Table of Contents

The Book in Three Sentences

In this summary of Slow Productivity, you’ll learn to do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. In the book, Cal Newport redefines productivity from busyness to producing lasting work at a slower pace. Ultimately, slow productivity is about escaping the overload that defines modernity to focus on a timeless and meaningful approach.

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Slow Productivity Summary

Introduction

Knowledge work involves tasks that are complex and overwhelming to the point that they paralyze you. After all, how do you turn a chaotic mess of information into something relevant and coherent? The answer, for the author, is to focus on that singular task, ignoring everything else. Many knowledge workers are exhausted because they regularly engage with busyness, but there’s a solution: to craft something impressive and that you’re proud of, you need time and space. Productivity has nothing to do with overload and busyness, so the author came up with a new term: slow productivity.

Newport defines slow productivity as “A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner”. Slow productivity has three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality.

Part 1: Foundations

Chapter 1: The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-Productivity

For a lot of people in the knowledge sector, productivity means work. Work, however, is a loosely defined term. It’s supposed to be what workers do and they must do a lot of it. Unlike other sectors, knowledge workers don’t have a set metric to determine if they’re being productive or not. Therefore, visible activity became a proxy for productivity. The author refers to this as pseudo-productivity.

With the arrival of computers and smartphones, work became checking email and replying to messages frantically without producing anything substantial. As a result, people feel burnt out. They can’t handle the workload coming their way and the quality of their work suffers immensely. To create something lasting, you need to nurture that project for a long time, not to work late or engage with busyness. True productivity happens at a slow pace and it’s invisible.

Chapter 2: A Slower Activity

Pseudo-productivity tries to pull you away from slow productivity with appealing yet not-so-effective methodologies. When we think of the modern workplace, we make some arbitrary assumptions: 40-hour workweeks where people do visible activity.

Lately, some workers have challenged those conventions, demanding a reduced workweek to mitigate the worst parts of pseudo-productivity. They also want to use time-tested ideas to create a slow framework. This framework isn’t an exact blueprint every knowledge worker can use, but it does offer some guiding principles they can implement. The author calls this framework, slow productivity.

Part 2: Principles

Chapter 3: Do Fewer Things

A slow approach to productivity can transform your life. You just need space to think and work. Doing less leads to better results, even when modern life encourages busyness. To achieve this, give yourself plenty of time to work and focus on the most important projects While reducing your workload might seem impossible, selecting and organizing your work creatively, might get you there.

In knowledge work, new commitments lead to what the author calls overhead tax. This is back-and-forth messaging where you exchange the specifics of the task in question. The more commitments you accept, the more expensive the overhead tax becomes. This is the case because, at some point, all organizations embraced technology and those tools are so frictionless that overusing them is easier than not.

Doing fewer things, on the other hand, produces better results. This seems illogical in a world where we’ve gotten accustomed to doing more, but we need self-regulation. This is saying no to the endless stream of incoming requests. The problem with refusing to take on more work is the social capital cost, but if you know you’re close to being so busy it’s about to become unmanageable, that’s a price worth paying. Soon, you’ll realize that all the urgent things weren’t as urgent as you thought.

Dedicating most of your time to a singular pursuit is powerful. If you see everything else as a distraction, you can make a meaningful contribution in your most important area. The idea is to minimize most things so that you can focus on a singular project. You do this by limiting missions, projects, and daily goals.

Missions are ongoing goals, projects are work-related initiatives that require more than one session, and daily goals represent the progress you make on certain projects. Small tasks destabilize what you’re trying to do, so it’s your job to mitigate them and focus on the most important task. For this purpose, the author compiles a series of strategies:

Put tasks on autopilot: assign recurring work to specific times, days, and locations weekly. The idea is to contain tasks to complete them.
Synchronize: replace asynchronous communication (such as email or Slack) with real-time conversations (such as sharing a cup of coffee or doing a video call). Not every task is worth a meeting, so don’t overschedule work sessions. Also, try to dedicate a specific timeframe for this purpose.
Make other people work more: before others send more work your way, they should do more work themselves. You can add friction to the process by having a shared document where you have limited tasks to complete. This gives structure to an often overwhelming pile of things but also implies that someone does some of the work before they involve you. A positive side effect of doing this is that it provides clarity so the requested work will probably be completed.
Avoid task engines: choose the type of work that will generate fewer tasks and unnecessary back-and-forth exchanges. Task engines generate several urgent things to do, so simply avoid them.
Spend money: this involves spending money on useful apps and services rather than getting the most out of free versions. As expensive as these tools can be, professional software services make a difference, especially in eliminating certain tasks.

There’s something almost inhumane about being overwhelmed all the time. Another technique the author suggests when you have a lot on your plate is going from “push” to “pull. A push-based process is where you push work, promising to commit to it as soon as you’re done with what you’re working on. Pull, on the other hand, involves committing to work only when you’re ready. Pulling in new work makes it almost impossible to overload and makes it easy to complete projects. The idea is to have lots of tasks to pull from, update them as necessary, and inform relevant people what you’re working on.

Chapter 4: Work at a Natural Pace

What we produce in the short term isn’t as important as what we produce throughout our lifetimes. Rushing negatively impacts the quality of our work yet that’s what our modern notion of productivity encourages. To solve this, Newport suggests we allow important work to flow at a natural pace.

This is how our ancestors used to work when they hunted and gathered, but everything changed when we discovered agriculture. Work suddenly became monotonous and uniform. This also created the illusion that we can work with continuous intensity which is simply unsustainable. True productivity demands a natural, slower, and varied pace.

With this in mind, Newport came up with a series of suggestions to make your work more varied:

Take longer: one of the best decisions you can make when it comes to creative work is to take your time with it. This lets you explore and develop your creativity.
Make a five-year plan: long-term planning doesn’t mean the next five months, but the next five years.
Double your project timelines: organizing your work is also important and for this purpose, you should double the amount of time you think your upcoming projects will take. We’re terrible at estimating how much time our creative endeavors will take, so simply double them.
Simplify your workday: to do this, schedule fewer tasks and reduce the number of appointments you take.
Force yourself: when you take your time, you end up procrastinating. When this happens, remember you won’t get everything right all the time. As long as you come back to what’s important, forgive yourself and move on.
Embrace seasonality: the seasonal approach involves varying the intensity and focus throughout the year. You can work intensely in a cabin in the summer and live a busier life in the city in the fall.

Nowadays many people are embracing quite quitting, but you don’t have to go that far. Instead, you can vary the intensity of your work. You can, for instance, not volunteer for extra work, shut down at 5 PM, say no, and ignore certain emails. What the author suggests is to try this for a season. Here are some additional strategies:

Define a shorter work year: instead of working for twelve months, you could figure out a way to work for a shorter amount of time. As difficult as it may be, spending time away from our professional routines could change our lives. The idea isn’t to maximize your income but to maximize your life. In other words, while your budget might go down, the rewards you get are well worth it.
Implement “small seasonality”: you don’t have to slow down work for an entire season, you can implement this concept on a smaller scale. The idea is to avoid working frantically the entire year without rest.
Not meeting Monday: as a general rule, don’t schedule appointments on Mondays. When people request a meeting with them, always suggest a different day. Of course, Monday is just a suggestion, but you can pick any day you prefer.
See a matinee once a month: to reset your mind, you can go to a movie theater on a weekday afternoon. Of course, this is only a suggestion and you can come up with your own ritual to cleanse your mind. Other examples include going on hikes or visiting museums, for example.
Schedule rest projects: blocking out parts of your calendar means intense work. To balance the stress, for each major project you have, also schedule what the author calls “rest projects”. Examples of rest projects include watching movies, learning a language, or playing a musical instrument.
Work in cycles: instead of working at the same intensity all the time, you work in cycles where each cycle lasts several weeks. After each cycle, you have a couple of weeks of “cool down” where you work on small issues and determine what to work on next.
Match your space to your work: this involves using your surroundings to complement what you’re working on, such as writing nature-themed poetry in the woods.
Strange is better than stylish: never think having the perfect setting or tools will make your job easier. The more extravagant things you use, the better.
Rituals should be striking: rituals aren’t always rational, but even if they’re silly or random, they’re effective. Rituals are necessary to spark creativity and the more eccentric, the better. Create rituals around your most important work.

Chapter 5: Obsess Over Quality

Always focus on quality over quick returns. Your main goal should be to produce the best work you’re capable of and undoubtedly, that will take time. You might lose opportunities in the short term, but if you focus on quality, your efforts will compound and lead to substantial results. Quality, by nature, demands that you slow down. For this purpose, ignore busyness and focus on what matters.

Quality is important for artists. Knowledge workers, on the other hand, often underestimate it. Nevertheless, focusing on quality can transform your professional life because it forces you to slow down. Quality and busyness don’t go hand in hand after all. Another positive side effect of doing quality work is that it leads to satisfying results, something you never get when you’re working frantically. Quality is about simplicity. For this purpose, many people have replaced “more” with “just enough”.

When you start working on something, you have good taste but don’t yet have the skills to produce great work. The only way to make that gap smaller is by working more. Additionally, Newport gives you some suggestions to see the possibilities in your field.

Become a cinephile: having high-quality leisure activities is important. For this purpose, the author suggests cinema. You can use different resources to understand what makes movies so good, such as books, reviews, or essays. Regardless of which activity you choose though, approach it with playfulness and openness.
Start your own inklings: meet with someone who has similar ambitions and you’ll soon find a way to improve your projects considerably.
Buy a fifty-dollar notebook: spending a lot of money on high-quality equipment makes you more careful about the work you do with it. This is a way to signal to yourself that you’re taking that activity seriously.
Write after the kids go to bed: work whenever you can, especially when you have a passion project. If you fail, nothing happens, but if you win, it can change your life.
Reduce your salary: if you rely on the side project you’re working on for money, you’ll be forced to focus. After all, failing to do so means you won’t be able to pay the bills. Of course, the idea is to wait until you know that the interest you’re pursuing has the potential to make some money.
Announce a schedule: by announcing the work you’re doing before it happens, you create enough expectations that you’ll have to produce something notable.
Attract an investor: when you get financial help from someone else, you’ll be able to have better production quality. Additionally, you’ll feel the need to pay back their trust.

Conclusion

Adopting slow productivity is more possible than you think. Slowing down is about finding the best way to do your work. Pseudo-productivity is unsustainable and thankfully, we now have a viable replacement.

Book Summary: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport