Imagine what you could do if you were able to slow down, if you could give your brain the time and space to produce purposeful and patient work.
This is the goal behind Slow Productivity, a movement designed to help us escape the busyness treadmill and produce higher-quality output, while also protecting our wellbeing.
What is Slow Productivity?
There are some major issues with the way we approach our output as knowledge workers. Author and academic Cal Newport came up with Slow Productivity to address these.
“The world of cognitive work lacks coherent ideas about how our efforts should be organized and measured,” Newport explains. We’ve defaulted to using visible activity (or busyness) as a proxy for being productive, which Newport calls pseudo-productivity. To demonstrate, he points to how academics are often evaluated on how many papers they publish, rather than on the quality or impact of their research.
This focus on quantity over quality can lead to overwhelming personal administrative overheads.
Every time you take on a new project, you’re taking on additional tasks required to manage it, in the form of meetings, emails, note taking, prioritization, and so on. As you add more and more projects, the overheads mount until you have less and less time to produce the work itself. As Newport puts it in the book: “You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.”
The Principles of Slow Productivity
To tackle these problems related to our approach to output, Newport came up with these three principles:
- Do fewer things. Identify the work that has the greatest impact and focus your efforts on that.
- Work at a natural pace. Embrace the fact that humans aren’t built to do high intensity work all the time and that mental resources aren’t limitless. Vary your efforts to give yourself space to think and time to recover.
- Obsess over quality. Doing fewer things allows you to spend time honing your craft and doing the important things as well as you can.
Newport is keen to point out that Slow Productivity doesn’t mean we don’t have periods where we’re working intensively or rushing from commitment to commitment – that’s sometimes unavoidable (and even helpful).
Most of the time, though, we should be aiming to achieve a slower default pace that allows us to recuperate in between these peak times.
The Benefits of Slow Productivity
Slowing down allows different parts of the creative process like ideation, incubation, and evaluation to happen organically. It acknowledges that it can sometimes take time to sift through the many possibilities and leaves room for trial and error to find the best way to execute.
There are numerous examples of creative thinkers who gave their ideas time and space to evolve, from scientists like Marie Curie to writers like J.R.R. Tolkien.
By reducing overheads and busyness, Slow Productivity enables us to put more time and cognitive effort into the most important tasks. We might be “doing less” on paper but we’ll be taking larger steps towards goals and may be able to achieve more.
And of course there is the final benefit, explicitly acknowledged in Newport’s book tagline: “Accomplishment Without Burnout”. Slow Productivity encourages us to give our brains adequate time to recover. It also helps us to feel less overloaded, reducing stress and anxiety.
How to Integrate Slow Productivity into Your Workflow
Slow Productivity is best suited to people with a lot of autonomy over their work. However, you can still integrate the principles into your workflow, even if you’re working in a more structured environment.
Here are some ways to slow down without frustrating others or derailing collaborative work. These strategies can also be scaled up for entire teams.
Create a Pull System
Try to get to a place where you’re pulling work toward you when you have the capacity for it, rather than work being pushed onto you regardless.
Newport recommends creating two lists: One list of projects you need to work on (the “holding tank”) and one of things that you’re currently working on (the “active list”). Your active list should have a limited number of spots (Newport recommends three).
When you finish something on your active list, you can fill the empty slot with something from your holding tank. You may want to break larger projects into chunks and only pull one chunk onto your Active List at a time.
This model can be expanded for an entire team by keeping track of what everyone is currently committed to. A project should only move forward once there are team members with sufficient capacity to work on it.
Don’t Split Your Focus
Commit to working on one of your main projects per day, rather than trying to make a little bit of progress on multiple. That way, you can get fully immersed.
This uses the same logic as the productivity strategies of day-theming or task batching. It reduces the number of times your brain has to switch contexts, which can be cognitively taxing. You may still have to break off for meetings and to answer emails, but it decreases the amount of adjusting you’ll have to do.
Be Transparent About Your Workload
When someone asks you to do something, don’t automatically promise to do it (especially not ASAP). Evaluate how important it is compared to your existing commitments. Then, let the person know what you’re working on already and give them an estimation of how long before you can realistically get to their request.
If the request is coming from your manager, leadership development expert Dane Jensen recommends asking them how they’d like you to prioritize it compared to the other things you’ve been assigned: “It reframes the exchange from a binary choice (yes/no) to a collaborative discussion about what is most important.”
In his book, Newport says that making your to-do list and calendars public can also help you and your colleagues visualize how much you’re already doing.
Foster Healthy Scheduling Habits
Try to build some variation and slack into your schedule so that you’re not constantly working at a breakneck pace. Here are some actionable strategies for building healthier habits when it comes to scheduling and planning:
- We tend to be overoptimistic with our time estimates so make sure to add buffer time. Try this: When you draw up your to-do list for the day, intentionally reduce it by 25%.
- Each time you accept a meeting request, aim to schedule an equivalent block of protected time for deep work.
- Follow intense tasks or projects with “rest tasks”, i.e. work that’s more enjoyable or less demanding.
Control the Overheads
Try to keep administrative tasks to specific blocks during the day. This may be difficult without buy-in from your team so it might be worth seeing if you can agree to shared “office hours.”
Also worth considering is an investment in high-quality tools. Having simple and intuitive ways to organize your notes, communicate with colleagues, and gather feedback will free you up for meaningful work.
Take Your Time, Slow It Down
“This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.”
Cal Newport
Slow Productivity could help you to be more intentional about time and energy, enabling you to produce higher-quality work and feel less overloaded. Though it might seem impossible at first glance, it’s always possible to tweak workflows to reduce unproductive busyness and slow things down a little.
