Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Starting in the 1990s, however, a lot of the activity that began dominating the attention of knowledge workers like Mann wasn’t the execution of discrete tasks, but instead interactions with others about these tasks.

Containing tasks is not about escaping the small. It’s instead about making these efforts as painless as possible.

“Once you get to the point where your regular work is getting done with minimum of thinking,” I wrote in one of my early articles on this topic, “you’ve hit that low-stress sweet spot where you can start turning your attention to the bigger things.”

I also suggested writing more structured emails to minimize unnecessary back-and-forth messaging, an objective I elaborate in much greater detail in a follow-up book I published a half decade later titled A World Without Email.

A coach named Laura, for example, reported that she simplified her practice by reducing her offerings down to a few key services. “Since figuring this out,” she told me, “my brain is calmer, the quality of my interactions is stronger, and my work quality is higher.” As a result of this higher-quality work, she now makes the same amount of money wor

This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.

Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind.

Slow productivity, for example, is designed to be actionable, providing ideas that individuals can implement immediately.

The way we’re working no longer works.