slow productivity by cal newport

there’s a reason why MFA programs are so common among successful writers: they provide an effective training regimen for literary taste.

When someone has invested in your project, you’ll experience amplified motivation to pay back their trust. This is true for investments of financial capital, as with Carpenter and Akkad. But it’s also true for investments of sweat equity, such as when a friend helps you build the sets for a theatrical production or spends an afternoon stuffing enve

When your output is only one step among many on a collaborative path toward creative progress, the pressure to get everything just right is reduced.

These authors demonstrate one of the more approachable strategies for betting on yourself: temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question. The stakes here are modest: If you fail to reach the quality level that you seek, the main consequence is that during a limited period you’ve lost time you could have dedicate

The general idea that quality tools can increase the quality of your work is not unique to my early academic career. Novelists find a burst of energy when they switch from a generic word processor to professional writing software like Scrivener,

Dedicating time or sacrificing money for a project are two obvious bets to push you toward higher-quality work. A natural third option is to leverage your social capital. If you announce your work in advance to people you know, you’ll have created expectations. If you fail to produce something notable, you’ll pay a social cost in terms of embarrass

Quality demands that you slow down. Once achieved, it also helps you take control of your professional efforts, providing you the leverage needed to steer even further away from busyness.

When you gather with other people who share similar professional ambitions, the collective taste of the group can be superior to that of any individual. This follows, in part, from the diversity of approaches that people take toward creation in a given field. When you combine the opinions of multiple practitioners of your craft, more possibilities