slow productivity by cal newport

Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind. It’s not that these efforts are arbitrary: our anxious days include tasks and appointments that really do need to get done. But once you realize, as McPhee did, that this exhausted scrambling is often orthogonal to the activities that m

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,

I urge you to consider radically transforming your professional life along the three principles I proposed. Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.

What makes Jarvis’s story so heartening is its demonstration that these benefits of “obsessing” over quality don’t necessarily require that you dedicate your entire life to the blinkered pursuit of superstardom. Jarvis didn’t sell fifteen million records; he instead became, over time, good at core skills that were both rare and valuable in the part

A consultant named Chris, for example, pushed the quality of his team’s client work “much higher” by relegating email to one hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening, while also demanding that his team observe a three-hour deep-work period

Around the time I was writing this chapter, for example, two artisans on my street—a jewelry designer and a mixed-media painter—had recently announced an art market to be held over three successive weekends in a former commercial building that was in between tenants. They teamed up with a small-press printer who was creating attention-catching adve

It can be daunting to directly study great work in your profession, as you already know too much about it. Confronting the gap between what the masters produce and your current capabilities is disheartening. When you study an unrelated field, the pressure is reduced, and you can approach the topic with a more playful openness. When I read great non

What’s needed is more intentional thinking about what we mean by “productivity” in the knowledge sector—seeking ideas that start from the premise that these efforts must be sustainable and engaging for the actual humans doing the work. Slow productivity is one example of this thinking, but it shouldn’t be the only one. My long-term wish is that thi