Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

This aspect of working at a natural pace is hard to get right, and you will be disappointed from time to time. But the humane response to this reality is obvious: Forgive yourself. Then ask, “What’s next?” The key to meaningful work is in the decision to keep returning to the efforts you find important. Not in getting everything right every time.

A subtler alternative is to instead implement a “one for you, one for me” strategy. Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an equal amount of time that day to protect. If I schedule thirty minutes for a call on Tuesday, I’ll also find another thirty minutes that day to block off on my calendar as protected for myself. A

It’s okay if your efforts to take longer sometimes temporarily lead you off your chosen path. It happens to everyone who has ever tried to accomplish something important.

Toning down your seasonal and long-term plans won’t help if you persist in filling every hour of the current day with more work than you can hope to complete. All three timescales must be tamed together.

Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. In the moment, it might exude a false sense of usefulness, but when continued over time, it estranges us from our fundamental nature, generates misery, and, from a strictly economic perspective, almost certainly holds us back from reaching our full capabilities. A more natural, slowe

A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time.

PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.

You should update and clean your lists once a week. In addition to pulling in new work to fill empty slots on your active list, you should also review upcoming deadlines. Prioritize what’s due soon, and send updates for any work that you know you’re not going to finish by the time promised. These cleaning sessions also provide a good opportunity to

Simulating a pull-based workflow works only if you maintain transparency.