Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

and the push for individuals to be more efficient in their every action creates conditions that promote injury and exhaustion.

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.

PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

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.

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?

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

“To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me,”6 he explained. “It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”

In contemporary work, it became clear, our bias is toward evaluating our efforts at the fast scale.

Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”