👉 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/197773418-slow-productivity
Page 12: Core Definition
The author defines “Slow Productivity” as a philosophy for knowledge work based on three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and focusing on quality.
SLOW PRODUCTIVITY
A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:
- Do fewer things.
- Work at a natural pace.
- Obsess over quality.
Page 30: The Broader Slow Movement
The author references Carl Honoré’s book “In Praise of Slowness” and describes various branches of the “slow movement” including Slow Cities, Slow Medicine, Slow Schooling, Slow Media, and Slow Cinema—all advocating for a less frenetic approach to life and work.
As the journalist Carl Honoré documents in his 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, these second-wave movements include Slow Cities, which also started in Italy (where it’s called Cittaslow), and focuses on making cities more pedestrian-centric, supportive of local business, and, in a general sense, more neighborly. They also include Slow Medicine, which promotes the holistic care of people as opposed to focusing only on disease, and Slow Schooling, which attempts to free elementary school students from the pressures of high-stakes testing and competitive tracking. More recently, the Slow Media movement has emerged to promote more sustainable and higher-quality alternatives to digital clickbait, and the term Slow Cinema is increasingly used to describe realistic, largely nonnarrative movies that reward extended attention with deeper insight into the human condition. “The slow movement was first seen as an idea for a few people who liked to eat and drink well,” explained the mayor of Petrini’s hometown of Bra. “But now it has become a much broader cultural discussion about the benefits of doing things in a more human, less frenetic manner.”
Page 35: The Goal of Slow Productivity
The author states that the goal of Slow Productivity is to create a more humane and sustainable approach to work that becomes a source of meaning rather than overwhelm.
My goal is to offer a more humane and sustainable way to integrate professional efforts into a life well lived. To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.
Page 42: Principle #1 - Do Fewer Things
The first principle of Slow Productivity emphasizes reducing obligations to focus more deeply on projects that truly matter.
PRINCIPLE #1: DO FEWER THINGS
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.
Page 48: Knowledge Work vs. Factory Work
The author contrasts factory work with knowledge work, noting that increasing workload in knowledge work can actually reduce both quantity and quality of output.
In a factory, pushing employees to work longer shifts might be directly more profitable. In knowledge work, by contrast, pushing employees into larger workloads can decrease both the quantity and quality of what they produce.
Page 50: Pseudo-productivity
The author acknowledges that simply recognizing the inefficiency of overwork isn’t enough to transform one’s professional life because the knowledge sector still operates on “pseudo-productivity.”
This recognition, however, is not enough on its own to support the transformation of your professional life. The knowledge sector remains defined by the demands of pseudo-productivity.
Page 56: Scheduling Reality
The author recommends a practical approach to new projects: estimate the time required and actually schedule it on your calendar to ensure you have the capacity to take it on.
To gain this credibility, I recommend, at first, 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.
Page 57: One Project Per Day
For daily work management, the author recommends focusing on at most one significant project per day, while still handling routine tasks and meetings.
We’ve arrived at the smallest scale of work that we’ll consider for our limiting strategies: the projects you decide to make progress on during the current day. My recommendation here is simple: 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 (we’ll talk more about these smaller tasks in the upcoming proposition about containing the small). But when it comes to expending efforts on important, bigger initiatives, stay focused on just one target per day.
Page 72: Pseudo-productivity and Parents
The author describes how pseudo-productivity particularly impacts parents (especially mothers), creating an ongoing battle between work and family demands with no clear boundaries.
Under a pseudo-productivity regime, by contrast, such demands are more implicit and self-reinforced. You’re judged on how much total work you visibly tackle from a never-ending supply of available tasks, but no one is going to tell you specifically how much is enough—that’s up to you. Good luck! This reality requires parents—and more specifically moms, who often shoulder more of these household burdens than their partners do—to renegotiate for themselves, day after day, the battle between the demands of employment and family. This is a process that unfolds as a thousand cutting decisions and compromises, each of which seemingly disappoints someone, until you find yourself writing at 4:00 a.m. next to a precarious pile of laundry. In a particularly heartbreaking (and distressingly familiar) anecdote from Overwhelmed, Schulte’s daughter complains about how much time her mom spends on the computer. She tells Schulte that when she grows up, she wants to be a teacher, explaining, “because then at least I’ll be able to spend time with my kids.
Page 82: Arbitrary Nature of Grinding
The second principle of Slow Productivity suggests that constant grinding without relief is arbitrary and often self-imposed through our own anxieties rather than external demands.
The second principle of slow productivity argues that these famous scientists were onto something. Our exhausting tendency to grind without relief, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, is more arbitrary than we recognize. It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.
Page 82 (continued): Alternative Approach
The author presents an alternative approach where important work is given more breathing room and allowed to unfold at varying intensities over time, which can be more sustainable and effective.
These scientists point toward an alternative approach to scheduling work in which we give our important efforts more breathing room, allowing them to take longer and unfold with intensity levels that vary over time. This approach is not only more sustainable and humane, it’s also arguably the better long-term strategy for producing results that matter.
Page 83: Principle #2 - Work at a Natural Pace
The second principle of Slow Productivity advocates for not rushing important work and allowing it to develop naturally with varying intensity.
PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE
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.
Page 87: Historical Work Patterns
The author contrasts modern work patterns with historical ones, noting how the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture introduced continuous monotonous work that was previously unknown to humans.
This side-by-side comparison underscores the degree to which our experience of work has transformed during the recent past of our species. Our shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture—the Neolithic Revolution—only really picked up speed somewhere around twelve thousand years ago. By the time of the Roman Empire, foraging had almost completely disappeared from the human story. This reorientation toward agriculture threw most of humanity into a state similar to that of the rice-farming Agta, grappling with something new: the continuous monotony of unvarying work, all day long, day after day.
Page 94: Poor Time Estimation
The author discusses how humans are poor at estimating time for cognitive tasks, as we’re wired for tangible efforts and tend to imagine best-case timelines that feel good in the moment but lead to scrambling later.
great at estimating the time required for cognitive endeavors. We’re wired to understand the demands of tangible efforts, like crafting a hand ax, or gathering edible plants. When it comes to planning pursuits for which we lack physical intuition, however, we’re guessing more than we realize, leading us to gravitate toward best-case scenarios for how long things might take. We seem to seek the thrill that comes from imagining a wildly ambitious timeline during our planning: “Wow, if I could finish four chapters this fall, I’d really be ahead of schedule!” It feels good in the moment but sets us up for scrambling and disappointment in the days that follow.
Page 95: One for You, One for Me Strategy
The author suggests balancing scheduled meetings with equal amounts of protected time for yourself on the same day.
A subtler alternative is to instead implement a “one for you, one for me” strategy. Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an equal amount of time that day to protect. If I schedule thirty minutes for a call on Tuesday, I’ll also find another thirty minutes that day to block off on my calendar as protected for myself.
Page 106: Work in Cycles
The author describes Basecamp’s practice of working in 6-8 week “cycles” followed by 2-week “cooldown” periods, emphasizing the importance of respecting these recovery periods.
Work in Cycles The software development company Basecamp is known for experimenting with innovative management practices. This is perhaps not surprising given that its cofounder and current CEO, Jason Fried, once published a book titled It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. One of Basecamp’s more striking policies is the consolidation of work into “cycles.” Each such cycle lasts from six to eight weeks. During those weeks, teams focus on clear and urgent goals. Crucially, each cycle is then followed by a two-week “cooldown” period in which employees can recharge while fixing small issues and deciding what to tackle next. “It’s sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cooldown period to fit in more work,” explains the Basecamp employee handbook. “But the goal is to resist this temptation.”
Page 121: Principle #3 - Obsess Over Quality
The third principle of Slow Productivity emphasizes focusing on the quality of work, which can provide leverage for greater freedom in the long term.
PRINCIPLE #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.
Page 127: Quality as Leverage
The author shares examples of how obsessing over quality can provide leverage for greater control over one’s schedule, and how this doesn’t necessarily require becoming a superstar but rather developing rare and valuable skills.
Both Jewel and Paul Jarvis discovered a similar lesson in their careers. The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities. What makes Jarvis’s story so heartening is its demonstration that these benefits of “obsessing” over quality don’t necessarily require that you dedicate your entire life to the blinkered pursuit of superstardom. Jarvis didn’t sell fifteen million records; he instead became, over time, good at core skills that were both rare and valuable in the particular field in which he worked. But this was enough, when leveraged properly, to enable significantly more simplicity in his professional life. We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.
Page 140: Progress vs. Perfection
The author provides a strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism: give yourself enough time to create something great but not unlimited time, and focus on making progress rather than perfection.
Your goal is instead reduced to knocking the metaphorical ball back over the net with enough force for the game to proceed. Here we find as good a general strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism as I’ve seen: Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about, but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection.