Requires:
- Doing fewer things
- Working at a natural pace
- Obsessing over quality
Extracted from: https://tim.blog/2022/02/04/cal-newport-transcript/
The human brain is wired to — it’s good at making a plan for executing something that you think is important, and it makes you feel good when you complete that plan. This is critical to humans, why we’re different than a lot of animals. We can actually come up with a plan to do something, and feel motivation to do it, and feel good when we actually — we need to fix the fence. (When) we fixed the fence, the cattle can’t get out. We feel really good.
But if you put too much on people’s plates so that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of ascent to complete than you can easily conceive actually all getting done, you short circuit that drive, just like your drive for hunger is really important, but if you eat a huge amount of junk food, it short circuits the drive, and you end up unhealthy.
When we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily imagine how it’s going to get done, it makes us really unhappy because we’re short circuiting a cognitive drive here, and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed, but it doesn’t feel good.
So our solution to this type of overload — we have too much on our plate, in work and in our life admin as well. Our solution has been to use Fast Productivity, so fast productivity or tactics and systems for increasing the amount of the things you finish on the scale of days and weeks. So how do I get more stuff — this is what all productivity software is about, lower friction, easier access to information, take out seven steps in the process of getting this meeting scheduled. We want to maximize the number of things we can execute on the scale of days and weeks.
My emerging concept of slow productivity says shift that scale up to years — months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years. It completely changes the game in a way that becomes very compatible with the human brain, because now, suddenly, while I’m going to try to do a lot less, the stuff I’m doing, I’m doing it on a larger timescale, so maybe I’m working a lot on it this week, and then I go a month without doing it at all, and I have a hard day today and an off day tomorrow. You have the seasonality, up-and-down rhythms, which is a better fit for the human brain. You get rid of the sense of overload because if you want to produce a good book in the next two years, that’s a very different set of initiatives than I want to do as many writerly related promotional things as possible this week.
That latter could be a real source of stress and overload. The former can be a real source of fulfillment, and you tend to produce things of higher value because when you’re just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale of days or weeks. It diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needing to actually do the things that move the needle or that you’re proud of.