Read: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Recommended

I appreciate that he looked for a positive and hopeful framing, rather than an anti-.

As the 4th Cal Newport book I’ve finished (and 5th I’ve started), it’s largely what I’d expect. That said, there are useful notes and references therein (captured below).

In knowledge work, and particularly software development, many of the recommended approaches are already encoded (in different terminology) in various agile methodologies.

Newport acknowledges how the techniques and strategies will not apply outside certain narrow situations, but hopes to spark a “revolution”.

See also:

• Digital Minimalism
• Productivity As an Incomplete Measure (this is addressed further in this book)
• Deep Work
• The Time Block Planner

My Reading Highlights and Notes

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

INTRODUCTION

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY 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.

Tags: definition

this philosophy 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.

Part 1 FOUNDATIONS

1 THE RISE AND FALL OF PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY

It’s hard to overemphasize how unusual it is that an economic sector as large as knowledge work lacks useful standard definitions of productivity.

In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness, we also gravitate away from deeper efforts toward shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list. 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.

PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

Tags: definition

Many people would rather pretend to be busy in an air-conditioned office than stamp sheet metal all day on a hot factory floor.

2 A SLOWER ALTERNATIVE

There’s a personal satisfaction in grimly pointing out the flaws in a system, but sustainable change, Petrini came to believe, requires providing people with an enjoyable and life-affirming alternative.

There’s a temptation in activism to propose radically new ideas, as this preserves the utopian possibility of a pristine solution. Petrini recognized, however, that when it came to presenting an appealing alternative to fast food, he would be wise to draw from traditional food cultures that had developed through trial-and-error experimentation over many generations.

Once isolated, Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements—focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—are obviously not restricted to food in any fundamental sense. They can apply to any setting in which a haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience. This claim is validated by the many new slow movements that arose in the wake of Slow Food’s original success, targeting other aspects of our culture that were suffering from an unthinking haste.

This sudden interest in workplace experimentation is both welcome and needed, as much about how we work in the knowledge sector today is ossified into tradition and conventions, some of which are arbitrary and some of which are borrowed from different, older types of work.

Moves to maintain telecommuting or reduce the workweek help blunt some of the worst side effects of pseudo-productivity but do little to address the root problem itself.

a more sustainable response to the burnout crisis facing knowledge work would be to offer an appealing alternative. This would require moving beyond attempts to simply constrain pseudo-productivity to instead propose a brand-new vision of what productivity can mean.

KNOWLEDGE WORK (GENERAL DEFINITION) The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.

Tags: definition

it’s worth noting that the general mindset and mood conveyed in these tales are also of stand-alone value. Following Petrini’s lead, I’m convinced that one of the best ways to truly introduce you to the “lost art of accomplishment without burnout” is to immerse you in the world of those who successfully built their lives around this goal.

I want to reassure you that slow productivity doesn’t ask that you extinguish ambition. Humans derive great satisfaction from being good at what they do and producing useful things. This philosophy can be understood as providing a more sustainable path toward these achievements.

Though this book is about knowledge work productivity in general, it targets in particular anyone who has a reasonable degree of autonomy in their job. This obviously includes freelancers, solopreneurs, and those who run small businesses. Pseudo-productivity’s presence in these particular settings is not due to a boss’s demands but is instead largely self-imposed, which opens up vast potential for individual experimentation. My imagined audience, however, also includes those who might work for larger employers but still enjoy significant freedom in how they go about their work.

This is not to say that slow productivity cannot one day reform these corners of knowledge work as well (see my discussion in the conclusion of this book about my broader vision for the future of this movement), but every revolution needs a starting point, and for something as momentous as rethinking the very notion of productivity itself, it makes sense to focus at first on those for whom self-experimentation is possible.

Part 2 PRINCIPLES

3 DO FEWER THINGS

PRINCIPLE #1: 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.

I found myself distracted by the central mystery of these events: How is it that so many knowledge workers end up with workloads calibrated to the exact edge of the overhead tax tipping point?

They exist at that point of maximum sustainable overhead tax that seems to represent the worst of all configurations, as it maintains the pain of having too much to do, but keeps this pain just manageable enough to avoid reform.

How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation. If you turn down a Zoom meeting invitation, there’s a social-capital cost, as you’re causing some mild harm to a colleague and potentially signaling yourself to be uncooperative or a loafer. But, if you feel sufficiently stressed about your workload, this cost might become acceptable: you feel confident that you’re close to becoming unsustainably busy, and this provides psychological cover to skip the Zoom. You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party.

toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things, as it chokes our schedule in administrative kudzu and splinters our attention into fragments too small to support original thinking.

Proposition: Limit the Big

He didn’t resolve, in some generic fashion, to try to take on less; he instead put in place specific rules (e.g., no conferences), habits (e.g., work from home as much as possible), and even ploys (e.g., trickling out his already completed research)—all directed toward minimizing the number of big items tugging at his attention.

Intentional limits set concurrently at all three of these scales are more likely to succeed than focusing on just one scale in isolation.

LIMIT MISSIONS

The term mission can sound grandiose. For our purposes, we’ll demote it to a more pragmatic definition: any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life.

Tags: definition

It’s hard to specify the optimal number of missions, but generally, less is better than more. There’s a romance to focusing on a single pursuit, but this level of simplicity is typically accessible only to the most purely creative fields….Two or three missions are more tractable and still quite minimalist.

LIMIT PROJECTS

Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session. Some projects you complete once and then are done, such as updating the sales copy on a product website. Other projects are ongoing, meaning they unfold without any clear stopping point, such as answering support queries from clients. Projects create many of the concrete tasks that take up your time during the day. It follows that limiting them is critical to limiting your overall work volume.

If you instead have a reputation as someone who is careful about managing their time and can quantify your busyness more concretely, you have a better chance of avoiding the new work. When you say, “I don’t see any really significant swaths of open time to work on something like this for at least three weeks, and in the meantime, I have five other projects competing for my schedule,” it’s hard for someone to rebut you, unless they’re willing to challenge your calculations, or demand that you expand your working hours to accommodate their specific request.

To gain this credibility, I recommend, at first, when considering a new project, you estimate how much time it will require and then go find that time and schedule it on your calendar. Block off the hours as you would for a meeting. If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you don’t have enough time for it. Either decline the project, or cancel something else to make room. The power of this approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment.

You don’t have to continue pre-scheduling your projects in this manner indefinitely. After you’ve executed this strategy for a while, you’ll develop an instinct for roughly how many commitments you can maintain at any point without overtaxing your time. Going forward, it becomes sufficient to just track your current project tally, and reject new work once you pass your limit—making adjustments as needed, of course, for unusually busy periods.

LIMIT DAILY GOALS

We’ve arrived at the smallest scale of work that we’ll consider for our limiting strategies: the projects you decide to make progress on during the current day. My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day.

There’s a calibrated steadiness to working on just one major initiative a day. Real progress accrues, while anxiety is subdued.

Proposition: Contain the Small

I enjoy collecting these stories of glamorous defenses against distraction. I find them aspirational, even if they remain, in their specifics, often laughably unobtainable.

This advice is unified by the notion of containment.

PUT TASKS ON AUTOPILOT

In the context of knowledge work, it turns out, autopilot schedules provide an effective means to contain tasks. Instead of setting regular times each week for completing school assignments, you can set times for accomplishing specific categories of regularly occurring tasks.

A key refinement to support this task-centric version of autopilot scheduling is to leverage rituals and locations.

Containing tasks is not about escaping the small. It’s instead about making these efforts as painless as possible. Seeking, as I once put it, that “low-stress sweet spot.”

SYNCHRONIZE

There are many explanations for Mann’s disillusionment with detailed task management systems like GTD. The one I want to highlight here is perhaps the most fundamental: they didn’t work. To be fair, they weren’t entirely ineffective. Moving obligations out of your mind and into trusted systems—the foundation of GTD—will make you less anxious and more organized.

transformed office collaboration into an ongoing, haphazard bazaar of asynchronous, back-and-forth messaging—a colleague asks you to handle something, you reply to clarify what he means, you then write another colleague to gather the needed information, but based on her response, you realize you don’t fully understand the task, so you send a new message to the original requester, and so on. Multiply these drawn-out interactions by dozens of concurrent open loops, and soon you’re spending most of your time managing conversations, not executing individual tasks.

A direct strategy for reducing collaboration overhead is to replace asynchronous communication with real-time conversations.

The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussions that can be used to resolve many different issues. Set aside the same thirty to sixty minutes every afternoon, and advertise this time to your colleagues and clients.

If someone sends you an ambiguous message, instead of letting it instigate yet another stretched-out volley of back-and-forth missives, reply, “Happy to help! Grab me during one of my upcoming office hours and we’ll figure out the details.”

This approach can also be adapted for teams in the form of a related strategy that I call docket-clearing meetings. Like office hours, these meetings happen at the same times on the same days, each week. Unlike office hours, they’re attended by your entire team. During these sessions, your team churns through any pending tasks that require collaboration or clarification. The group moves through the tasks one at a time, figuring out for each what exactly needs to be done, who is working on it, and what information they need from others. An easy way to organize these sessions is to maintain a shared document of tasks to discuss. Team members can add items to the list as they come up in between meetings. One thirty-minute docket-clearing session can save a team from hours of highly distracting inbox checking and back-and-forth emailing.

The cure isn’t to be found in smarter task systems, but instead in a return to something simpler, and more human: regular conversation.

MAKE OTHER PEOPLE WORK MORE

Create a public task list for each of the major categories of tasks you tackle in your job. You can use a shared document for this purpose. (If you’re feeling more advanced, a shared Trello board is perhaps even better.) When someone asks you to take on some small obligation, direct them to add it themselves to the relevant shared task list; writing it, for example, into the shared doc, or creating a new card for it on the shared Trello board. Critically, make it clear that all of the information you’ll need to complete the task should be included in their entry.

Another strategy along these lines is to introduce processes that require your colleagues or clients to do more of the work associated with a given task.

At first, these strategies for making the burden of task assignments more symmetric can feel self-indulgent. You might even worry that others will be offended by your brashness. In reality, however, if you’re diplomatic in your phrasing, and deploy sufficient self-deprecation, you can introduce these systems without attracting too much ire. Indeed, your peers might end up appreciating the added structure, as it provides clarity about how or when their requested work will actually be accomplished.

AVOID TASK ENGINES

When selecting new projects, assess your options by the number of weekly requests, questions, or small chores you expect the project to generate. Prioritize options that minimize this number.

SPEND MONEY

Every effective entrepreneur I know shares a similar commitment to paying people who know what they’re doing so they don’t have to do the work, at a lower level of quality, all by themselves.

Interlude: What about Overwhelmed Parents?

Proposition: Pull Instead of Push

In a push-based process, each stage pushes work onward to the next as soon as it’s done. In a pull-based process, by contrast, each stage pulls in new work only when it’s ready for it.

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.

The key is to simulate a pull-based assignment system in such a way that the people you work with don’t even realize you’re trying something new. What follows is a three-step strategy for implementing a simulated pull system as an individual without control over the habits of your colleagues or clients.

SIMULATED PULL, PART 1: HOLDING TANK AND ACTIVE LISTS

The first step in simulating a pull-based workflow is tracking all projects to which you’re currently committed on a list divided into two sections: “holding tank” and “active.”

When a new project is pushed toward you, place it in the holding-pen section of your list. There is no bound to the size of your holding tank.

The active position of the list, by contrast, should be limited to three projects at most.

When scheduling your time, you should focus your attention only on the projects on your active list.

SIMULATED PULL, PART 2: INTAKE PROCEDURE

When adding a new project to your holding tank, it’s important to update the source of this new obligation about what they should expect. To do so, send an acknowledgment message that formally acknowledges the project that you’re committing to complete, but that also includes the following three pieces of extra information: (1) a request for any additional details you need from the source before you can start the project, (2) a count of the number of existing projects already on your lists, and (3) an estimate of when you expect to complete this new work.

label the project with the time estimate you included in your acknowledgment message so you won’t later forget. Notice, when making this estimate, you can look at the estimates on all of your existing projects to help inform a realistic prediction.

If you fall behind on a project, update your estimate and inform the person who originally sent you the work about the delay. The key here is transparency. Be clear about what’s going on, and deliver on your promises, even if these promises have to change. Never let a project just drop through the cracks and hope it will be forgotten. If your colleagues and clients don’t trust you to deliver, they won’t stop bothering you.

SIMULATED PULL, PART 3: LIST CLEANING

In these cases, remove the outdated projects from your lists. But before you do so, send a quick note to their original source letting them know. Simulating a pull-based workflow works only if you maintain transparency.

4 WORK AT A NATURAL PACE

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.

PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.

Monotonous, all-day effort is unavoidable when you’re harvesting crops or working an assembly-line station—the best you can do is mitigate its worst impacts with rituals and laws. It’s less clear that this unvarying intensity is equally as unavoidable in knowledge work.

Proposition: Take Longer

MAKE A FIVE-YEAR PLAN

DOUBLE YOUR PROJECT TIMELINES

take whatever timelines you first identify as reasonable for upcoming projects, and then double their length.

A reality of personal productivity is that humans are not great at estimating the time required for cognitive endeavors. We’re wired to understand the demands of tangible efforts, like crafting a hand ax, or gathering edible plants. When it comes to planning pursuits for which we lack physical intuition, however, we’re guessing more than we realize, leading us to gravitate toward best-case scenarios for how long things might take.

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.

A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.

SIMPLIFY YOUR WORKDAY

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.

The first suggestion is simple to implement: apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

When it comes to taming appointments, a good target is to ensure that no more than half of the hours in any single day are dedicated to meetings or calls. The simplest way to meet this mark is to declare certain hours to be protected (e.g., no meetings before noon).

A subtler alternative is to instead implement a “one for you, one for me” strategy. Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an equal amount of time that day to protect.

FORGIVE YOURSELF

It’s tempting to react to these periods of depressed productivity by assigning yourself a penance of crushing busyness. If you’re exhausted, you tell yourself, you can’t be accused of laziness.

Proposition: Embrace Seasonality

To work without change or rest all year would have seemed unusual to most of our ancestors. Seasonality was deeply integrated into the human experience.

SCHEDULE SLOW SEASONS

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.

What if, for example, you decided to quiet quit a single season each year: maybe July and August, or that distracted period between Thanksgiving and the New Year?

For this idea to work, you should, if possible, arrange for major projects to wrap up before your simulated offseason begins, and wait to initiate major new projects until after it ends.

An advanced tactic here is to take on a highly visible but low-impact project during this season that you can use to temporarily deflect new work that comes your way: “I’m happy to lead that internal review project, but I’m really focused this month on mastering this new marketing software, so let’s wait until the New Year to get started.” The key is to choose a deflection project that itself doesn’t require a lot of collaboration, meetings, or urgent messages. Solo writing or research projects work well here.

DEFINE A SHORTER WORK YEAR

IMPLEMENT “SMALL SEASONALITY”

No Meeting Mondays

You don’t need to make a public announcement about this decision. When people ask when you’re free for a meeting or a call, just stop suggesting slots on that particular day.

Other days, of course, could also work just as well. Perhaps keeping Fridays clear of meetings works better for the pace of your particular job, or you find more value in maintaining a clear day in the middle of the week. The key to this idea is maintaining some bastion of peace amid an otherwise cluttered calendar.

See a Matinee Once a Month

My suggestion is to try to put aside an afternoon to escape to the movies once per month, protecting the time on your calendar well in advance so it doesn’t get snagged by a last-minute appointment.

To receive the benefits of this advice, it’s not necessary that you see a film. Other activities can work as well. In my own experience, for example, I’ve also found similar benefits visiting museums and going on hikes. The key observation here is that even a modest schedule of weekday escapes can be sufficient to diminish the exhaustion of an otherwise metronome-regular routine.

Schedule Rest Projects

The idea is simple: after putting aside time on your calendar for a major work project, schedule in the days or weeks immediately following it time to pursue something leisurely and unrelated to your work.

The key is to obtain a proportional balance. Hard leads to fun. The more hardness you face, the more fun you will enjoy soon after. Even if these rest projects are relatively small compared with the work that triggers them, this back-and-forth rhythm can still induce a sustaining experience of variation.

Work in Cycles

Adopting some notion of cycles in your own work can be understood as a more structured implementation of both the rest project and seasonal quiet quitting strategies described above.

Interlude: Didn’t Jack Kerouac Write On the Road in Three Weeks?

Proposition: Work Poetically

sometimes cultivating a natural pace isn’t just about the time you dedicate to a project, but also the context in which the work is completed.

MATCH YOUR SPACE TO YOUR WORK

Whenever I see a generic home office, with its white bookcases and office-supply-store wall hangings, I can’t help but think about all the ways in which its inhabitant could remake the setting into something more tailored to the work it supports.

STRANGE IS BETTER THAN STYLISH

The problem is that the home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly.

When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (aka our bedroom), our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on whatever pressing work needs to get done.

What counted was their disconnection from the familiar.

RITUALS SHOULD BE STRIKING

In this account of ancient Greek Mystery cults, we learn something important about rituals in general. Their power is found not in the specifics of their activities but in the transformative effect these activities have on the mind. The more striking and notable the behaviors, the better chance they have of inducing useful changes.

My advice here has two parts. First, form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important. Second, in doing so, ensure your rituals are sufficiently striking to effectively shift your mental state into something more supportive of your goals.

5 OBSESS OVER QUALITY

She adopted a motto for her intentional approach: “Hardwood grows slowly.”

PRINCIPLE #3: OBSESS OVER QUALITY Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this 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.

Doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are both absolutely necessary components of this philosophy, but if those earlier principles are implemented on their own, without an accompanying obsession with quality, they might serve only to fray your relationship to work over time—casting your professional efforts as an imposition that you must tame.

the manager has to lead a well-functioning team.

quality turns out to be connected in unexpected ways to our desire to escape pseudo-productivity and embrace something slower.

Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable. In other words, this third principle helps you stick with the first.

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.

We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.

Proposition: Improve Your Taste

In his exposition, Glass focuses on the gap that often exists between taste and ability—especially early on in a creative career. It’s easier to learn to recognize what’s good, he notes, than to master the skills required to meet this standard. … His exhortation to those just beginning their careers is to keep putting in the work, as it’s only through this deliberate effort that the gap will close.

When we idolize an Ira Glass–style obsession with quality, we often overlook the importance of developing our internal filters first. It’s more exciting to focus on effort, drive, and diligence—but no amount of grinding away at your proverbial radio program or novel manuscript will lead to brilliance if you don’t yet have a good understanding of what brilliance could mean.

BECOME A CINEPHILE

There’s nothing special about cinema in this case study. The bigger observation is that there can be utility in immersing yourself in appreciation for fields that are different from your own.

Understand your own field, to be sure, but also focus on what’s great about other domains. It’s here that you can find a more flexible source of inspiration, a reminder of what makes the act of creation so exciting in the first place.

START YOUR OWN INKLINGS

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.

BUY A FIFTY-DOLLAR NOTEBOOK

Knowing how much I had spent, I figured, would make me more careful about what I wrote on its archival-quality pages, which would force me to be more structured and careful in my thinking.

quality tools can increase the quality of your work

Part of the power of these setups is found in their complexity, which puts the user in a specialized mindset, ready to do the hard work of writing efficient programs.

Interlude: What about Perfectionism?

Quality matters, but if it becomes everything, you may never finish.

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.

Proposition: Bet on Yourself

The goal in betting on yourself, as you’ll see, is to push yourself to a new level without accidentally also pushing yourself into an unnaturally busy workload.

WRITE AFTER THE KIDS GO TO BED

The stakes here are modest: If you fail to reach the quality level that you seek, the main consequence is that during a limited period you’ve lost time you could have dedicated to more rewarding (or restful) activities. But this cost is sufficiently annoying to motivate increased attention toward your efforts.

This spare time strategy, of course, is not a sustainable way to work in the long term. Sacrificing too many of your leisure hours to extra work can violate both of the first two principles of slow productivity. But when deployed in moderation, dedicated to a specific project for a temporary period, this act of giving up something meaningful in pursuit of higher quality can become an effective bet on yourself.

REDUCE YOUR SALARY

The problem, of course, is that for every Grisham there are a dozen other aspiring writers—or entrepreneurs, or artists—who end up slinking back to their old jobs, chastened and deeper in debt than when they started.

Don’t haphazardly quit your job to pursue a more meaningful project. Wait instead to make a major change until you have concrete evidence that your new interest satisfies the following two properties: first, people are willing to give you money for it, and second, you can replicate the result.

In entrepreneurship, by contrast, this might mean that your side hustle generates a steady stream of sales. Once you’ve passed these thresholds, however, take action. This doesn’t necessarily mean quitting your current job completely. It might instead mean that you reduce your hours, or take an unpaid leave.

ANNOUNCE A SCHEDULE

If you announce your work in advance to people you know, you’ll have created expectations. If you fail to produce something notable, you’ll pay a social cost in terms of embarrassment.

Note: this may not work the same for everyone. Know yourself. It could cause you to quit. It may depend on the type of commitment. (Investment, promise, etc.)

ATTRACT AN INVESTOR

When someone has invested in your project, you’ll experience amplified motivation to pay back their trust.

CONCLUSION

Slowing down isn’t about protesting work. It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.

The philosophy I developed is meant primarily for those who engage in skilled labor with significant amounts of autonomy. This target audience covers large swaths of the knowledge sector, including most freelancers, solopreneurs, and small-business owners, as well as those in fields like academia, where great freedom is afforded in how you choose and organize your efforts. If you fall into one of these categories, and are exhausted by the chronic overload and fast pacing of pseudo-productivity, then I urge you to consider radically transforming your professional life along the three principles I proposed. Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.

Slow productivity is one example of this thinking, but it shouldn’t be the only one. My long-term wish is that this movement kicks off many others, creating a marketplace of different concepts of productivity, each of which might apply to different types of workers or sensibilities.

Revolution requires rebellions of many different scopes, from the practical and immediate to the fiery and ideological.