Slow Productivity
Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices? Long before the arrival of pinging inboxes and clogged schedules, history’s most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. In this timely and provocative book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of these traditional knowledge workers to radically transform our modern jobs. Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkers – from Galileo and Isaac Newton, to Jane Austen and Georgia O’Keefe – Newport lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,” a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment. Combining cultural criticism with systematic pragmatism, Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for cultivating a slower, more humane alternative.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
12mentions
12people
2022–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Probably not what the author intended, but this article highlights exactly where Millennials (of which I am one) went terribly, terribly wrong. And the last piece of advice at the end is unfortunately the exact opposite of the remedy we need.
The MOAR FASTER OMG CAN'T KEEP UP CHANGE COMES AT YOU FAST FOMO WEEE mindset is what got us into this terrible situation in the first place. I'm not here to bash on my generation, but if we could gently take a piece of advice (probably good for GenXers as well) it would be this:
Slow the ever-loving f*** down.
You will succeed by ignoring nearly all hype cycles, intentionally not jumping on the next big thing, skipping past virtually all "influencers" online…in fact you should probably just spend the bulk of your waking hours offline entirely.
Cal Newport has been one of the leading voices of this corrective movement (Deep Work, Slow Productivity, etc.), and I pray to the gods above that Gen Z rightly rejects so much of this hustle porn that Millennials came up with in the first two decades of this century.
Slow dooowwwnnnn. Focus on real-world values which last, not fleeting spikes in viral activity. Build meangingful community IRL. Learn tangible skills with your brain and your hands. Interface with people who are not at all like you. Talk to more people in different generations. Realize the hazards of "software brain" as The Verge's Nilay Patel wisely has talked about.
We have a lot to answer for I fear. And if we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the Boomers, we really need to shut up and listen to what the kids are telling us. There's a reason they now hate AI and want iPods for Christmas.
- I built Space after realizing most productivity tools focus on doing whatever, not doing better.
After reading Oliver Burkeman's "4000 Weeks" and Cal Newport's "Slow Productivity," I wanted a tool that actually supported their ideas rather than undermined them. Something that helps you zoom out (year/quarter goals) so you can zoom in (week/day) with confidence that today's work connects to what actually matters.
I couldn't find anything like this, so I built it myself. After a year of daily use and iteration, I'm releasing it publicly.
Oliver Burkeman looked at it and said "this has the potential to be a very useful tool for many."
Demo video here: https://help.findspace.app/
- The trouble is that making progress in leaps is often mutually exclusive with being productive in the short term. It’s hard to think big and plan long-term when you’re constantly overwhelmed with what’s in front of you.
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport talks about this trade-off extensively and provides interesting points of reference where real famous historical figures achieved incredible things in ways that would seem slow and lazy by modern standards.
- Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in Slow Productivity.
- I quit my job 6 months ago because my family of four travels a lot and bosses couldn't handle me working async (although I delivered very well).
I'm also kind of tired of working for someone else. I did SEO for 10 years very profitably and it was a dream life.
I was going to take at least one year off to take care of my health and my little one (she's 3) but as my wife correctly pointed out, I go crazy when I don't do something that exercises my brain.
Lost 30 pounds, and been doing a lot of hiking, sports, salsa, which is great, but it's not enough. Finally I understand why rich people seldom retire.
I'm reasonably productive (big fan of Cal Newport, Deep Work, Slow Productivity).
The dream is to have a profitable SaaS but it's been overwhelming to see the amount of stuff out there.
My strengths are FE and I can handle design and marketing reasonably okay. Don't want to brag but likely 90 or 95% top talent doing FE , based on the CTOs and investors we used to work with. I was Eng Manager at some point but hated the endless meetings.
I'm also over the fence with everything related to AI (I think it's powerful, but it's a double-edged sword to build in such a competitive industry that I don't find that enticing and I am not too knowledgeable of).
What would you do in my position if you had 3 years of runway?
That's if we continue spending as we are now (very comfortable living), but it could be extended to 4-5 years if we decide to live a bit on a tighter budget, provided I find a mission on what to build or do.
I know myself, and by the time I only have 1 year of runway I'm going to start stressing out. So I have some time.
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EDIT: My ideas so far.
1) Try a few micro SaaS ideas. Fail a lot and figure it out. FAFO.
2) Grow my socials so I have a bigger network. It's going well but I'm just not a big fan of all the shallow work.
3) Try one or two BIG SaaS ideas. Slow and steady, focus on quality. Very enjoyable but the risk of failing miserably haunts me.
4) Work on open source projects. I have a few that I started and have a tiny bit of traction. If nothing can be done for profit, use it as leverage to find a great job in the future and learn a ton
- I’ve helped build out or steer these sorts of systems a number of times and usually management behaves themselves during the adoption and honeymoon phases but then erode the trust later on by trying to use the system to determine PIP or promotion.
Devs who have seen this behavior before tend to push back hard on adoption, and then invest the absolute minimum effort in using these tools. The tools tend to be built wrong often enough to encourage that slide into toxicity. There’s an amount of using a tool where it improves your work experience, and then an additional amount that improves the team experience, and then beyond that it’s doing your manager’s job for them and self-reporting/narcing.
I’m trying to build a tool at the moment that has had three focuses due to different sources of inspiration. First it was going to be Trac (a project management tool and wiki that is so simple it shouldn’t work, but somehow does) with bits of Jenkins. Bamboo has thousands of features and integrations where it should have hundreds. All those integrations make reproducing a failed build locally difficult or impossible. The bones of a build process should be in the build scripts and dependencies, so you can run them locally. The build tool should schedule builds, report status changes, collect some release notes data, and track trends with grafana charts and that’s about it. I also want something running in each dev’s machine to boost system performance and do some of the teamcity features for trunk based dev like push-on-green-build. I just miss how distilled Trac was, but it had some problems with plugins and git support.
That sat on the Some Day Shelf behind two other projects until I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and then Slow Productivity. Then it became more user oriented. Atlassian has about three per-user dashboards that I’m responsible for juggling all day, and that is tragicomically stupid. I’m terrible with this sort of juggling but have coworkers who don’t check the PR list ever - you have to pester them to look at PRs, week in and week out. If I’m doing deep work I don’t want preemptions except in specific circumstances (like I broke trunk). But when I come up for air I need a cheap gestalt of what I’ve missed and what people are expecting from me. Show me all the PRs, and my red builds and open tasks in a single view. Allow some low priority alerts through. And that can be facilitated by building a pomodoro straight into the dashboard and information hiding during deep focus moments.
I have some family that was recently diagnosed as neurodivergent, and the thing about YouTube is that your suggested videos get influenced by what other people in the house are watching (particularly if you’re not logged in on a device). ND people of all types have a lot of coping mechanisms to function within other people’s expectations (eg work and responsibilities) and to mask. They get both barrels when it comes to being judged poorly by toxic management tools because their variability is so high. Best performer one day, second worst the next. And this is nowhere more true than with ADHD. And the worst of it is that almost nobody will go harder and farther than an ADHD person during a crisis. They can hyperfocus during rare moments but most reliably due to an emergency (self created, like a paper due tomorrow, or externally driven, like servers on fire). They also innovate by drawing connections nobody else sees between different disciplines.
But they’re the first on the block when toxic metrics kick in. And the productivity tools they objectively need more than anyone else on the team seals their fates, and thus they either don’t use them or use their own, which are similarly poorly integrated, which leads to more plate spinning which they are terrible at.
So what finally got me ass-in-chair in front of a keyboard was realizing that if this is two tools instead of one, you can keep some of the productivity data on the employee’s machine where it can help them with time management and self-improvement but not self-incrimination. Then you can cherry pick and clean up the narrative of your day or week before you self report. Have private tasks on your machine that may look embarrassing to others (like remember to drink fluids, eat lunch, call the dentist, tasks you’re skunkworking).
