Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
This classic saying from the Navy Seals teaches an important lesson. While it might feel that rushing is quicker, it often causes mistakes, neglect or…
By acting with intention, even though each step may be longer, you can achieve your goal faster.
That’s basically the principle at the heart of Slow Productivity the latest book by Cal Newport and it’s more important than ever. Our continuous quest to do more has led to the exact frantic mindset the Navy Seal saying is against.
Here’s a quick visual summary of the main ideas of the book and the practical tips you can apply to achieve more by doing less.
Slow productivity book summary Sketchnote
The problem of pseudo-productivity
Productivity used to be simple to measure. In agriculture and manufacturing, you looked at how much raw product you started with and how large your yield was within a set time. If you could produce more from the same amount of materials, or produce it in a shorter time, you were more productive. The key was that produce remained the same.
According to Cal, we’ve transferred this understanding of productivity to knowledge work, leading to pseudo-productivity.
Psuedo-productivity focuses on visible work. Because the creative process seems mysterious and so unreliable (Why do some projects take twice as long to get something half as good?), we fall back to the lowest possible metric — activity.
If someone is “at work” — either online or sat at their desk — and responds quickly to any message, that means they are productive. Any time away from the desk, not clicking on their keyboard, or deploying more lateral tools for problem-solving is seen as bad.
But for the most challenging problems and best solutions, these kinds of lateral thinking tools and non-visible work are essential.
This drives us to “busyness” over productivity, quantity over quality, and burnout over sustainability.
The alternative is slow productivity.
What is slow productivity?
Slow productivity is about producing quality work in a focused but less frantic way. It draws on the lessons of slow movements (such as slow food instead of fast food) with three key pillars.
- Do fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Focus on quality
Together, these create a recipe to do more important and effective work without burning out.
Here are nine practical tips to apply these ideas.
Do fewer things
1. Missions, projects, daily goals
When you split your focus in multiple directions, you can’t give any of them the energy they require.
To combat this, Cal advocates limiting yourself to three missions, three active projects, and one daily goal.
Missions are BIG goals or outcomes. An example might be changing careers, publishing a book, or becoming fit and healthy.
These will take you a long time with lots of steps along the way. Those steps are your projects.
Each project should have multiple tasks to complete and can range from a week to a few months to do. As a student, it might be one of your subjects, as a writer it might be a chapter in your next book.
While you may have many projects connected to your missions, limit yourself to three active ones. This avoids draining your mental resources by keeping track of multiple projects.
Instead, you can use that extra headspace to focus more on the tasks at hand allowing you to complete them quicker.
2. Say no and add barriers
Not all tasks are of equal value.
In your role, there are probably a couple of core tasks that bring in 80% (Yup, Pareto Principle) of the results of your work.
The trouble is that the unimportant and niggly tasks can overtake the rest of our work. This comes from the dual threat of unimportant admin as well as major tasks that don’t contribute to your missions (such as speaking engagements for a writer which can prevent them from writing their next book).
There are three solutions:
- Automating processes and tasks using routines and technology.
- Say no to tasks that don’t align with your missions or are unimportant.
- Add barriers to prevent others from adding new major projects to your list.
The last two can feel intimidating. We fear missing out on good opportunities or giving off a bad impression, but when we explain the reasons it becomes easier to accept.
Cal shares some practical suggestions in the book for how you can create these barriers without coming across as rude.
3. No meeting Monday
Meetings have their place, but they want to fill every space.
If you’re not careful, it can become impossible to do the focused, deep work you need to create quality work. This is particularly true of more senior positions. One option Cal has advocated for in the past is “office hours” where you are free to be spoken with at those times (and other times you can be less accessible), but the other approach is to block certain times from meetings.
No meetings Monday is a pithy way to remember the idea but the day isn’t really so important — especially for roles where Monday meetings are vital. Instead, it’s a reminder to block certain valuable times to focus on your key tasks.
4. Change to a pull workflow, not a push one
If you always have too many tasks over your head, this one is for you — it can be a powerful team tool too!
A push system comes from manufacturing where items are pushed down a manufacturing line to the next step. This works well in some situations but can lead to growing backlogs at stages that are 1. less important 2. take more time to complete than others. 3. Are prevented for other factors (like someone being off sick).
The alternative is a “Pull workflow” where the next stage in a chain pulls in the work from the previous stage.
This prevents mental overhead and allows a previous stage to stop or assist when there is a backlog rather than add more and more to the stockpile.
Work at a natural pace:
5. Double your time estimates
We are terrible at predicting how long a task will take.
The humourous Hoftstader’s law speaks to a deeper truth.
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
This makes us set impossible deadlines that cause stress, backlogs, overwork and low-quality work. If we instead give ourselves more time, we have time and mental space to deliver quality work but manage those extra urgent things that come up as we work.
6. Use time blocking
Time blocking is the process of setting specific times to work on specific tasks or projects.
A key part of the idea is to “chunk” similar tasks together and minimise small unimportant tasks while maximising time spent on important ones. This helps prevent getting distracted by emails, messages, social media or whatever and helps you focus on the really important tasks.
By focusing on a particular task at a time, you’re able to get more done, better, in less time.
Focus on quality
7. Develop your sense of taste
In an interview, Ira Glass famously coined the “taste-talent gap” — the idea that when we start, we know what is good, but we can’t reach it.
But in another interview, Ira also pointed out how his “taste” was limited when he started out in radio. Even when he managed to bridge his taste-talent gap early on in his career, he can now see all the things he didn’t do.
So the first stage in focusing on quality is to develop your sense of taste.
Cal explores a few options including
- exposure to good work
- Setting up or joining a peer support group
- and picking up random hobbies that you can draw on to inspire your core work.
8. Obsess over quality
“Obsess” might feel like a bad word.
After all, perfectionism can easily arise when nothing ever feels good enough. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
We can obsess by investing in our skills. We can obsess by seeking to be a little better each time. We can obsess by analysing the results of our work. And we can obsess by focusing on the really important tasks that produce the greatest results rather than all the extras.
Your mantra should be “Progress over perfect”.
And one way to achieve this good obsession is to bet on yourself.
9. Bet on yourself
Every bet has a risk.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But that doesn’t mean you should place random bets without a strategy or plan.
Obsessing over quality is similar.
You can bet a certain period of time, energy and even money on a project that you feel you can do well. This is the way many writers have worked — they set aside free time to work on their books. Once they’ve finished, they can see how well or badly a bet did and adjust.
The key is not to endlessly push on a project like this. Instead, either set a dedicated time (3 months for example) or plan some regular or seasonal breaks so you won’t burn out.
Achieve without burning out
Burnout and exhaustion have become far too common and rather than making us more productive, it’s making us less.
The ideas in slow productivity won’t help you do more, but they will help you achieve more, and be happier while doing it.
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