  I’m also putting this in the blog by way of explanation for why I am going to set down posting for the next 6 weeks (and just when I’d started to get in a habit of posting weekly!)  “Posting regularly to the blog” didn’t make the cut as I identified 3 projects for my focus between now and mid-October.  It’s more important to make progress on the book (do fewer things) and to be realistic about how much time I’m spending finishing the back yard project (which has a natural pace and is my “rest” project).  If I want to get serious about this blog, I need to do more to promote it (obsess over quality) and I will have more time to do that as I get further along with the book.

Next post:  A report on how this experiment in slow productivity works out….