When Henry Ford switched his factory in Highland Park, Michigan, to this method in 1913, the labor-hours required to produce a Model T dropped from 12.5 to around 1.5.
A simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity.
If you can see me in my office—or, if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly—then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something.
As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work. It’s why we gather in office buildings using the same forty-hour workweeks originally developed for limiting the physical fatigue of factory labor, and why we feel guilty about ignoring our inboxes, or experience internalized pressure to volunteer or “perform busyness” when we see the boss is nearby. In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness, we also gravitate away from deeper efforts toward shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list.
PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.
3 Principles of Slow Productivity
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.
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.
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.
A coach named Laura, for example, reported that she simplified her practice by reducing her offerings down to a few key services. “Since figuring this out,” she told me, “my brain is calmer, the quality of my interactions is stronger, and my work quality is higher.” As a result of this higher-quality work, she now makes the same amount of money working fewer hours.
A teacher named Aurelia, fed up with the overload that’s endemic in K–12 education, quietly adopted a clear rule: “I no longer do work that is not compensated and clearly expected as part of my job.”
Overload is not fundamental to knowledge work. It’s instead largely a side effect of the crude ways in which we self-manage our work volume.
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.
It’s hard to specify the optimal number of missions, but generally, less is better than more. There’s a romance to focusing on a single pursuit, but this level of simplicity is typically accessible only to the most purely creative fields—Hemingway at Key West, banging out his morning pages on his Corona typewriter. Two or three missions are more tractable and still quite minimalist.
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.
Feynman, then a professor at Caltech, gave to the BBC show Horizon:
"To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time . . . it needs a lot of concentration . . . if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everybody I don’t do anything."
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 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 I say “projects,” I mean something substantial enough to require multiple sessions to complete. (Strategies for containing smaller commitments, which we call “tasks,” were discussed in the preceding proposition.)
When a new project is pushed toward you, place it in the holding-pen section of your list. There is no bound to the size of your holding tank.
The active position of the list, by contrast, should be limited to three projects at most.
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.
Here’s an example of an acknowledgment message:
Hi, Hasini, I wanted to follow up on our conversation from earlier this morning and confirm that I’ll take charge of updating the client section of our website. What I’ll need from you before getting started is a list of what elements you think the new section needs (or a link to another company’s site that you think does it right). At the moment, I have eleven other projects queued up ahead of this. Based on my commitments to these existing projects, my best guess is that I’ll be able to get to this in roughly four weeks after I get the needed information from you. I will, of course, update you if this estimate changes.
– Cal
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.
DOUBLE YOUR PROJECT TIMELINES
By deploying a blanket policy of doubling these initial estimates, you can counter this instinct toward unjustified optimism. The result: plans that can be completed at a more leisurely pace.
Apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.
A good target is to ensure that no more than half of the hours in any single day are dedicated to meetings or calls.
