slow productivity by cal newport

When you spend two years reading and critiquing and admiring work by other young writers pushing their prose in new and interesting directions, your standards for what writing can achieve sharpen.

obsessing over quality often demands that you slow down, as the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness.

Don’t haphazardly quit your job to pursue a more meaningful project. Wait instead to make a major change until you have concrete evidence that your new interest satisfies the following two properties: first, people are willing to give you money for it, and second, you can replicate the result. In the context of writing, this might mean you’ve sold

From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted.

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.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. . . . But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making, isn’t so good . . . it’s not quite that good. . . . If you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you gotta know it’s totally normal and the

In Bird by Bird, the novelist Anne Lamott elegantly captures this rhythm of creation. “You find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors,” she writes. “You don’t care about those first three pages; those