Slow Productivity  🔗 **Source:** [Slow Productivity]() ## Highlights - The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. - A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality. - this philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. - It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything. - Peter Drucker published an influential paper titled “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge.” - using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. - The more activity you see, the more you can assume that I’m contributing to the organization’s bottom line. - PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. - KNOWLEDGE WORK (GENERAL DEFINITION) The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort. - SLOW PRODUCTIVITY A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality. - Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most. - The advantage of doing fewer things, however, is about more than just increasing the raw number of hours dedicated to useful activity; the quality of these hours also increases. - So much of knowledge work culture seems built around juggling more and more work, with more and more “efficiency,” that the idea of doing fewer things, even if logical in the abstract, seems an impossible goal to pursue in practice. - The term mission can sound grandiose. For our purposes, we’ll demote it to a more pragmatic definition: any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life. - Missions require that you initiate “projects,” which is my term for any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session. Some projects you complete once and then are done, such as updating the sales copy on a product website. Other projects are ongoing, meaning they unfold without any clear stopping point, such as answering support queries from clients. Projects create many of the concrete tasks that take up your time during the day. It follows that limiting them is critical to limiting your overall work volume. - appeal to the hard but unimpeachable reality of your actual available time. If someone asks you to do something, and you appeal to some vague sense of busyness to get out of it, you’re unlikely to consistently succeed. - when considering a new project, you estimate how much time it will require and then go find that time and schedule it on your calendar. Block off the hours as you would for a meeting. If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you don’t have enough time for it. Either decline the project, or cancel something else to make room. The power of this approach is that you’re dealing with the reality of your time, not a gut feeling about how busy you are at the moment. - work on at most one project per day. To clarify, I don’t intend for this single daily project to be your only work for the day. You’ll likely also have meetings to attend, emails to answer, and administrative nonsense to subdue - If much of your perceived busyness comes from talking about tasks instead of actually executing them, you might be less overloaded than you realize. In other words, if you can reduce the footprint of these conversations, the pile of actual, concrete obligations that remains might not be so forbidding. - Instead of allowing colleagues to effortlessly lob requests in your direction like hand grenades, leaving you to clean up the mess generated by their productivity-shredding shrapnel, they must now do more work themselves before they can commandeer your attention. - Create a public task list for each of the major categories of tasks you tackle in your job. You can use a shared document for this purpose. (If you’re feeling more advanced, a shared Trello board is perhaps even better.) When someone asks you to take on some small obligation, direct them to add it themselves to the relevant shared task list; writing it, for example, into the shared doc, or creating a new card for it on the shared Trello board. Critically, make it clear that all of the information you’ll need to complete the task should be included in their entry. - they wanted to transition from a system in which new tasks could be pushed onto their plate haphazardly to one in which they would pull in new work only when they were ready for it. - The situation becomes trickier, however, when we turn our attention to individuals without direct control over how their work is assigned. - The first step in simulating a pull-based workflow is tracking all projects to which you’re currently committed on a list divided into two sections: “holding tank” and “active.” - When adding a new project to your holding tank, it’s important to update the source of this new obligation about what they should expect. To do so, send an acknowledgment message that formally acknowledges the project that you’re committing to complete, but that also includes the following three pieces of extra information: (1) a request for any additional details you need from the source before you can start the project, (2) a count of the number of existing projects already on your lists, and (3) an estimate of when you expect to complete this new work. - You should update and clean your lists once a week. In addition to pulling in new work to fill empty slots on your active list, you should also review upcoming deadlines. Prioritize what’s due soon, and send updates for any work that you know you’re not going to finish by the time promised. These cleaning sessions also provide a good opportunity to remove from your holding tank projects that are languishing. If you’ve delayed the same project again and again, for example, this might be a good sign that you’re not really equipped to handle it, or that it falls outside your comfort zone. In these cases, consider just bluntly asking the original source of the project to release you from your obligation: - when cleaning your lists, look for projects that have become redundant or have been rendered obsolete by subsequent developments. - Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance. - If you’re too ambitious, your intensity will remain pegged at a high level as you scramble to try to hit your targets. If you instead give yourself more than enough time to accomplish your objectives, the pace of your work can fall into a more natural groove. - take whatever timelines you first identify as reasonable for upcoming projects, and then double their length. - sometimes a natural pace is