Slow Productivity: My Top 9 Takeaways

NYT bestseller Cal Newport's new book: "Do Fewer Things. Work at a Natural Pace. Obsess over Quality." (vol 146)

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Today’s topic.

We all struggle with how to get more, and more important, work done in the same or fewer hours, whether that be tackling climate change or attending our kid’s never-ending track and field meet. 🤣

So…

I’m trying something new for this issue — Sharing nine bullets that I distilled from reading this book by NYT bestselling author and Georgetown University computer science professor Cal Newport:

📗 Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

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1. Ignore email. Mostly. 🖥️

He cites a study of 10,000+ knowledge workers who checked their email every six minutes on average.

Yikes.

Imagine what you could do if you instead checked email 2-4x a day.

2. Change your time scale for goal setting. 📅

In addition to quarterly or annual goals, think about your 5-10 year plan.

“The magic of [meaningful work] becomes apparent over longer timescales.”

Or as Bill Gates puts it, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

3. Avoid the illusion of other people’s easy success. 💪

Isaac Newton’s seminal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica changed math and physics forever. But it took him 20 years to write.

Jack Kerouac said he wrote the Beat classic On the Road in just three weeks, typing 100 words per minute on a 120-foot roll of paper. But that was just the first draft. The entire process lasted from 1949 to 1959.

4. Create space to think bigger. 🌌

Intense focus is great. But downtime is also key to incubating world-changing ideas.

Marie Curie was on the cusp of history-making breakthroughs in radioactivity. Then, she and her family took an extended vacation to the French countryside to “climb hills, visit grottoes, and bathe in rivers.” Work could wait.

In addition to his worldview-shattering insights in astronomy, Galileo “had a full private life, studying literature and poetry, attending the theater regularly and continuing to play the lute to a high standard.”

5. Make it harder for people to give you work to do. 🙏

I’m partly kidding, but…

When people try to delegate (dump?) work to us, the book urges us to create a little friction while also making the outcomes more productive.

Here’s how:

1. Ask the other person to specify their requirements in detail and provide all the background materials you’ll need in an easy-to-access format.

2. Tell them that you have X number of other projects ahead of theirs, so you estimate an X-day turnaround time, which might be longer than they expect.

Sometimes either of these two could cause the person to retract their request.

6. One for you, one for me. 🌴

To balance work and play (family, fun, etc.), consider this:

• Create an equal block of focus time for every new appointment added to your calendar.

• For every week of intensity working overtime, create a week of vacation of half-time work.

And do so weeks or months in advance so these rest periods are held sacred.

7. Change your scenery. 🌄

The same old working environment might produce the same old thinking.

Consider new environments for certain kinds of work.

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote Hamilton at the “Morris-Jumel Mansion, the oldest surviving house in Manhattan, and former HQ for George Washington during the Battle of Harlem Heights and home of Aaron Burr during his VP years.”

For me, my special “thinking places” are a tiny home Airbnb in the Blue Ridge mountains with no running water, and the Gothic Reading Room at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.

8. Produce less, charge more. 📈

If demand for your product or service is growing, you could scale your team and each member’s output.

Or you could maintain a sane pace, increase your prices, create more flexibility in your (team’s) life, and earn the same or more revenue.

Taking this to the extreme, consider the work of these one-person company empire builders:

• Jenny Blake — Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Paul Jarvis — Company Of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business

9. Drink a warm beer in the morning at Oxford University. 🚫

Clearly, I’m just joking here.

But that’s what J.R.R. Tolkien did with C.S. Lewis and other writers in the 1930s.

The real benefit of these sessions was “forming a group of like-minded individuals, all looking to improve what they’re doing, and providing a shortcut to improving their taste, an instantaneous upgrade to the standard of quality they’re pursuing.”

Hmmm, sounds like what we’re doing at EFI with our climate CEO peer groups. 😉

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That’s all, y’all.

Make it a great week because it’s usually a choice.

~ Chris

Dr. Chris Wedding: Founder @ Entrepreneurs for Impact — North America’s top CEO peer group for growth-stage climate tech, with 70+ entrepreneurs and investors representing over $20B of market value for climate solutions

P.S. If you like these concepts, you’ll love his other book, which was a game changer for me: 📘 Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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(As these photos show, I’m an actual human writing this newsletter. Not AI. 🤖)