Slow Productivity
Here are the core practices from Cal Newport’s book Slow Productivity.
Do Fewer Things
1. Limit the Big
Limit Missions: Any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life is a mission (such as research or writing). Three seems to be the absolute limit, but less is better and easier to wrangle.
Limit Projects: Each mission is executed through projects and are either one-off or ongoing. The less currently active projects across your mission, the better. a. Block off a project’s time requirement ahead of time before choosing it. If you don’t have enough time to do so, decline or cancel something else. b. Limit the time available for project work. An example is Newport’s hard limit of a forty-hour workweek.
Limit Daily Goals: Outside of required work admin (meetings, emails, etc.) focus on one major project a day as your daily target. This helps accrue progress more steadily and completes projects sooner.
2. Contain the Small
Put Tasks on Autopilot: Assign different types of recurring work to set days and times in the week to reduce cognitive load.
Synchronize: Favor direct meetings that can wrap up multiple things at once over long email chains. If possible, use set office hours (or the equivalent of an agile team’s daily standup) to batch together requests for collaboration or clarification.
Make Other People Work More:
a. Consider using a public task list to illustrate the time you have available, and have people add to it only if time’s available and with all the information you would need to complete it. This also demonstrates a visual of your alloted time and might make people think twice.
b. Use processes to put more of the work onto a colleague or client before they get you involved. An example of this involves using self-service systems for users with technical issues, giving them tools and articles to solve a large part of the problem on their own.
Avoid Task Engines: Some new tasks can be considered task engines if they generate a large amount of small and urgent subtasks. Writing a dense report will have far less subtasks associated with it than organizing a conference.
Spend Money: It’s okay to invest in professional software and assistants to reduce your personal burden in doing all of the setup yourself, sometimes at a lower quality than if you just hired someone to do it. Of course, balance this against your available income.
3. Pull Instead of Push
a. Track all your projects in two “holding tank” and “active” lists. Active should be limited to three projects at most.
b. When scheduling time, focus on clearing projects from the active list. When you clear one, then you’re free to pull a project from the holding tank onto your active list (or a sizable chunk of one).
c. When adding new projects to the tank, send an acknowledge message for the number of projects you have going and an estimate on when you can complete the new work.
d. Every week, update and clean the lists. Replace projects, send updates, and kill any projects that are seriously delayed and ask for forgiveness.
Work at a Natural Pace
1. Take Longer
Make a Five-Year Plan: Beyond crafting plans for the next few months, also craft what you’d like to accomplish in the next five years or so. This helps create perspective when progress isn’t always immediate.
Double Your Project Timelines: Double any initial estimates for how long a project might take to finish, since humans are bad at estimating timespans for projects anyway.
Simplify Your Workday: Reduce the daily number of tasks and appointments you put on your calendar. Reduce your task list by 25-50%. For each meeting on your calendar, aim to set one of equal length the same day for yourself, to work on what you care about.
Forgive Yourself: Sometimes you overwork. Forgive yourself then ask what’s next. Keep trying again and again. Aim for a practice, not perfection.
2. Embrace Seasonality
Schedule Slow Seasons: Mark a seasonal period per year to deliberately not take on any new major work. Consider doing research or writing projects then.
Define a Shorter Work Year: If possible, you could be well-served by taking a 1-2 month vacation during the year to thoroughly renew yourself. This is easier if you control your own time, of course, and you’d have to weight the trade offs of extra free time VS income.
Implement Small Seasonality: However, you can also vary intensity at smaller scales such as taking a random weekday off every so often, not scheduling meetings for Mondays, schedule time after a big work project for a big rest project, working in cycles (Basecamp does 6-8 project-driven weeks followed by a lighter 2-week cooldown period focused on lighter tasks and catch up.)
3. Work Poetically
Match Your Space to Your Work: Modify your surrounding work environment to match the mood of your work.
Strange is Better Than Stylish: Working in places that are wholly unfamiliar (like in a loud factory or a garden shed instead of your home office) allows you to escape existing contexts and promote greater attention towards your work.
Rituals Should Be Striking: Personalized, striking rituals that can even border on the eccentric can help shift your mental state towards something supportyive of your goals. (David Lynch relied on the sugar rush of regular chocolate milkshakes, Anne Rice wrote Interview With the Vampire mostly at night, etc.)
Obsess Over Quality
1. Improve Your Taste
Become a Cinephile: Beyond studying great works in your field, study great works in other, different fields, to give yourself a jolt of inspiration without the normal pressures of your field.
Start Your Own Inklings: Seek to form a group of like-minded individuals to inform each other - the combined opinions of multiple practicioners can allow more possibilities and nuance to emerge in your own work.
Buy a Fifty-Dollar Notebook: Investing in quality tools can have a mirrored effect on the quality and care of your work, such as expensive notebooks demanding care in use.
2. Bet on Yourself
Write After the Kids Go to Bed: By devoting large amounts of free time to a project, you’re more likely to focus more intensely and bring your A-game towards higher quality. This is best done in moderation, for shorter and intense periods.
Reduce Your Salary: As you focus on your project and gain evidence that you can use it for income, like selling books or selling products for your side hustle, consider reducing your existing job hours and leaning more into it, harnessing the motivation you need to have it work out.
Announce a Schedule: Announce work in advance to other parties of people you know to create a social commitment to produce something notable.
Attract an Investor: Having someone else invest in your project - time, labor, money - is another social motivator to pay back the favor with higher quality work.