Slow Productivity

Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time.

There’s something about entering a movie theater on a weekday afternoon that resets your mind. The context is so novel—“most people are at work right now!”—that it shakes you loose from your standard state of anxious reactivity. This mental transformation is cleansing and something you should seek on a regular basis.

What if we stopped positioning quiet quitting as a general response to the “meaninglessness of work,” and instead saw it as a more specific tactic to achieve seasonality?

But unlike in the industrial sector, in this invisible factory we’d constructed for ourselves we didn’t have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits. Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence: colonizing as much of our time, from evenings to weekends to vacations, as we could bea

A clever way to balance this stress is to pair each major work project with a corresponding rest project. The idea is simple: after putting aside time on your calendar for a major work project, schedule in the days or weeks immediately following it time to pursue something leisurely and unrelated to your work.

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.

This seasonal approach to work, in which you vary the intensity and focus of your efforts throughout the year, resonates with many who encounter it.

A slower approach to work is not only feasible, but is likely superior to the ad hoc pseudo-productivity that dictates the professional lives of so many today.

I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you’re proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way.