Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

he summarized, “A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled on top of frantic work.”

By deploying a blanket policy of doubling these initial estimates, you can counter this instinct toward unjustified optimism. The result: plans that can be completed at a more leisurely pace. The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or

In a setting where activity provides a proxy for productivity, the introduction of tools like email (and, later, Slack) that make it possible to visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort inevitably led to more and more of the average knowledge worker’s day being dedicated to talking about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through in

In his careful and deliberate process of typing out his notes and slicing them into slivers, and then organizing index cards on a plywood board and arranging material ladderlike on a card table, we see the promise introduced under McPhee’s backyard ash tree transformed into something more systematic.

LIMIT DAILY GOALS We’ve arrived at the smallest scale of work that we’ll consider for our limiting strategies: the projects you decide to make progress on during the current day. My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day. To clarify, I don’t intend for this single daily project to be your only work for the day.

If I’m working from home, by contrast, we might instead set up a Zoom meeting, which due to the format of most digital calendars will likely require that we set aside at least thirty minutes. “When we work remotely, this kind of ad-hoc coordination becomes harder to organize,”

Assault on Precinct 13 is a cool film, but Halloween is great. The difference was the scale of investment supporting Carpenter.

“Those frustrated Apple employees aren’t just arguing about their commutes,” I wrote in a New Yorker article reporting on this fight. “They’re at the vanguard of a movement that’s leveraging the disruptions of the pandemic to question so many more of the arbitrary assumptions that have come to define the modern workplace.”

If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you don’t have enough time for it. Either decline the project, or cancel something else to make room. The power of this approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment.