Slow productivity is an emerging topic of thought we’ve been talking about more and more frequently and I want to get into it with this core idea. All right let’s give some background to where the concept of slow productivity come from what motivated it we are in a moment right now in which there is a popular and visible push back against the general notion of productivity and by productivity I mean just general drive to try to get more things done.
What was productivity for our ancient ancestors ?
In other words as human beings
What’s is in natural ?
when it comes to activity ?
there’s a basic question but we need an answer to this question of what is natural if we’re going to try to get back to something that’s more attuned to the human condition and so I went back and did some work try to understand the rhythms of activity of our Paleolithic ancestors we obviously done have direct observations about this here’s basically you see our best guess at what activity was like for the bulk of our species existence you will be doing skilled and important work basically ever day mainly focused on food acquisition and preparation as well as child rearing you will be you know these extant tribes they studied if you where gathering herbs you hard a huge expert understanding the various plant and their various uses it’s very expert work or and if you hunting was a very skilled activity when you don’t have very sophisticated weapons like rifles right so you are doing skilled but important work.
Three problem of chronic overload
1-brain short circuit
2-over head spiral
3-reientless pace
Three ideas to achieve slow productivity
1-do fewer things
2-work at natural race
3-opsess over quality
Cal newport’s summary
What’s solution not to discard productivity and say do less and let’s celebrate that but to get more specific and say let’s redefine productivity we will call it slow productivity we are going to build this very intentionally from the ground up to get our work lives back aligned with our ancient wiring .
Do fewer things do this work at a natural pace obsess over quality that I believe is that proper response to our current rightly pointed out as problematic state of overload that is how we take back control of activity in our life and keep it fulfilling keep it meaning full keep options open but also get away from all of the issues we are currently facing in our word chronic overload.
I think your workload and ideal world would be below that level of chronic overload you have few enough things that you committed to doing on your plate that you are not suffering from the short circuiting of your planning circuit you're not suffering from overhead spirals and you do not feel like you have no option but to have a relentless pace for your feeling every minute of your day we need to do many fewer things and if you work yourself.
If you're a freelancer run your own company aggressively titrate how many things you take on at the same time you're not a computer processor where you want your pipeline of instructions to execute to be full so you never miss a particular tick you're a human you're not wired to do that we need to do many fewer things what if you work for someone else well i think we need to completely rethink how work is assigned in the workplace this should be transparent how much work is this person doing what's on their plate so we can all see it and then.
We can have very clear understandings of what is reasonable and if i see you know jesse has a fair number of things on his plate i can't put something else on it it's on me to figure out something pops up it needs to get done at some point i can't just say jesse handle this i have to figure out where does this go untill someone has room for it, it can't just go on their plate the answer here is probably going to be external systems things that need to get done go into external systems.
Where they bring with them the information they need to be accomplished and have clear statuses and priorities and then individuals pull work out of the system as new slots open this might sound like it's a pain i don't care if it's a pain it's what we're wired to do keep my load reasonable and i'll pull in new stuff when i'm done with what's on my plate don't just give it all to me and you're going to short circuit my barin.
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