Slow Productivity
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One of the challenges with “knowledge work” is that there is no direct measurement of work. In industrial contacts you can measure how many widgets are produced. But in knowledge work this is hard. Lines of code written is not a helpful measurement for productivity. So what has been widely adopted is busyness as proxy for productivity. Cal Newport calls this “pseudo productivity”. But can there be a better way for measuring the productivity of a knowledge worker?
“Knowledge work”: The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artefact with market value through the application of cognitive effort. Captures programmers, accountants but also philosophers, scientists, playwrights, artists, ….
It took Newton over twenty years to produce the Principia, his masterwork. The slow pace is forgotten, the history-changing impact remains. Slow productivity allows legacy-building accomplishments, at a natural pace.
Principles
- Do fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Obsess over quality
Do fewer things
Reduce your commitments so you can accomplish all with ease and time to spare. Use the time to advance a small number of projects that matter most.
Jane Austen didn’t write anything when busy. Only when her family removed themselves from the social scene, and reduced her obligations, she had ample free time and was able to transform English literature.
When you commit to a task, there is an overhead tax attached. For each task, there’s messages, meetings, updating the task manager.
Focus on one big thing. Systematically reduce any distractions from it. ⇒ I could just focus on building one website for a day. Or one release or so.
- Limit “Missions”: ongoing commitments
- In my personal life, that would be “Areas”
- Limit “Projects”
- When considering out a new project, schedule how it would work in your actual calendar
- Instead of vague business, be concrete about how you have no extra time
- Limit daily tasks: One project per day
Put tasks on “autopilot”: always do this thing in a location at a time.
Push- vs Pull-based workflows
- Can I implement something similar for personal projects? Like to only have two (better: one!) going at the same time. Once a project is closed/declined, I can pull in the next one.
- Can we implement this at work? Have a long backlog of items that each one of us can pull in as needed?
You can implement a simulated pull as an individual.
- ‘Holding tank’ and ‘active’ lists. For projects. ‘Active’ should be three projects max.
- Intake procedure: When adding a new project, update the source with an acknowledgement message that details 1) request for additional details, 2) count of projects already on your list, 3) estimate of when you expect to complete this work. “I have eleven projects before this on the list”. Key: transparency.
- List cleaning: Once a week. Pull in new work into slots, review deadlines, send updates to work that you won’t finish on the estimate. Remove projects from holding tank that are languishing. ⇒ This would be a cool app to build.
Work at a natural pace
Scientists making great discoveries worked a leisurely pace. Some discoveries took lifetimes, with lots of moments of rest in between.
Don’t rush you most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.
For most of human history, we’ve ‘worked’ as hunter-gatherers. That type of work is intermittent. Modern work is monotonous in its pace.
Make a five year plan. (Or something in that range, five specifically doesn’t matter). This makes you feel comfortable even if progress isn’t immediately made. (I could use something like this for some coding projects. What, instead of a few weeks, I’d give projects a year?). It expands the timescales in which you’re evaluating your productivity.
Double the estimated timelines. Cut daily todo tasks by 25%
Embrace seasonality
- “Quiet quit” during a season
- Define a shorter work year. Ian Fleming worked 10 months per year.
- No meeting Mondays.
- Implement a Basecamp-style “cycle”. 6-8 weeks intensity, 2 weeks rest, fixing and reflection
3: Obsess over quality
Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.
Producing something quality means you need to slow down. These extraordinary results then allow you to slow down even further.
Without this strategy, the previous two are just about how to get away with less. The commitment to high-quality work is what demands slowing down and doing less. This leads to a fulfilling professional life.
Getting better at your work can mean doubling your income, or it can mean cutting the time you work in half.
An obsession with quality both demands and enables slowness.
Taste is crucial to producing great work. It’s the tacit understanding of what is great and what isn’t. Initially, you won’t be able to meet the standards you have for yourself. Also, over time your taste will increase.
Like I know what a great app is like, I’ve used plenty. But I might not yet know how to get there. Over time my ability increases to build a great app. At the same time, my taste in what makes a great app should also have increased.
This is why being immersed in great RSS is so important to me. Reading Hygge talk about accessibility, or Alex Lichter about Nuxt, increases my taste of what is great.
Immersing yourself in high quality work from fields different to your own can improve your work. Cal learning about Resevoir Dogs lead to an epiphany about his own writing.
“Find your Inklings”: join a group of professionals, similar to what you’re doing. The collective taste is better than each individual. This is what codeFellowship() does for me.
Give yourself enough time to create something great, but not unlimited.
Only leave your job for your side hustle if 1) people pay for it 2) you can replicate the result
Conclusion
Hm… what an interesting read. The books initial proposition sounded too much like just chilling out from work. I was wondering about how to integrate that with having integrity at work and working well. Then in the last chapter he talks about how slow approach to work is required to produce quality work. I think we also see that in the idea of Sabbath that we as humans we need rest (sidebar: How to do nothing talks about rest being valuable in itself, not just to enable more work. Maybe that is more what Sabbath is).
I think my current working environment I am actually able to really hone in on the core work of my field. I spend 90% of my day actually coding.
More: Slow Productivity Takeaways
Doing fewer things also applies to my leisure. By just doing a few things - reading, coding - I do those well. This also applies for my personal projects. Only having two, or ideally one, going on at the same time, means that I can make them better.
Rating: 4.5. A great book, on the verge of being a masterpiece. I could agree with/implement Cal’s other books more easily. This was a bit more subversive and challenging to me. I could see myself bumping it up to 4.75/5.0 after sitting with it for some time.