The most practical skill you can learn is working smarter. But here's what nobody tells you about working smarter: it often looks like you're working slower.

A programmer might spend 20 hours wrestling with a difficult algorithm, then have an insight in the shower that solves it in 10 lines of code. Those 20 hours weren't wasted—they were necessary

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

When you go slow, things are smoother. You have time to observe, to plan, to coordinate efforts. But go too slow and you may get stuck or lose your momentum.