Takeaways From Cal Newport on the Tim Ferriss podcast

The way we should think about dealing with technologies in our life, but also in our organizations and our culture. So at multiple scales, it’s hard to predict in advance always the impact a new tool is going to have.

I always give the example of going back and watching Steve Jobs’ keynote speech in 2007 when he’s introducing the iPhone. He doesn’t even get to the internet features until 30 minutes into the speech. I mean, he was just jazzed that your iPod was going to be on the same thing as your phone and you wouldn’t have to switch back and forth. He had no way of predicting eight years later. You’re going to have, for example, a teenage mental health crisis.

Techno-selectionism says, be willing to actually aggressively step backwards. Be willing to say, this looks interesting. Let me try this out. Oh, no. No, no, this is not matching what’s really important to me, so you’re out of here. So being more willing to both experiment and reject after the fact, to move away from these narratives of techno-progressivism that says new technology is good and there are bumps along the way, but you can’t put this genie back in the box. And I say, we can build all sorts of new boxes. And that’s probably the right way to go forward. So in my own life, for example, what I used to be really known for was the fact that I never signed up for traditional social media.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

You can’t be busy and frenetic and bouncing off the walls with 100 projects if you’re obsessed about doing something really well. It’s incompatible with that. Now, doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you’re pulling something together, but it is incompatible with being busy. Like Chris Nolan, the director, doesn’t even own a smartphone. He is just, “I’m making Oppenheimer, and that’s what I’m doing for the next three years. And then when I’m done, I’m going to go away for six months and just read. That’s what I do.”

I cannot be on YouTube because when you obsess over quality, two things happen. One, you can’t be busy because that gets in the way of actually getting really good at something. And then two.If you’re doing something really well, that actually gives you the autonomy to push the other junk out of your life and slow down even more. As you get better at something, the more say you get over the way your life unfolds.

The glue is quality first”

Obsess over quality. Yes, because the other two principles are to do fewer things and work at a natural pace. However, if you’re only adhering to those two principles, you’ve set up a sort of adversarial relationship with work in general. It’s as if all you’re thinking about is how to do less. You see work as an adversary. You want more variety in your pacing. You’re just trying to reduce or change work. If that’s all you’re doing, you’re building up a negative attitude towards work, which I believe is one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now in, let’s say, elite culture. It’s an outright rejection of work itself.

Like, any drive to do things is a capitalist construction. And the real thing to do is to do nothing. But that doesn’t last. And the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing. They’re striving really hard to ensure that their substacks and books about doing nothing will have a large audience. They’re giving talks on it.

You can’t just focus on the doing less part. You need to obsess over quality. And that’s where you’re able to still fulfill that human drive to create. And that’s where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living.

“Don’t get started”

[Kris: unconventional advice these days]

It’s really hard to get a good idea. So, take your time. Cultivating a good idea takes years. You have to write, you’re going to dedicate a lot of your life to it. So, don’t get started if you can hold back until you’re really, really sure about it.

People say, “Yeah, but I worry that I’m just going to procrastinate forever.” In some sense, it’s like, well, maybe you’re not meant to do this type of work. But the solution to that is not just to go, tweet this, do this video, or jump over this.

Don’t start using generative AI, or look for a quick thing that you can connect. You shouldn’t want to get started until you can’t help but get started. I think that’s frustrating for a lot of the internet generation because it takes a really long time.

To say I am a writer is something that I think many folks right now, who are in any form of content, would have a lot of trouble saying, “I am X.” They might say, “I’m a YouTuber,” but usually it’s like 15 hyphens. And therein lie many opportunities and also many temptations to be resisted.

It makes me think of Warren Buffett and the phrase, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” This is like, you don’t need to make 100,000 investments. You don’t need to be a day trader. Wait for the fat pitch. Figure out what the fat pitch looks like.

Figure out what your zone of genius is. What is your advantage?

How do you figure out what to work on?

I think you have two options and you can do both. One option is to have a way of test driving ideas. Like with a newsletter or blog to test drive it. And the internet makes that easier than it was 20 years ago.

Then the other option, and this is what I think of as the MFA option, is you have to develop really good taste.

These MFA programs, which are creative writing graduate programs, they don’t really teach you. It’s not instructive. Like here’s how you do paragraphs or here’s techniques you didn’t know, but it increases your taste, meaning your ability to recognize what’s good and what’s not and what’s possible with good things.

Slow productivity

There was no hustle culture. That’s the interesting thing. So when you go back and study people producing things of real value using their brain, they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard, but they didn’t hustle. And they didn’t work 10-hour days, day after day. They didn’t work all out year round. They didn’t push, push, push until this thing was done.

It was a more natural variation. They had less on their plate at the same time, and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality. That’s the Slow Productivity approach. It still produces stuff that you’re really proud of. But it doesn’t burn you out. And it doesn’t leave you in this weird out of sync balance where work is taking up almost all of your time.

Can we take an example, like Newton and the Principia, and apply it to someone who has a 21st-century corporate, semi-remote hybrid work job for a big company? How do we isolate the principle and then make it pragmatic for people who are not traditional knowledge workers, but modern knowledge workers?

If we start with the first principle, “do fewer things,” what this really means for someone with a normal corporate job is to start being very explicit about workload management. Everyone does workload management, but we tend to do it in really inefficient ways because this is left to the individual in the knowledge work context in most jobs.

People send you emails and you just say, yeah, sure, I’ll do it. So what most people do, for example, is they wait until they feel really stressed. And then they say, all right, I have psychological cover to say no. Because I’m so overwhelmed that I feel justified in taking the social capital hit for saying no. It’s a terrible way to manage your workload. So you can be much more explicit about how you manage your workload. Here’s how many slots I have. Oh, I filled them. I mean, this is really sort of four-hour workweek style.

Let’s get in and write the systems for how we manage workload. You could go to a pull-based system instead of a push-based system. You can do reverse to-do list. There’s a lot of things you can do to make sure that the amount of work on your plate doesn’t get too large. In a way that’s fully compatible. Work at a natural pace. While there’s organizational things you can do here so that you’re not at full intensity, but you can also just do this yourself. You can titrate your workload. I go easier in the summer than I do in the rest of the year. And I can do this in a way that my employer doesn’t notice. You know, it’s pretty subtle in like what projects you take on or don’t take on.

Selling the idea of slow productivity in place of pseudo-productivity

We will make more money if we don’t pile 15 things on their plate because more of their time is going to be working on value-producing objectives and not talking about objectives that they don’t have time to actually get to. There’s a useful alignment happening here between clients and entrepreneurs, between employers and employees.

Slow Productivity produces good stuff. It doesn’t just make the workers happier. Doesn’t just make you happier. You produce better stuff. I mean, your company has more profit. Your clients are happier. You can charge more for the services you offer. So it’s not zero sum. It’s more win-win than anything else.

I think people don’t realize how chaotic and haphazard and impromptu the way they’re organizing their work is. How chaotic it really is, right? I don’t think people realize that. What we really did, and by we, I mean like the whole knowledge sector, is in the 1950s, when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector with really large companies, with a large number of people working in offices.

There wasn’t a clear idea, how do we measure how someone is productive? Because all the ideas about that came from manufacturing and agriculture, and they didn’t apply.

In manufacturing, you could tabulate the labor hours per Model T produced, and in agriculture, you could count bushels produced per acre of land. You had numbers, and so you could say, oh, the assembly line increases this number, so let’s do that instead, or this Norfolk crop rotation method increases the bushels, so let’s do that instead. Knowledge work couldn’t…

Have any number like that because the jobs were more diverse and the organizational systems were autonomous. It’s just up to you to figure out how to organize yourself. There was no organizational-wide way of assigning and monitoring work that you could test and see, what if we change this? Is it better? So what happened was we invented this idea called pseudo-productivity.

Which was we will use activity that’s visible as a proxy for useful effort. So it’s just, hey, you’re doing something that’s good. Doing more things is better than less. That’s where the sort of notion of sort of busyness is good.

Once we got mobile computing, the internet, networks, and email, and I could work on my laptop, you can’t combine that with pseudo-productivity. If more activity is better than less, and you have endless work that you can do in any place, you just spiral into constant work and guilt.

This is the thing I think people miss: they believe they understand what productivity means and have many opinions about it. My argument is that they don’t have a sensible definition. We just have this notion that activity is somehow good, which is clearly not the case, especially for non-entry level knowledge work. Busyness doesn’t produce high value. So, people too often think of something like Slow Productivity as a willingness to trade off economic output for psychological sustainability. They’re willing to trade off making more money for feeling better about themselves. But that’s not what it is. What you’re doing now is crazy. You’re building Model Ts with the lights off. It’s a terrible way to work. It’s like, no, let’s get a real definition of productivity. One that is very sustainable, but also produces good stuff. So, I think people believe they’re stepping away from something that works, but it’s hard. It just gets it done, but it’s hard on me. The thing that we’re doing now doesn’t work. It’s not a sensible way of connecting human brains to add value to information. It’s not a good way of working. So almost any alternative that’s intentional is going to be better than what we have. So we might as well choose one that’s also sustainable and makes us feel good.

What productivity means to Cal

You take a craft that you think is important and that you could be good at and that’s interesting to you. And then you really put on your blinders for a decade. Get really good at something important. Everything else will work itself out. Like his [Steve Martin] exact quote was, be so good they can’t ignore you. If you do that. Everything else has a way of working out.

A bad sign: when you think you have to rush to compete

If you feel like you have to rush to compete in something or race in some way, chances are you don’t have a great sustainable competitive advantage. I would say almost certainly you don’t have any sustainable competitive advantage. In which case, if you telescope out and just ask yourself, “What does this look like? What does my life look like in one year, three years, five years?” It’s going to break. Something’s going to break. It’s just a question of when it breaks. So you want to preemptively think through how to prevent that.

A specific example I admire is John Grisham. I once compared him to Michael Crichton. I found an old interview of Michael Crichton when he was 27 years old and wrote an essay comparing him to John Grisham. You can see two different approaches to the same job, which is writing popular genre fiction. Crichton was all about being busy. This interview was after The Andromeda Strain had come out. He was full of ambitions. He wanted to direct, do movies, had five books in development, was writing screenplays, and had just moved out to LA. He had a huge plan.

John Grisham, on the other hand, simplified his life as soon as his second book, The Firm, did well. His first book, A Time to Kill, was a flop when it first came out. But he said, “I’m going to write two books. If one of the two works, then I’ll keep doing this.” The Firm did really well. As soon as he had some autonomy, he simplified his life to the point where, at some point in the 2000s, he didn’t need to hire a new assistant when his longtime assistant retired. He said, “No one bothers me. My agent and my editor know how to contact me. I don’t do anything else. I write my book once a year. That’s it. I spend a lot of time doing stuff in my town.” He was a commissioner of the little league and did a lot of things unrelated to work.

He slowed down and said, “I just want to write. That’s all I do. I don’t need to have TV shows. I don’t need to write the screenplays for my books when they get made into things. I don’t need to create a six-part series and direct my own shows. I’m just going to write. I’m getting paid a lot of money. That’s what I want to do. I want to simplify.” So Grisham has always stood out to me. I know a couple of people who know him, and they confirm this. He writes one book a year. You’re not going to hear from him until it’s done. Then you get him for about four weeks, and he’ll do some publicity. But people know who he is. He has the leverage to do nothing.

Embracing slow productivity

Here’s the heuristic that maybe ties a lot of this together. At least for professional stuff, in the end, it’s craft. Craft is what matters. Respecting craft, developing craft, applying craft, finding meaning in craft. Just keep watching on repeat, “Jiro dreams of sushi,” right? Just go back and watch that like once a month, because the more you think about craft, the more I find fulfillment.

Craft is where I impact the world. Craft is where I gain autonomy over my professional life. It can provide for the people I care about and give interesting opportunities in my life. It all comes back down to craft. You slow down. Your timeframes become much longer. Psychologically, you gain so much resilience.

Maybe you couple that, if I’m going to add a second heuristic, with ignoring the internet. It’s a crazy-making machine. Don’t rely on metrics you have to look at on a day-to-day basis.

That’s the two things. Do those two things. It’s night or day. Like what your life is like is night or day.

Intentional productivity involves having a consistent, coherent philosophy for how I’m going to do my work. This philosophy should be more sophisticated than simply being busy. Being busy is often people’s default because it prevents self-recrimination and assures them that they are trying. However, it’s important to be more intentional.

Not everyone needs to be busy all the time. If you’re an investment banker or trying to become a law partner, a very intentional, coherent, and reasonable productivity plan might involve working all the time. This is specifically what works in that world. However, for most people, when they’re intentional, they realize that 80% of what they’re doing is just trying to generate smoke from friction, but there’s no fire. They’re just trying to be busy because they don’t know what else to do. Slowness becomes almost always inevitable once you actually start to be intentional about what you’re really doing. You start to question what really works, what matters, and what doesn’t. Adopt a blend of relentlessness and patience.

Take your time. The good things will wait because it’s uncrowded. They’re really important things. Those domains are typically very, very uncrowded.

A clever insight about writing

Slow Productivity is actually kind of hidden all around us if we pause to look at the people we most respect. All i do as a writer basically is come up with two word terms for things that widely exist and everyone already knows about. “Deep work” already exists i just put a name to it. “Digital minimalism”. I’m just putting a name to a philosophy. That’s my whole secret.

And I’ve said this before to people about pragmatic nonfiction writing. The goal is not to try to teach someone something completely new they didn’t know about. The goal is just to try to help people articulate something they already know deep in their gut is true. They just don’t have a framework or terminology for it. You know, don’t try to convince people of new things. Explain to them what they already know in a way that lets them take better action.

That’s the secret to nonfiction. Prescriptive nonfiction writing is you’re not really teaching people something new.

Techno-selectionism