Giving Up Hustle Culture Doesn't Mean Giving Up

Can one execute at a high level while staying present and aware? What would it look like to bring my full presence to periods of intense work?

Hustle is an important part of life. Whether it was our ancestors chasing down a gazelle for hours on end, or a team cranking to ship a software product, "hustle mode" is simply part of human-ing.

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This isn't about lowering our ambitions - it's about elevating them. Trading the superficial for the substantial, rigidity for resilience, and the exhausting pursuit of "crushing it" for the satisfaction of building something meaningful. Because perhaps true success isn't measured in inbox zeros, but in creating a life that doesn't feel like someth... See more

this philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activ

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Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind. It’s not that these efforts are arbitrary: our anxious days include tasks and appointments that really do need to get done. But once you realize, as McPhee did, that this exhausted scrambling is often orthogonal to the activities that m

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Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are ... See more