For those who are new here, I'm a fan of Cal Newport. He's a computer science professor and author who began writing student advice as an undergrad at Dartmouth. He continued his writing throughout his PhD at
MIT and even as he worked toward securing tenure at Georgetown, which he did in six years. His writing transformed
from student advice to career advice and now to lifestyle advice.
I don’t particularly care for lifestyle advice, but I make an exception for Cal’s. He has never,worked past 5:30pm (with a few rare exceptions) and always respects his weekends. He's a husband, a father, and a devoted member of his community. He's smart but he doesn’t have a super high-octane brain; he's simply committed to doing what’s necessary to lead the life he desires.
I just finished reading his new book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Although the
topics of his books may seem to have evolved over time, really, the destination has always been the same: living a deep
life. To those who know Cal, this book won't teach you many new ideas.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. We know what the ten commandments are, but we do a good job of pretending
like we don't.
The three main ideas in Slow Productivity are:
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Do fewer things.
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Work at a natural pace.
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Obsess over quality.
The book isn't even about productivity. It's about revisiting your relationship with work. By slowing down, we might not
get more tasks done, but we'd get more meaningful work done. This harkens to his early student writing, where, in the context of being a college student, he talks about doing fewer things, doing them well, and knowing why you're doing them.
Actively choosing to do fewer things is hard because it requires you to prioritize what's important to you in your life.
But if you do that, you're able to do the few things that you do, really well. What this means practically is that if you're in
college, don't double major, be president of five clubs, and be in a fraternity. Instead, have one major, maybe be in one club, and start to think about the rest of your life. Fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that
matter most.
Cal doesn't care if he has a
bad Tuesday. What's more important to him is sticking to his quarterly goals or five-year plan. That means being
creative with your work rhythms and embracing seasonality, to the extent that you can. Much of this advice is well
suited for writers (the original slow productivity gurus) and freelancers, but there's still a lot that the average
knowledge worker can do to make strides in this area. Take on big projects and plan them over the course of a long time
period. Have lofty fitness goals that are set for years, and strike reasonable checkpoints that you can measure over the
coming months and years. "If you give yourself more time, it's not just going to be more realistic, it's probably going
to be better."
Obsessing over quality is a throwback to his book So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest
for Work You Love. Strive to produce work of such quality that it will give you the career capital to control more of
your work. Your work quality is the glue that holds slow productivity together. "When you go back and study people
producing things of real value, using their brain, they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard,
but they didn't hustle and they didn't work 10-hour days day after day. They didn't work all-out, year-round. They
didn't push, push, push until this thing was done. It was a more natural variation. They had less on their plate at the
same time, and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality."
Who are some of these successful, slow people? The first person he talks about is Jane Austen. Contrary to the myth that
Austen wrote in spare moments, she had to deliberately craft her household duties such that she'd have long
uninterrupted stretches to focus on her novels. By having fewer responsibilities and protecting her writing time, Austen
was able to write masterpieces like Pride and Prejudice in just a few years. Another example he brings up is
Isaac Newton. His Principia Mathematica summed up more than twenty years of Newton's research! And an example that he
doesn't talk about in the book but one that I like is J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien's experience fighting in the trenches of
the First World War inspired his depictions of battle and the struggle between good and evil. He embarked on an academic journey in
philology, the study of languages and literature, partly because English mythology didn't have the kinds of stories you might find in the Norse, Celtic, Finnish, and Greek traditions. It took Tolkien seventeen years to write The Lord of the Rings from start to finish.
Do less. Do better. While this is much easier said than done, the decision to embrace slow
productivity is perhaps one of the most important decisions we can make, paving the way to a deeper and more meaningful life.