“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs explained.

The problem is that the home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly. When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (aka our bedroom), our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on whatever

Working on fewer things can paradoxically produce more value in the long term: overload generates an untenable quantity of nonproductive overhead.

The finished piece would stretch to more than thirty thousand words and be divided into two parts, to appear in two consecutive issues of the magazine. It’s a marvel of long-form reporting and one of the more beloved entries in McPhee’s long bibliography. It couldn’t have existed, however, without McPhee’s willingness to put everything else on

Slow productivity requires that you free yourself from the constraints of the small so that you can invest more meaningfully in the big. This is a messy, detail-oriented conflict, largely fought on the battleground of old-fashioned productivity tactics and systems. But it’s a battle that must be fought if you hope to, as Benjamin Franklin lauded,

The shift to remote work also made collaboration somewhat less efficient,

Never let a project just drop through the cracks and hope it will be forgotten. If your colleagues and clients don’t trust you to deliver, they won’t stop bothering you.

SIMULATED PULL, PART 3: LIST CLEANING

Slow productivity requires that you free yourself from the constraints of the small so that you can invest more meaningfully in the big.