Slow Productivity

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This week on the Next Big Idea podcast: Cal Newport and I discuss the surprising power of slow productivity. Listen on Apple or Spotify, and let's discuss your productivity journey in the comments below.

I don’t know about you, but I have spent a good portion of my working life measuring my effectiveness in effort. “If I run as hard as I can every day,” I have thought to myself, “if I work rabidly until I have no more to give, arriving at the evening, like a shipwrecked sailor washed up on the shore, well, then I can feel good about my output.”

As a serial entrepreneur, it has often felt like a plate spinning circus act, riding a unicycle, firing off emails and texts while juggling projects, interrupted by various crises. It has been exhilarating — I have been, for much of my career, addicted to the energy, the novelty, the dopamine.

The problem, of course, is that this approach to work is exhausting … and it’s not very effective. When we are responding to endless communications, buffeted about by the shifting winds of other peoples crises, it’s awfully difficult to get focused, serious work done.?

In contrast, we all experience beautiful, serene moments — what some would call flow state — where time seems to slow down. It’s in those moments where most of us do our best work.

As my guest today, Cal Newport, says in our conversation —

"This is one of the effects of working at a natural pace that seems paradoxical to people. You slow down, you take your time with what you're doing. You're not, frenetic. You feel like you have a lot more time."

You may know Cal Newport as the author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. We had him on the show in 2021 to talk about his last book, A World Without Email. This week, Cal joins us to discuss his latest: Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.?

Cal has distilled his advice for how to work more effectively into 3 simple principles:

1 — Do fewer things.

2— Work at a natural pace.

3 — Obsess over quality.

Doesn't that sound nice? I find it relaxing just to say these words out loud. And here’s the cool part — these shifts in how we work reinforce one another. When we are focused on producing things of quality, the appeal of frenetic distraction falls away.

As Cal says in our conversation —

"When you do a small number of valuable things very well and getting better at doing those things, busyness is going to start to seem absurd. It's the cure for this need for freneticism. It also gives you leverage — as you get better at things, you get more control over your life."?

I have spent a few weeks now testing Cal's thesis. If I do fewer things, will I get more done? If I work more slowly, will I work better? If I obsess over quality, will I lose my taste for freneticism? ?

My conclusion? Cal is on to something.?This is about more than efficiency. It’s about more than getting shit done. This is about meaning making. Doing stuff we genuinely care about. And if we care about it, it’s more likely others will too.

There is a lot in this conversation. We talk about the underappreciated literary tradition of American self-help, the work habits of early scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Marie Curie as well as creatives like Jack Kerouac, Steve Martin, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. We talk about pseudo-productivity and multi-scale planning (my latest obsession ... thank you Cal). My hope is that you’ll emerge from this conversation just as I did — equipped with new tools that will help you build a daily schedule that reflects your aspirations?not just for the week or the month or the quarter, but for the decades to come.

Listen on Apple or Spotify, and let's discuss your productivity journey in the comments below.