Slow Productivity

The first principle of slow productivity provides what is ostensibly professional advice. Working on fewer things can paradoxically produce more value in the long term: overload generates an untenable quantity of nonproductive overhead.

The cure isn’t to be found in smarter task systems, but instead in a return to something simpler, and more human: regular conversation.

Maybe you’re able to identify a clever new business strategy, devise an elegant algorithm, or come up with a bold advertising campaign that would have eluded you in a more fragmented state of attention.

When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility.

as the embrace of a big new goal can be exciting in the moment. But missions, once adopted, demand effort. If your professional life is top heavy, you’ll unavoidably face an onerous workload. Any attempt to succeed with our first principle of slow productivity, therefore, must begin with the reduction of your main objectives. It’s hard to specify t

If someone asks you to do something, and you appeal to some vague sense of busyness to get out of it, you’re unlikely to consistently succeed. “We’re all busy,” they might reply, “but I really need you to do this for me.” If you instead have a reputation as someone who is careful about managing their time and can quantify your busyness more concret

The term mission can sound grandiose. For our purposes, we’ll demote it to a more pragmatic definition: any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life. Andrew Wiles had a mission to solve Fermat’s last theorem. Winning grants, effectively managing HR requests, producing new creative briefs, and crafting elegant computer programs ar

“Irresponsibility requires eternal vigilance,” Feynman told the Los Angeles Times in a 1986 profile. “And I failed! I wasn’t careful enough when this presidential commission thing came up. I flunked my own principle.” A plan to simply become too unpleasant to be bothered, it seems, isn’t sustainable. There are only so many times you can offer an un

But we don’t need science to convince us of something that we’ve all experienced directly: our brains work better when we’re not rushing.

I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give my self, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness, leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large . . . on such points as may produce something for the common benefit of mankind, uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.