Slow Productivity Crash Course
Summary
TLDRIn this video, author Cal Newport explains the concept of 'slow productivity,' his proposed solution to knowledge workers' growing discomfort with mainstream notions of productivity. Slow productivity offers an alternative, more sustainable approach built around three key principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. Newport traces the history of productivity notions, arguing that 'pseudo-productivity' focused on constant busyness is no longer tenable, causing burnout. By shifting focus to quality over quantity of output, working on fewer projects at once, and embracing natural work/life rhythms, Newport believes knowledge workers can find more meaning, fulfillment and impressiveness in their work.
Takeaways
- 😊 Slow productivity is an alternative definition of productivity that produces impressive, profitable work in a sustainable way without burning people out
- 🤔 We don't have a clear definition of productivity for knowledge workers like we do for farmers and factory workers
- 😮 Pseudoproductivity uses visible activity as a proxy for useful work, which is not sustainable with more digital tools enabling endless tasks
- 👥 Do fewer things to minimize the overhead tax of open obligations and reduce cognitive load
- 📝 Use a public pull list to take control over your own workload instead of letting others push endless tasks onto your plate
- 🕰 Judge productivity on longer timescales, not just what you did today or this week
- 🌴 Introduce seasonality to your schedule with quiet periods of lower intensity like our ancestors had
- ✨ Obsess over quality to make your work more fulfilling, force you to slow down, and give you more leverage
- 🎨 Study the masters in your field to improve your own taste and ability to identify high quality work
- 😌 Read the book for a full, detailed approach to transform to a slow productivity mindset
Q & A
What problem led Cal Newport to study the concept of slow productivity?
-He began hearing growing discomfort from people about the general notion of productivity, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. People felt overwhelmed by the constant pressure to do more work and be productive.
How does Cal Newport define pseudo-productivity?
-Pseudo-productivity uses visible activity as a proxy for useful labor. It's the idea that if someone sees you doing something, that's better than not doing anything, even if the work itself isn't that valuable.
What are the three main principles of slow productivity?
-The three main principles are: 1) Do fewer things 2) Work at a natural pace 3) Obsess over quality.
How can a public pull list help you take on fewer obligations?
-A public pull list forces people to transparently add tasks instead of just pushing them onto you. Seeing your existing workload may make them less likely to add more. You can also point to it to explain why you can't take on more concurrent tasks.
Why is constant intensity and long hours of work unnatural for humans?
-Studies of hunter-gatherers show our ancient ancestors worked in bursts with downtime in between. Agricultural societies also had seasons where work was intensive but winter had little work. Working at full intensity year-round is a modern construct.
What is quiet quitting and how can it create seasonality?
-Quiet quitting means doing the bare minimum at work. Doing it for 1-2 months allows you to create a 'winter' rest period without your boss noticing, then you can ramp back up and do impressive work during the other seasons.
How does quality help enable the other principles of slow productivity?
-Obsessing over quality makes your work more fulfilling, forces you to slow down to improve, and builds leverage to take on fewer obligations.
Why study the masters in your field?
-Studying the acknowledged masters in your field improves your taste and appreciation for what is possible. This allows you to improve the quality of your own work at a faster rate.
What was the key problem Cal Newport identified with productivity?
-There is no clear definition or way to measure productivity for knowledge workers. Things like quantity of output or time spent working do not necessarily equate to valuable productivity.
How is slow productivity different from traditional notions of productivity?
-Slow productivity focuses on quality, working on fewer things, variability of pace, and sustainability. Traditional productivity tends to care mostly about quantity and constant intensity.
Outlines
😀 Introducing slow productivity: an alternative to pseudo productivity
Cal introduces slow productivity as an alternative definition of productivity for knowledge work in the digital age. Instead of using visible activity as a proxy for useful labor, slow productivity is based on 3 principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. These emulate traditional knowledge workers like artists with complete flexibility to see what works, adapted for modern jobs.
😮 Pseudo productivity leads to unsustainable overwhelm
Pseudo productivity of using visible busyness as a proxy for useful work was fine until technology enabled endless work from anywhere. This led to ubiquity of work, overwhelm, burnout. The pandemic amplified this.
😊 Principle 1: Do fewer things
More obligations brings overhead tax of admin and cognitive load. 50 things vs 10 on your plate takes more time even if you only work on 1 per day. Can fall into overload spiral. Public poll list: shared doc of workload queue makes adding/tracking projects transparent.
🏃♂️ Principle 2: Work at a natural pace
We use wrong timescales to judge productivity, when the greats like John McPhee did little some days. We also work constantly at high intensity unlike our evolutionary design. Introduce seasonality like quiet quitting for a couple months.
🌟 Principle 3: Obsess over quality
Obsessing over quality makes work fulfilling, forces you to slow down, gains leverage to shed obligations. Key is improving taste: study masters in your field to appreciate what's good, accelerating your own progress.
😊 Conclusion: Put these 3 principles into action
These 3 big ideas of slow productivity will improve sustainability and quality right away. But read the book for full transformation to the slow mindset.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡productivity
💡pseudo-productivity
💡slow food movement
💡flexibility
💡overhead tax
💡natural pace
💡seasonality
💡quiet quitting
💡quality
💡taste
Highlights
Slow productivity is an alternative definition of productivity that produces impressive, useful, profitable results in a sustainable way that energizes people.
Pseudo productivity uses visible activity as a proxy for useful labor, which is not sustainable in the age of digital networks.
The 3 principles of slow productivity are: 1) Do fewer things 2) Work at a natural pace 3) Obsess over quality.
Every obligation on your to-do list has an overhead tax of administrative work and cognitive load required to keep the task alive.
Using a public pull list allows you to transparently display your workload so people can see your capacity before assigning you more work.
We often use the wrong timescales to measure productivity - creativity and impact emerge over months and years, not days and weeks.
Modern knowledge work happens at an unnaturally constant pace compared to our evolutionary and agricultural history of variability.
You can "quiet quit" for a couple months a year to introduce seasonality and mental rejuvenation without your boss noticing.
Obsessing over quality makes work more fulfilling, necessitates slowing down, and builds leverage to gain more autonomy.
Getting better requires not just practice but also improving your taste by studying the masters in your field.
Putting these 3 core principles into action - doing less, pacing naturally, pursuing quality - will slow down and improve your work life.
The book expands on these ideas for transforming your productivity mindset in a detailed, step-by-step way.
These initial practical steps around managing obligations, seasonality, and studying experts can kickstart changes.
Pseudo productivity forces an unsustainable pace of constant intensity.
A public pull list brings transparency to workload capacity that discourages people from overassigning you.
Transcripts
[Music]
hi there I'm Cal Newport if you are
watching this video this means that
either you pre-ordered my book slow
productivity or someone who did
pre-order the book has shared this video
link with you either way welcome I'm
glad you're here now I'm calling this
video a slow productivity crash course
my goal is to give you just enough
information that you can actually start
putting the big ideas of slow
productivity into action in your current
life even before you get my book with
all of the extra details and explanation
that it contains so this will be your
quickest route from getting from zero to
having a notable amount of slow
productivity in your professional
personal life now here's the way I'm
going to structure this I'm going to
start by introducing the concept of slow
productivity so you know what we're
talking about and then going to go
through the three main principles of
this philosophy and for each pull out a
single piece of particularly effective
practical advice from my book to detail
to you right here so when we're done
with this crash course you'll not only
know what slow productivity is but
you'll have a concrete thing to put into
action your life along the three main
principles of this philosophy once you
have a taste for this of course read the
book and you'll get a much more nuanced
detailed
approach all right so let's get started
with what slow productivity is to
explain this let me start with the
problem I detected that instigated my
study of this issue it was early
pandemic we're talking 2020 Summer 2020
spring 2020 when I began to hear from my
podcast listeners and newsletter readers
a growing
discomfort with the general notion of
productivity now as someone who tackles
uh the intersection of digital
technology in our lives and because of
that does a lot of writing about the
workplace and digital distractions and
how to stay productive among digital
distractions this was a topic that was
true to my interest so I began to
investigate what's going on here why do
we have this growing discomfort with the
notion of productivity the answer I
found is that we don't really have a
sensical definition of what we even mean
by
productivity now if we look into other
economic sectors productivity is very
well defined if you're a
farmer productivity is clear bushels
produced per acre of land you can
measure it you can give it a number you
can experiment with different
agricultural systems and see how they
impact this number in industrial
manufacturing productivity is precisely
defined how many model's per manh hour
of Labor are we producing you can
measure this you can put a number on it
when you change the way you build your
cars when you switch let's say from the
craft message to the assembly line you
can see that number get
better but then we get knowledge work
this is something that emerges as a
major economic sector really in the mid
20th century it's 1959 that the term
knowledge work itself is first coined by
Peter Ducker when we get the knowledge
work productivity gets a little bit more
hazy it's not so clear to Define if you
take the average knowledge worker
someone today that works at a computer
screen somehow associated with an office
or some sort of business that produces
mainly products out of uh the human
brain what do we
measure there's no bushels of wheat we
can just tabulate or numbers of model
T's that were produced for a given
number of labor hours most knowledge
workers actually do multiple different
types of things their jobs have multiple
roles and multiple types of work
products uh it's typically not
comparable from one worker to another so
what I do might be different than the
exact sort of things that you're
producing there's also not clearly
defined systems in knowledge work if I
run a factory I can tell you exactly how
I build cars in knowledge work the tools
you use to organize your own efforts are
up to
you they're not written down somewhere
they're not somewhere that we can study
and say this way of working is producing
these type of results so productivity
didn't really work in the ways we were
used to thinking about this concept in
the world of knowledge work so what do
we do because we have managers we have
to manage something so what did we do
about this problem well early in my book
I argue we invented a clever New Concept
that I call pseudo
productivity pseudo productivity said
let's use visible
activity as a proxy for useful labor so
if I see you doing something that's
better than not seeing you do something
and that'll be the best way that we can
approximate you know useful labor so I
want to see you here in the office doing
things if you're goofing off too much I
will be mad uh if our company needs to
turn itself around we do so by saying be
here longer I want to see you in the
office more this was pseudo productivity
this was the implicit law of the land
and knowledge work since at least the
midcentury and it worked okay it's not a
very accurate way of measuring labor but
whatever you know when the boss comes
around put down the magazine uh if
you're at the water cooler pretend like
you were talking about work instead of
sports it's
fine but then something else happened
the tech Revolution what I call the
front office it
transformation we got computers we got
networks we got mobile commuting we got
laptops and smartphones we got email and
we got chat and now suddenly Soo
productivity became
unsustainable we had more possible work
to do than we ever could handle we had
the ability to do this work in any
situation not just when we were in an
office building we could uh interact
with people about this work at any point
the combination of more work is better
than less and you have endless work you
can do at any point that was
combustible that began leading to this
uh this ubiquity of our jobs the sense
of work following us everywhere this
sense of uh more and more work could
come at us through tools like email so
we had more and more things on our plate
burnout and exhaustion began to follow
by the time we get to the pandemic this
just gets Amplified even worse and
people said I've had enough I don't know
what productivity is but I do know this
urge I have to always have to be doing
more work is killing me and I'm done
with it
that was the stage that led to slow
productivity so what is slow
productivity it's an alternative
definition of this concept pseud
productivity does not work for knowledge
work in an age of digital networks we
need to explore alternative definitions
of productivity that can
a produce really impressive useful
profitable results whatever it is we're
actually trying to do professionally
speaking and BB
sustainable us human beings can pursue
the definition and not get burnt out but
instead get
energized slow productivity was my
attempt to come up with that definition
and the way I came up with this
definition is inspired by the slow food
movement I said let's go back and study
how people have solved this problem
before and I went back and in the book I
study what I call traditional knowledge
workers people historically who uh
produce things with their mind but due
to historical Circumstances had a ton of
flexibility in how they did it poets
scientist writers artists people who had
maybe patronage uh to pay their bills or
they uh didn't have to work and they
could do their art full-time or their
art was very successful so they got lots
of flexibility I was looking for people
that were in this rare historical
circumstance of I'm trying to build
things with my mind and I have complete
flexibility to see what works and what
didn't I then draw from the hisorical
examples to isolate some key principles
and then adapt them to knowledge work in
the 21st century to adapt them to the
constraints of I'm an entrepreneur and I
have clients who need things to adapt
them to the constraints of I work for an
office my boss doesn't care and needs
things from
me so just like the slow food movement
retrieve food culture from traditional
approaches to food I am trying to build
a more sustainable and effective notion
of productivity by pulling from these
traditional knowledge work cultures the
definition I came up with is built
around three principles it says the
right way to produce impressive work in
a way that's sustainable and energizing
is to build your work around three
principles number one do fewer things
number two work at a natural pace number
three obsess over quality these three
things together is a much more
Humane a much more sustainable a much
more intuitive natural way to produce
work that we really are impressed by
work that we really love it's a much
better alternative to pseudo
productivity so here's what I want to do
now moving forward in this crash course
we're going to go through those three
principles one by one and for each I
will give you a specific piece of
concrete advice for my book so you can
start putting some of that principle
into action your life right away way all
right makes sense let's get
rolling let's start with the first
principle of slow productivity which is
to do fewer things now here's the
motivation for this principle it is easy
in our current age of digital
communication for people just to push
work your direction hey Cal can you do
this can you get back to me on this hey
what do you know about this hey can you
jump on a call and help me schedule
what's going on with this upcoming
client the average knowledge worker
today has significant
more obligations to which they're
committed at any one time than it was
let's say 20 years ago 30 years ago 40
years ago we have more on our plate
right now than ever
before now there's a real cost to this
and I I detail this in my book but
there's a real cost to having too much
to do and the reason is every obligation
you've committed
to that's on your task list brings with
it what I call an overhead tax so so
long as that commitment is on your plate
there is a certain amount of
administrative work required from you to
keep this task alive this might be uh
emails about it people checking in on
how it's going it might be weekly status
meetings that you have to jump on as
long as this obligation is active it's
also just a cognitive overhead tax of I
know this is something I've committed to
do and it's there somewhere in the back
of my head there's a little voice like
okay this is here
we we have this thing to do we're not
working on it right now this is a
problem so because everything you commit
to do brings with it this overhead
tax the more things you put on your
plate the more time is dedicated to
paying overhead tax so there's actually
a cost to having 50 things on your to-do
list versus 10 even if you're only
working on one thing per day regardless
of whether you have 10 or 50 it makes a
difference this quantity makes a
difference because of the the overhead
tax eventually what happens when you've
agreed to do too many things is that you
spend more and more of your time paying
the overhead tax going to status
meetings answering emails just thinking
in the back of your mind about all you
have to do more and more of your time
gets spent on the tax less of this time
gets spent actually doing the work and
you fall farther behind more things pile
the amount of overhead tax increases it
can be a really nasty overload spiral
that you can fall into so you really
want to be doing fewer things that's a
key property to slowing down in your
approach to work there's a lot of ways
to do this I want to give you here one
particular piece of advice that comes
out of the book that I think is
delightfully
provocative and that is using what I'm
going to call a public poll
list p l l all right let me explain to
you how this works the typical way that
someone can put work on your plate is
what we would call the push model I have
this thing I want Cal to do boom I push
it onto his plate I don't have to worry
about it anymore maybe I'll bother him
occasionally like hey have you done this
yet in fact I'll be annoyed if you don't
do this right away because I want you to
do this I pushed it to you you are the
person I'm waiting for on to get this
back and so this is sort of on your
shoulder so yeah hey I push something to
you where's my
thing the alternative of approach to
work is pulling p u l l i n g instead of
letting everyone just push things onto
my plate that I'm now juggling I pull
things onto my plate when I'm ready to
work on something
else now from a cognitive perspective
pull systems in general are clearly much
better because you're minimizing
overhead tax I'm only working on a small
number of things at a time so the amount
of overhead tax I'm paying at any one
time is
constrained and when I'm done I pull in
something else now here's the thing this
is not reducing the total amount of work
that you
produce because even if you uh have
everything on your plate at the same
time you can only spend so much time
working on one thing at a time right I
mean you're not uh the amount of time
you spend working on things actually
will probably be larger in a pole system
because you're spending less time paying
overhead tax so the amount of things you
actually finish in a month in a pole
system might be much larger than if you
took all of these things and put them on
your plate all at once and you had to
waste so much time just Ling the
admin so a pbase system in general it's
not only going to make you feel much
better and slow things down you're
probably going to get more work done so
how do we Implement a pole based system
well in my book I give a really
intricate complicated approach for how
an individual who works inside of a
large company can stealthily Implement a
poll system in a way that people don't
even know you're doing it but it gives
you many of the advantages here I want
to give you a more direct way of doing
it this is something that can be
deployed if you have either e the
flexibility or the hutzpah to actually
try this I think it's a cool idea here's
how it works you have a public shared
document this is your uh project
list it's
divided at the top of the list you have
uh
pending or
waiting and at the bottom under some
sort of horizontal divider actively
working
on you have no more than one or two
things that you're actively working on
everything else goes above it so here's
what happens now when someone says hey
Cal can you do this for me you say okay
if it sounds reasonable yeah I could do
this project for you um add it to the
end of my queue show them the document
so yeah just type you know add it to the
top of the list um make sure you include
under it any information I need or
pointers or whatever I need to actually
like make progress on this once time
comes to work on it so already you're
putting the onus on their plate they
can't just asymmetrically put push this
to you hey get work on this Cal period
Send I'm done they have to write it down
they have to give you all the
information this itself that step itself
might clear out some obligations they
might give up more importantly however
they see transparently your
workload oh there's five other projects
ahead of me in this
queue and down at the bottom is what
Cal's working on right now so now I know
where my project stands and how much
work Cal actually has now that alone
also is going to clear out more projects
before they actually make it onto your
plate because when they get to this list
and they see the five things you have
they say you know what you're
busy uh I'm not going to bother with you
this now so like half of the incoming
projects disappear when people have to
confront what they are doing to your
list you already have all these things
they're adding something new for the
projects that remain you now have
transparency on their
status so you can say to this person hey
keep an eye on this document I update
this as I work on new things I move them
down to the active and I move everything
else down in the in the waiting queue so
at any time you have a question about
where am I on this project just go to
that shared document and you'll see
where it is you don't have to email me
you don't have to bother me you can see
it now you can now as the as the person
executing this work you can now
comfortably work on one thing at a time
pull in the next thing when it's done
everyone else who's giv you work can see
their status and if they feel guilty
they can take these things off your
plate it's very hard for them to
complain the only complaint they can
give is I think my thing should be a
higher priority than something else and
okay that's a fair argument let them
make it and if they're right you can
swap the priority but they probably
won't make that argument uh the other
argument they can make is I want you to
work at all these at the same time but
there's a clear response to that that's
stupid why would I work at six things
concurrently I need to do these one at a
time it'll be much faster
overall there is a hard logic to what
you're doing here that's hard to push
back back against all right so using
this shared poll list is a fantastic way
if not a little bit deliberately
provocative to shift the way you think
about workload management no you can't
just throw stuff on my plate I'll pull
stuff when I'm ready this is one of many
ways to take a step towards this first
principle of slow productivity work on
fewer things all right let's talk now
about the second principle of slow
productivity which is to work at a
natural pace now in my book I
identify multiple issues with the way we
think about the timing of our work and
there's two issues in particular that I
want to highlight here one we use the
wrong time scales when measuring
productivity so we often think about how
productive was I today and if I wasn't
busy all day long working on lots of
different things and making progress on
lots of different things
I'll say to
myself I was not productive
today however when we study people who
actually produce things of real value
people that we really admire for their
creative knowledge work skills the time
scales at which they're productive are
often much longer we care not what they
did last week we cared what they
produced over the last 20 years I open
my book for example on John MC Now by
any reasonable standard of productivity
the writer John MC is productive he's
written something like 25 or more books
he's won a pullit surprise for one of
them he's been nominated for National
book awards twice he's been one of the
most famed writers for the New Yorker
since
1969 and has been writing regularly for
them ever since he's in his 90s right
now incredibly productive writing career
but I highlight in the book a story
about him working on a particular famous
article of him uh and he told the story
of working on this article and the story
of working on this particular article
involved a fay period where all he did
towards this article was lay on his back
on a picnic table in the backyard of his
house in Princeton New Jersey staring up
at the leaves of a tree just thinking
how am I going to make this article work
so if we zoom in on one of those
particular days in John MC's
illustrative career we say like look how
unproductive he is he's laying there
he's not doing anything he's not
answering emails he's not getting after
it on the typewriter he's not going into
his cold plunge and getting fired up to
make sure that he can handle his notion
powerered 17 context to-do list he laid
on a picnic table didn't do much but
when we zoom out to the period of a year
we said oh that year he produced this
great article on the pine Barons that's
what he was working on and it became an
acclaimed art uh article we zoom out
even more to his whole career we're like
man over two dozen books a politer two
national book award nominations this guy
is productive so we often use the wrong
time scales uh when it comes to
productivity and that forces us to speed
up
unnaturally now why should we care about
it well this is the second thing I
wanted to tell you about what we get
wrong about Pace we work in the Modern
Age The Modern Age of offices in an
incredibly unnatural artificial way we
go to an office 5 days a week we're
supposed to be working hard this is the
dictates of pseudo productivity at least
eight hours each of those days and we do
this week after week all year long this
is not the way that humans are wired to
work I get into this both the paleolog
research uh the anthropological research
um the historical research I pull from a
lot of different threads in my book to
argue hey if we look back at uh the
Paleolithic we have evidence from the
studies of extant hunter gatherer
communities that our work was in the
scale of just an individual day way up
and down a really intense period where
I'm in the middle of a hunt or foraging
but there may be hours of a midday kind
of break because it's hot and then
another intense period over there we we
didn't work hard all day long then we
jump forward to the Neolithic this idea
that we would uh be working all year
round at similar average levels of
intensity also made no sense no we'd
work super hard in the fall the Harvest
but in the winter we barely worked at
all we instead had you know festivals
and other types of things to keep our
sanity when we had no work to do so
there's nothing more unnatural to the
long history of hum kind than just
trying to work all day hard every day
day after day week after
week these two things fit together there
two issues with how we think about the
pacing of work to have a more slower
approach to work means you need a more
natural pace by which I mean a more
varied pace and I give a lot of advice
in the book in this some of this is
about your own expectations taking being
longer on projects being comfortable
with making something the work of the
next 10 years and not the work of the
next 6 months uh but there's a
particular section in this book where I
get super practical about how to break
free from this constant level of
intensity type of work that we do day in
and day out and one idea I had in there
that I want to relay to you now is
to
introduce
seasonality to your knowledge worker job
now seasonality means like in the
Neolithic some Seasons you work harder
than others you get intensity growth
recharging natural give and take that
avoids burnout and allows you to more
fully Embrace The Human Experience now
how do you get
seasonality if let's say you control
your job you're an entrepreneur you run
your own company it's just you maybe and
some uh part-time your solar preneur you
have some part-time assistance it's
mainly you okay you could just actually
take months off
I give the example in the book of my
friend and the entrepreneur and author
Jenny Blake who actually does this he
just builds her annual schedule around
the idea that she takes two months off
every summer turns out no one cares her
clients don't know whatever this is just
the way she works and it's hugely
important for
you but what about if you're not an
entrepreneur what if you work for
another company you can't just take two
months off this is the idea I want to
underscore here quiet quit for a couple
months at a time now quiet quitting was
this whole phenomenon from
2022 that was a big deal online and then
was sort of derided it was a Jin Z
saying you know what I'm going to do the
bare minimum in my work typically this
was motivated by some somewhat
half-baked and Illy articulated uh
conflict theory late stage capitalism
type verbiage of I'm more than just my
labor Etc but there is a interesting
tactical idea underlying quiet quitting
which is you actually control
more than you might realize your
workload you can pull back say no to
more things be more strategic about what
you accept kind of disappear off
people's Radars you can pull back in
your work now the problem with quiet
quitting and this is why this movement
as a whole
faltered if you do this all the time if
you're always quiet quitting it will
eventually be noticed like what are you
doing here uh you're not catching our
attention as someone who's doing
proactive interesting good work we're
not promoting you we're going to fire
you it's not aable but if you quiet quit
for a month or two no one's going to
notice so you can use quiet quitting to
actually induce seasonality in your work
without your boss actually knowing
choose a couple months maybe one month
maybe two in an already quiet
period and pull back come off the radar
don't take on new projects to start then
don't feel guilty this is your winter
for their Neolithic the equivalent of
the winter for our Neolithic ancestors
you're just going to pull back you're
going to
relax and then ramp it back up again and
do some cool stuff and be like oh yeah
Cal did this really cool thing last fall
like he's really on it if you do this
right no one on the outside will notice
but you will feel it big time on the
inside it is a more natural pace to your
work to have this seasonality and it's
going to make everything you do slower
and more sustainable all right we're
ready now to talk about the third and
final principle of slow productivity
which is to obsess over
quality in many ways this principle is
the glue that holds together the other
principles that we've talked about today
it's what makes slow productivity work
there's three things you get when you
begin to obsess over the quality of your
work one the work itself just becomes
more directly
fulfilling humans get great satisfaction
out of doing things at a high level
feeling themselves getting better
getting the rewards of this Improvement
that plays right into our motivational
centers that's going to make your work
much more
fulfilling two if you obsess over the
quality of what you
do this is going to force you
necessarily to slow down to put in place
the type of ideas we talked about in
principle one to put in place the type
of ideas we talked about in principle
two you cannot get really good at
something if you're busy you cannot get
really good at something if you're
pegging your intensity at the red line
every single day so if you make an
obsession with quality at the core of
your approach to work nothing will seem
more well motivated or natural than
trying to slow down and reduce what
you're working
on third as you get better which is what
will happen as you obsess over quality
you will gain more leverage over your
job that leverage will make it easier to
shed extra obligation to gain more
autonomy to slow down the better you get
the more opportunities you have to slow
things down so obsessive over quality is
like the engine or the glue for
everything else we talked about my book
I go into details about how to do this
and why this is important I've got some
really great case studies there but I
just want to mention one specific piece
of advice right
now the key to getting better at
something to improving your quality it's
not just putting in time to practice it
is
also improving your
taste if we really break it down how do
you actually get better at something
well there's this deliberate practice
you have to do where you design
activities that are uh structured to
push you past your comfort level and
make you better at the activity than you
were before the problem is you need a
definition of
better your taste how sophisticated and
refined your taste is is what determines
how fast and effectively you can get
better so what you want to do at the
beginning of a journey to obsess over
quality is to begin to obsess over the
masters of your
field to study the work of people that
do generally what you do really well to
understand what makes it so good to
become a connoisseur of the people who
are much better at what you do than you
are
yourself this is not just about paying
tribute to those who come before you
it's about improving your taste because
as your appreciation for what your field
could be it's
better the speed and effectiveness at
which you're yourself able to improve is
also going to accelerate if you're in
marketing study the great marketers if
you're in computer programming study the
great designers of algorithms and code
if you're in writing study great writers
if you're an artist study great artist
if you're an entrepreneur study the the
more big name entrepreneurs that came
out of nowhere and built Big Industries
how did they did that read their
biographies watch documentaries about
them talk to people who knew them what
did they do differently you want to be a
connoisseur of the great so that you can
make yourself better so it's not just
about getting after it and grinding and
doing hard work you have to actually
improve your ability to identify what is
good if you hope to get closer to that
good
yourself all right so that's the third
and final principle I want to talk about
again this a crash course the basics of
slow productivity one idea for doing
fewer things one idea for working at a
natural pace one idea for obsession over
quality put those three ideas into the
action and you will right away see
improvements in your life uh your
approach to work is going to slow down
your quality is going to go up
everything's going to seem more
sustainable but if you want the true
transformation to the slow productivity
mindset you got to read the book slow
prod slow
productivity available March
2024 get that book for the full detail
piece by piece breakdown of how to do it
but hopefully these ideas get you
started moving away from The Fast and
towards the much more fulfilling and
meaningful
[Music]
slow
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