Slow Productivity

Productivity is not drudgery and chores. It’s your ability to take a vision in your head and manifest it in the real world.

Productivity is also not about working harder and longer. It’s about working more efficiently, which means minimizing waste. Think wasted time, effort, energy, or potential.

Productivity is not some random hacks and silver bulle... See more

"I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being." — Maria Popova

“If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.” This is the same insight embodied in two venerable pieces of time management advice: to work on your most important project for the first hour of each d... See more

A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world. If you want to do great things—whether you’re a musician or entrepreneur or investor—you need free time and a free mind.

“I rarely have good ideas.

To overcome this limitation, I think about one topic (like habits) for an unreasonable amount of time. Then, I revise, revise, revise until only the best stuff remains. It’s slow, but it works.

You can either be a genius or you can be patient.”

There is truly a bottomless pit of advice on how to do work faster, harder, and more efficiently, and all of these ideas have been comforting to me at various times in my career. Now, having made myself sick living like that, I find myself looking for new advice on how to adhere to some other approach, one that does not focus primarily on beating t... See more

Rather than wait passively, "wait for it" requires that you do three things while you wait:

1. Think about what you're waiting for.

2. Visualize what it will look like.

3. Talk to others about it and seek advice.