I finished this book in March 2025. I recommend this book 7/10.
Why you should read this book:
You should read this book if you are a knowledge worker looking for a solution to your stressful day-to-day. Cal Newport is a college professor who also has a popular podcast. He advocates for the out-of-control knowledge workers who are influenced by outdated ways to measure productivity.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
Create processes and systems to establish boundaries.
Hunter/gathers had plenty of downtime and a few different cycles of work.
Be creative creating win-win, especially if you don't need the money.
📝 My notes and thoughts
P56. In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a larger project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activities as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you're paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished.
P74. To gain this credibility, I recommend, at first, when considering a new project, you estimate how much time it will require and then 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. You don't have to continue pre-scheduling your projects in this manner indefinitely. After you've executed this strategy for a while, you'll develop an instinct for roughly how many commitments you can maintain at any point without overtaxing your time.
P79. But Franklin was happy with this trade of money for time to pursue more meaningful projects. Indeed, a certain joy in this newfound freedom infuses Franklin's correspondence from this period. "I am settling my old accounts and hope soon to be quite a master of my own time," he wrote to a friend in London in 1748 before elaborating:
"I am in a fair way of having no other tasks than such as I shall like to give myself, and of enjoying what I look upon as a great happiness, leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large...on such points as may produce something for the common benefit of mankind, uninterrupted by the little cares and fatigues of business.
P85. I recommend capturing as many categories of regular tasks as possible into an increasingly elaborate autopilot schedule: when you review client requests; when you check in on the contractors updating your website; when you prep for meetings; when you read emails or update project management websites. Containing tasks is not about escaping the small. It's instead about making these efforts as painless as possible. Seeking, as I once put it, that "low-stress sweet spot." (schedule email and Slack checking reminders.)
P88. The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussions that can be used to resolve many different issues. Set aside the same thirty to sixty minutes every afternoon, and advertise this time to your colleagues and clients. Make it clear that you're always available during this period—your door is open. Zoom activated, Slack channels monitored, phone on—to chat about any and all relevant questions or requests. If someone sends you an ambiguous message, instead of letting it instigate yet another stretched-out volley of back-and-forth missives, reply, "Happy to help! Grab me during one of my upcoming office hours, and we'll figure out the details."
P93. In general, people are often too focused on their own problems to care about how you're solving your own. Remember that deliberately provocative suggestion from my New Yorker essay? The one designed to generate head-shaking disbelief from my readers? Not a single person wrote me to say I was going too far. Perhaps it was less radical than I assumed.
P99. This reality should motivate those in this position to energetically embrace the strategies discussed in this chapter. To avoid projects that generate excessive tasks, or to spend more money to outsource busy work, is not some sort of shady hack you hope your employer or clients don't notice. If your job, like so many in the era of pseudo-productivity, leaves it up to you to manage your own load, then you have every right to step up to this challenge with intention and determination. This first principle of slow productivity is not just about more effective way to organize work, it also provides a response for those who feel like their work is corroding away all the other attributes of their existence.
P107. 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. After sending this message, label the project with the time estimate you included in your acknowledgment message so you won't later forget. Notice, when making this estimate, you can look at the estimates on all of your existing projects to help inform a realistic prediction.
P114. The great scientists of the past eras would have found our urgency to be self-defeating and frantic. They were interested in what they produced over the course of their lifetimes, not in any particular short-term stretch. Without a manager looking over their shoulder or clients pestering them about responding to emails, they didn't feel pressure to be maximally busy every day. They were instead comfortable taking longer on projects and adopting a more forgiving and variable rhythm to their work. Curie wasn't unique in her decision to retreat for a summer of reflection and recharging. Galileo enjoyed visits to a villa owned by his friends in the countryside near Padua. Once there, he would take long walks in the hills and enjoy sleeping in a room ingeniously air-conditioned by a series of ducts that carried in cool air from the nearby cave system. And Newton, of course, made much of his extended visit to Lincolnshire, home to the famed apple tree.
P115. 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 numbering exhausting of jittery busyness.
P121. For our purpose, the key observation from Dyble's study is the uneven nature of the foragers' efforts. A busy start to a fishing expedition might also involve a long nap in the boat during the midday doldrums. And exhausting hunting trip might be followed by multiple days waiting out the rain, doing very little.
P133. When it comes to taming appointments, a good target is to ensure that no more than half of the hours in any single day are dedicated to meetings or calls. The simplest way to meet this mark is to declare certain hours to be protected (e.g., no meetings before noon). In some office contexts, of course, it might be hard to get away with strict rules of this type. ("What do you mean you don't take meetings before noon? That's when I'm available!") A subtler alternative way 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. As a given day starts to fill up with appointments, it also fills up with protected blocks, making it increasingly harder to add something new. No day can end up with more than half of this time dedicated to meetings or calls. At the same time, however, this approach is more flexible than simply declaring certain hours to be always off-limits. As a result, you won't seem so obviously intransigent to your colleagues.
P141. You have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload. The tactics of quiet quitters are straightforward. They suggest, for example, that you don't volunteer for extra work, actually shout down at five o'clock, be comfortable saying no, and dilute an expectation of being constantly accessible over email and chat. As numerous quiet quitters report, these little changes can make a big difference in the psychological impact of your workload. This got me thinking. What if we stopped positioning quiet quitting as a general response to the "meaninglessness of work" and instead saw it as a more specific tactic to achieve seasonality? What if, for example, you decided to quit a single season each year: maybe July and August or that distracted period between Thanksgiving and the New Year? You wouldn't make a big deal about this decision. You would just, for lack of a better word, quietly implement it before returning without fanfare to a more normal pace.
P163. David Lynch would order a large chocolate milkshake at a Bob's Big Boy restaurant. He would then leverage the resulting sugar rush to extract idea after idea from his subconscious, often scrawling them onto napkins. N. C. Wyeth would wake up at 5:00 a.m. to chop wood for over an hour before hiking up to his studio on a hill. Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire largely at night, catching up on her sleep during the day—the quiet darkness putting her into the right mindset to craft her gothic tale. When living near the French country village of Ain, Gertrude Stein would wake at 10:00 a.m., drink a cup of coffee, and then take a bath in an oversized tub. After getting dressed, she would drive through the surrounding countryside with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, looking for an auspicious place to work. Once such a site was found, Stein would settle onto a camp stool with a pencil and pad of paper and begin to write. My advice here has two parts. First, form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important. Second, in doing so, ensure your rituals are sufficiently striking to effectively shift your mental state into something more supportive of your goals. The second principle of productivity asks that you work at a more natural pace.
P170. "I had to put myself in an environment and a position to win as a singer-songwriter," she recalled thinking, and the way to do that was to be cheap. If she didn't cost the label much money, Jewel reasoned, they would be less likely to drop her if she wasn't an immediate hit. This in turn would provide her the freedom needed to sharpen her craft and pursue something new and exceptional with her music. "I was just doing it to put myself in a position to make my art first," she later explained. "To not leverage my art unduly." She adopted a motto for her intentional approach: "Hardwood grows slowly."
P173. There's a reason why this principle is presented last: it's the glue that holds the practice of slow productivity together. Doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are both absolutely necessary components of this philosophy, but if those earlier principles are implemented on their own, without accompanying obsession with quality, they might serve only to fray your relationship to work overtime—casting your professional efforts as an imposition that you must tame. It's in the obsession over what you're producing that slowness can transcend its role as just one more strategy on the arid battlegrounds of work-life wars and become a necessary imperative—an engine that drives a meaningful professional life.
P175. The third and final principle of slow productivity asks that you obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life. The goal here is not about becoming really good for the sake of being really good at your job (though this is nice). As I'll argue next, you should be focused on the quality of what you produce because quality turns out to be connected in unexpected ways to our desire to escape pseudo-productivity and embrace something slower. (Results + Retention)
Comments