philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality. — *location: 153* ^ref-49092 --- this philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything. — *location: 157* ^ref-27647 --- “In most cases, people don’t measure the productivity of knowledge workers,” he explained. “And when we do, we do it in really silly ways, like how many papers do academics produce, regardless of quality. We are still in the quite early stages.” Davenport has written or edited twenty-five books. He told me that Thinking for a Living was the worst selling of them all. — *location: 215* ^ref-20440 --- As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work. — *location: 275* ^ref-29796 --- PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. — *location: 286* ^ref-56211 --- KNOWLEDGE WORK (GENERAL DEFINITION) The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort. This definition still captures standard office-bound employees, such as computer programmers, marketers, accountants, executives, and so on. But it now also captures many other cognitive professions that have been around longer than the Age of Cubicles. By this definition, for example, writers are knowledge workers, as are philosophers, scientists, musicians, playwrights, and artists. — *location: 474* ^ref-34108 --- SLOW PRODUCTIVITY A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality. — *location: 507* ^ref-13704 --- 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. — *location: 627* ^ref-57361 --- How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation. If you turn down a Zoom meeting invitation, there’s a social-capital cost, as you’re causing some mild harm to a colleague and potentially signaling yourself to be uncooperative or a loafer. But, if you feel sufficiently stressed about your workload, this cost might become acceptable: you feel confident that you’re close to becoming unsustainably busy, and this provides psychological cover to skip the Zoom. You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party. — *location: 739* ^ref-27734 --- 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. — *location: 902* ^ref-54014 --- 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. 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. Going forward, it becomes sufficient to just track your current project tally, and reject new work once you pass your limit—making adjustments as needed, of course, for unusually busy periods. — *location: 885* ^ref-36280 --- 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. — *location: 838* ^ref-56090 --- There’s a calibrated steadiness to working on just one major initiative a day. Real progress accrues, while anxiety is subdued. This pace might seem slow in the moment, but zooming out to consider the results that eventually accrue over many months reveals the narrowness of this concern. — *location: 912* ^ref-18161 --- 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. — *location: 1392* ^ref-26271 --- 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. — *location: 1399* ^ref-13230 --- Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it. — *location: 1407* ^ref-65090 --- Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence: colonizing as much of our time, from evenings to weekends to vacations, as we could bear, and leaving little recourse beyond burnout or demotion or quitting when it became too much. Our estrangement from the rhythms of work that dominated the first two hundred eighty thousand years of our species’ existence was now complete. — *location: 1494* ^ref-3628 --- A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself. — *location: 1605* ^ref-56394 --- apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. — *location: 1613* ^ref-17521 >Double the timeline of every plan; halve the tasks for every day --- 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. — *location: 2101* ^ref-49321 --- 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. — *location: 2433* ^ref-59521 --- one of the more approachable strategies for betting on yourself: temporarily dedicating significant amounts of free time to the project in question. The stakes here are modest: If you fail to reach the quality level that you seek, the main consequence is that during a limited period you’ve lost time you could have dedicated to more rewarding (or restful) activities. But this cost is sufficiently annoying to motivate increased attention toward your efforts. — *location: 2506* ^ref-55071 --- But when deployed in moderation, dedicated to a specific project for a temporary period, this act of giving up something meaningful in pursuit of higher quality can become an effective bet on yourself — *location: 2515* ^ref-57660 ---