Cal Newport Slow Productivity Quotes

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.

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.

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.

This philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride.

The key to meaningful work is in the decision to keep returning to the efforts you find important. Not in getting everything right every time.

In most cases, people don’t measure the productivity of knowledge workers and when we do, we do it in really silly ways, like how many papers do academics produce, regardless of quality.

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that ‘good’ work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.

There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.

This lesson, that doing less can enable better results, defies our contemporary bias toward activity, based on the belief that doing more keeps our options open and generates more opportunities for reward.

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.

If we haven’t notably advanced our academic specialty, no amount of to-do list martyrdom can save us.

I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a job like that where you didn’t have to worry about being productive?

But recognize that a practitioner of slow productivity cannot afford to spend nothing.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,

For all of our complaining about the term, knowledge workers have no agreed-upon definition of what ‘productivity’ even means.

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.

To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.

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.

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. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished. At moderate workloads, this effect might be frustrating: a general sense that completing your work is taking longer than it should. As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new. This feedback loop can quickly spiral out of control, pushing your workload higher and higher until you find yourself losing your entire day to overhead activities: meeting after meeting conducted against a background hum of unceasing email and chat. Eventually the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions added after hours—in the evenings and early mornings, or over the weekend—in a desperate attempt to avoid a full collapse of all useful output. You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.

What are we really doing here?

What ended up mattering, however, was instead the obsessive efforts of an eccentric creative talent who spent over three years nurturing a vision, coming at it again and again in an attempt to create something special.

Productivity language is an impediment to me, the pleasure in thinking and doing things well is such a deep-wired human pleasure… and it feels (to me) diluted when it’s linked to productivity.

Using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity.

It seems like the benefits of technology have created the ability to stack more into our day and onto our schedules than we have the capacity to handle while maintaining a level of quality which makes the things worth doing.

The intersection of work and life needs some work. — Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief workplace scientist

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

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.

How is it that so many knowledge workers end up with workloads calibrated to the exact edge of the overhead tax tipping point? One could imagine an alternative scenario in which most workers are far from that edge, easily able to absorb unexpected new commitments, or conversely, a scenario where workers constantly spiral past the tipping point in Frostick-style burnout. But this is not what we see. Most workers who are fortunate enough to exert some control over their efforts—such as knowledge workers, small-business entrepreneurs, or freelancers—tend to avoid taking on so much work that they crash and burn, but also tend to avoid working a reasonable amount. 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.

It is the acceptance of this fundamentally uncontrolled nature of knowledge work that provides a solution to our mystery: self-regulation.

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.

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation.

The boundary between Miranda’s slow but steady creative production and straight-up procrastination is worrisomely narrow.

The world of cognitive work lacks coherent ideas about how our efforts should be organized and measured.

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. We seem to seek the thrill that comes from imagining a wildly ambitious timeline during our planning: “Wow, if I could finish four chapters this fall, I’d really be ahead of schedule!” It feels good in the moment but sets us up for scrambling and disappointment in the days that follow. By deploying a blanket policy of doubling these initial estimates, you can counter this instinct toward unjustified optimism. The result: plans that can be completed at a more leisurely pace. 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.

We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher.

The pandemic didn’t introduce this trend so much as push its worst excesses beyond the threshold of tolerability.

The story of economic growth in the modern Western world is in many ways a story about the triumph of productivity thinking.

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail, he can only be helped. But he must direct himself. — Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

You don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that.

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.

Franklin set up a pair of franchise versions of his print shop in other locations: the first in South Carolina, and the second in New York City. These complicated arrangements required Franklin to install a printer to run each operation locally, while he provided capital and expertise in exchange for splitting the profits. During this period, Franklin began to keep a daily checklist of cardinal virtues he desired to observe. Not surprisingly, one of these virtues was “industry,” which Franklin defined in his autobiography by the resolutions to “lose no time” and to “be always employed in something useful.” One can assume that this particular row on his list consistently received his check marks. This view of Franklin as the patron saint of busyness, however, misses a more nuanced story. While it’s true that his professional career began in a state of overload, it didn’t stay that way. Biographer H. W. Brands points out that as Franklin ground his way through his thirties, he began to burn out.

In the summer of 1995, Leslie Moonves, the newly appointed head of entertainment for CBS, was wandering the halls of the network’s vast Television City headquarters. He was not happy with what he saw: it was 3:30 p.m. on a Friday, and the office was three quarters empty. As the media journalist Bill Carter reports in Desperate Networks, his 2006 book about the television industry during this period, a frustrated Moonves sent a heated memo about the empty office to his employees. “Unless anybody hasn’t noticed, we’re in third place [in the ratings],” he wrote. “My guess is that at ABC and NBC they’re still working at 3:30 on Friday. This will no longer be tolerated.

But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

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.

One of the more insidious side effects of pseudo-productivity in the knowledge sector is the manner in which it forces individuals to manage tensions between work and life all on their own. If you toil in a factory, and your employer wants you to put in twelve-hour days, this demand will be clearly specified in a labor contract, in black and white, in a form that can be pointed to and argued about...Under a pseudo-productivity regime, by contrast, such demands are more implicit and self-reinforced. You're judged on how much total work you visibly tackle from a never-ending supply of available tasks, but no one is going to tell you specifically how much is enough - that's up to you. Good luck! This reality requires parents - and more specifically moms, who often shoulder more of these household burdens than their partners do - to renegotiate for themselves, day after day, the battle between the demands of employment and family. This is a process that unfolds as a thousand cutting decisions and compromises, each of which seemingly disappoints someone, until you find yourself writing at 4:00 a.m. next to a precarious pile of laundry.

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.

Productivity at the large scale doesn't require frantic busyness at the small.

Instead of allowing colleagues to effortlessly lob requests in your direction like hand grenades, leaving you to clean up the mess generated by their productivity-shredding shrapnel, they must now do more work themselves before they can commandeer your attention.

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.

My goal is to offer a more humane and sustainable way to integrate professional efforts into a life well-lived. To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

در طول تاریخ ثبت شده‌ی بشر، زندگی حرفه‌ای بیشتر مردم با کشاورزی عجین بوده است که به معنای واقعی کلمه یک فعالیت فصلی است. کار کردن بدون استراحت در تمام سال برای بیشتر پیشینیان ما امری غیرعادی بوده و به نظر می‌رسد علاقه به فصلی بودن به رگ و خون ما نفوذ کرده است.

راهبرد کلی خوبی برای متعادل کردن وسواس و کمال‌گرایی داریم: به خودتان برای تولید یک نتیجه‌ی عالی وقت کافی بدهید، ولی دقت کنید که وقت شما نامحدود نباشد. محصول شما باید به اندازه‌ای خوب باشد که نظر افرادی با قریحه‌ی مورد قبول از نظر خودتان را جلب کند، اما خود را ملزم نکنید که حتما یک شاهکار ارائه دهید.

expanded his commercial activity by publishing a newspaper, The Pennsylvania

در واقع آهستگی برای اعتراض به کار نیست، بلکه برای پیدا کردن راهی بهتر جهت انجام دادن آن است. رویکرد سریع دست کم در هفتاد سال گذشته امتحان شده و مشخص شده است که کارآمد نیست. وقت آن رسیده است تا رویکردی آهسته‌تر را امتحان کنیم.

با اینکه بسیاری از ما رئیس یا مشتریانی داریم و هر کدام خرده‌فرمایش‌هایی دارند، آن‌ها همچنان قادر نیستند برنامه‌های جزئی روزانه‌ی ما را تعیین کنند؛ نگرانی‌های درونی خودمان عموماً خشن‌ترین کارفرمایانمان هستند. جدول‌های زمانی بیش از حد جاه‌طلبانه و مدیریت نادرست مشغله‌هایمان باعث ایجاد بی‌قراری عمیق و فرسودگی ناتوان کننده خواهد شد.