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designates my notes. / designates important. / designates very important.

Thoughts

As I begin, early in chapter 1 right now, I have a feeling in the back of my mind that “knowledge work” is mostly bullshit. With some exceptions, like scientific experiments that produce actual useful results (think materials science) most knowledge work is moving around numbers in a spreadsheet or entertaining others. I’m sure there are some, maybe even a decent amount, of “knowledge work”, but I can’t shake the feeling that a great many more are borderline useless and who’s jobs exist only because everyone must do something for their wage and everyone needs a wage… so knowledge work (or make-work) is born.

I’m also reminded of the term “producer” when it comes to things like movie and music productions (there is that word again). The so-called producers are really financiers most of the time. The actual musicians or movie crew are the ones that actually produce the final product. I think this probably stems from some unconscious understanding that the financiers are little more than leeches but they want to tell themselves a comforting story that they are actually responsible for the production. “Without my money, none of this would even get off the ground!”

As the book progresses, I’m near the beginning of Chapter 4 now, I generally agree with the idea presented: slow and steady work will produce higher quality results than some frantic flailing that appears as busyness. When you look at the hour-by-hour or even week-by-week work of some of the greatest mind to have contributed to history, they might actually seem lackadaisical. When you zoom out a bit to the year-by-year and the entirety of a lifetime, the fruits of their labor become apparent.

I am reminded of parable of the tortoise and the hare.

Exceptional Quotes

• Once isolated, Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements—focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—are obviously not restricted to food in any fundamental sense. ^67e512

• After Blake began fantasizing about “winning the lottery or burning it all down,” she realized she had to simplify if she had any hope of achieving a sustainable and meaningful professional life. She slashed her income streams and reduced her staff to only three part-time employees. She now works, on average, twenty hours a week and takes off two full months each year for vacation. It’s likely, of course, that Blake would be making more money if she hustled to support more missions. When you’re enjoying twenty-hour workweeks, however, it’s hard to care too much about such possibilities.

• In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities.

• Strange is powerful, even if it’s ugly. When seeking out where you work, be wary of the overly familiar.

• A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled on top of frantic work.

• In his book, Jarvis asks that you consider an alternative. What if after your reputation spread, instead of growing the business, you increased your hourly rate to $100? You could now maintain your same $100,000 a year salary while working only twenty-five weeks a year—creating a working life with a head-turning amount of freedom. It would of course be nice to earn a seven-figure payday ten years from now, but given all the stress and hustle required to build a business of the necessary size, it’s not clear that you would really end up in a more remarkable place than the scenario in which you’re right away able to reduce your work by half.

Table of Contents

• 00: Introduction

Part 1 - Foundations

• 01: The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-productivity
• 02: A Slower Alternative

Part 2 - Principles

• 03: Do Fewer Things
• 04: Work at A Natural Pace
• 05: Obsess Over Quality
• Conclusion

· Introduction

page 17:

• 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.

Part 1 - Foundations

· Chapter 01 - The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-productivity

page 23:

• Early uses of the term (productivity) can be traced back to agriculture, where its meaning is straightforward. For a farmer, the productivity of a given parcel of land can be measured by the amount of food the land produces.

• As the Industrial Revolution began to emanate outward from Britain in the eighteenth century, early capitalists adapted similar notions of productivity from farm fields to their mills and factories. As with growing crops, the key idea was to measure the amount of output produced for a given amount of input and then experiment with different processes for improving this value. Farmers care about bushels per acre, while factory owners care about automobiles produced per paid hour of labor.

page 24:

• But then the knowledge sector emerged as a major force in the mid- twentieth century, and this profitable dependence on crisp, quantitative, formal notions of productivity all but vanished. There was, as it turns out, a good reason for this abandonment: the old notions of productivity that worked so well in farming and manufacturing didn’t seem to apply to this new style of cognitive work.

page 27:

• PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY - The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

page 28:

• The cause of this deterioration was the arrival during this decade of networked computers in the office. In a setting where activity provides a proxy for productivity, the introduction of tools like email (and, later, Slack) that make it possible to visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort inevitably led to more and more of the average knowledge worker’s day being dedicated to talking about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through incessant electronic messaging.

· Chapter 02 - A Slower Alternative

page 37:

• Once isolated, Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements—focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—are obviously not restricted to food in any fundamental sense.

• As the journalist Carl Honoré documents in his 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, these second-wave movements include Slow Cities, which also started in Italy (where it’s called Cittaslow), and focuses on making cities more pedestrian-centric, supportive of local business, and, in a general sense, more neighborly. They also include Slow Medicine, which promotes the holistic care of people as opposed to focusing only on disease, and Slow Schooling, which attempts to free elementary school students from the pressures of high-stakes testing and competitive tracking. More recently, the Slow Media movement has emerged to promote more sustainable and higher-quality alternatives to digital clickbait, and the term Slow Cinema is increasingly used to describe realistic, largely nonnarrative movies that reward extended attention with deeper insight into the human condition. ^e5fece

page 40:

• KNOWLEDGE WORK (GENERAL DEFINITION) - The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.

Part 2 - Principles

· Chapter 03 - Do Fewer Things

page 51:

• 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.

page 65:

• After Blake began fantasizing about “winning the lottery or burning it all down,” she realized she had to simplify if she had any hope of achieving a sustainable and meaningful professional life. She slashed her income streams and reduced her staff to only three part-time employees. She now works, on average, twenty hours a week and takes off two full months each year for vacation. It’s likely, of course, that Blake would be making more money if she hustled to support more missions. When you’re enjoying twenty-hour workweeks, however, it’s hard to care too much about such possibilities.

page 66:

• A crude approach to accomplishing this goal is to adopt the persona of someone who is eccentric and unresponsive, eventually driving your colleagues to redirect their requests and assignments elsewhere. In my book Deep Work, I pointed toward the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman as a canonical example of this approach. In Deep Work, I highlighted the following excerpt from a 1981 interview Feynman, then a professor at Caltech, gave to the BBC show Horizon:

• To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time . . . it needs a lot of concentration . . . if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everybody I don’t do anything.

page 76:

• autopilot schedules provide an effective means to contain tasks. Instead of setting regular times each week for completing school assignments, you can set times for accomplishing specific categories of regularly occurring tasks. A freelancer, for example, might schedule sending invoices for Monday morning, while a professor might schedule reviewing grant reports for Fridays, right after lunch. Once you get used to accomplishing a specific type of task at the same times on the same days, the overhead required for their execution plummets.

page 79:

• If every task generates its own meeting, you’ll end up trading a crowded inbox for a calendar crowded with meetings —a fate that is arguably just as dire.

• The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussions that can be used to resolve many different issues.

• strategy that I call docket-clearing meetings. Like office hours, these meetings happen at the same times on the same days, each week. Unlike office hours, they’re attended by your entire team. During these sessions, your team churns through any pending tasks that require collaboration or clarification. The group moves through the tasks one at a time, figuring out for each what exactly needs to be done, who is working on it, and what information they need from others. An easy way to organize these sessions is to maintain a shared document of tasks to discuss. Team members can add items to the list as they come up in between meetings. One thirty-minute docket-clearing session can save a team from hours of highly distracting inbox checking and back- and-forth emailing.

page 90:

• In a push-based process, each stage pushes work onward to the next as soon as it’s done. In a pull-based process, by contrast, each stage pulls in new work only when it’s ready for it.

page 95:

• We often believe those we work with care only about getting results as fast as possible. But this isn’t true. Often what they really want is the ability to hand something off and not have to worry about whether or not it will be accomplished. If they trust you, they’ll give you latitude to finish things on your own terms. Relief, in other words, trumps expediency.

· Chapter 04 - Work at A Natural Pace

page 101:

• In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities.

page 102:

• 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.

page 106:

• “The group engaged entirely in foraging spent forty to fifty per cent of daylight hours at leisure,” Dyble told me, when I asked him to summarize his team’s results, “versus more like thirty per cent for those who engage entirely in farming.” His data validates Lee’s claim that hunter-gatherers enjoy more leisure time than agriculturalists, though perhaps not to the same extreme as what was originally reported.

• Missing from these high-level numbers, however, is an equally important observation: how this leisure time was distributed throughout the day. As Dyble explained, while the farmers engaged in “monotonous, continuous work,” the pace of the foragers’ schedules was more varied, with long respites interspersed throughout their daily efforts. “Hunting trips required a long hike through the forest, so you’d be out all day, but you’d have breaks,” Dyble told me. “With something like fishing, there are spikes, ups and downs . . . only a small per cent of their time is spent actually fishing.”

page 116:

• The simplest way to meet this mark is to declare certain hours to be protected (e.g., no meetings before noon). In some office contexts, of course, it might be hard to get away with strict rules of this type. (“What do you mean you don’t take meetings before noon? That’s when I’m available!”) A subtler alternative is to instead implement a “one for you, one for me” strategy. Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an equal amount of time that day to protect. If I schedule thirty minutes for a call on Tuesday, I’ll also find another thirty minutes that day to block off on my calendar as protected for myself.

page 122:

• If we’re willing to push aside all of this digital posturing, at the core of quiet quitting is a pragmatic observation: you have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload. The tactics of quiet quitters are straightforward. They suggest, for example, that you don’t volunteer for extra work, actually shut down at five o’clock, be comfortable saying no, and dilute an expectation of being constantly accessible over email and chat. As numerous quiet quitters report, these little changes can make a big difference on the psychological impact of your workload.

• Years ago, when my beard wasn’t grey, when I got one of my first jobs (and certainly my first post-college “real” job) I told everyone my plan was to be a slacker. I was late my very first day. I left early as well. I set the tone, from the very beginning, that I was a slacker. I got my work done, but then I was gone. When something important came up though, I would pull through in the clutch. The boss remembers this. Mark, the slacker, did the impossible and worked late to get the job done. Paul my always dependable co-worker did the same thing and worked late. There was no acknowledgement for his work. He was dependable. His extra work was expected. I was the slacker. My extra work was a surprising breath of fresh air. This worked swimmingly well. Then I quit and went to live on the beach. I was, after all, a slacker.

page 138:

• Strange is powerful, even if it’s ugly. When seeking out where you work, be wary of the overly familiar.

· Chapter 05 - Obsess Over Quality

page 146:

• Hardwood grows slowly

page 148:

• 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.

page 152:

• A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled on top of frantic work.

page 153:

• I first encountered Jarvis when his editor sent me a copy of his 2019 book, Company of One. I was taken by the boldness of its premise: don’t scale your business. If you’re fortunate enough for your entrepreneurial endeavors to begin to succeed, he argues, leverage this success to gain more freedom instead of more revenue. This dynamic is captured well by a simplified thought experiment. Imagine that you charge $50 an hour as a web designer. Assuming forty hours of work a week, fifty weeks a year, this works out to a $100,000 annual salary. Now imagine that after a few years at this level, your skills expand and the demand for your services increases. The standard move would be to scale your business. If you hired multiple designers, you could grow it to the point where it was bringing in millions in annual revenue and yielding you a salary that was well above $100,000 a year. If you continued this growth, you might even end up one day with an enterprise valuable enough to sell for a healthy seven-figure payday.

page 154:

• In his book, Jarvis asks that you consider an alternative. What if after your reputation spread, instead of growing the business, you increased your hourly rate to $100? You could now maintain your same $100,000 a year salary while working only twenty-five weeks a year—creating a working life with a head-turning amount of freedom. It would of course be nice to earn a seven-figure payday ten years from now, but given all the stress and hustle required to build a business of the necessary size, it’s not clear that you would really end up in a more remarkable place than the scenario in which you’re right away able to reduce your work by half.

page 162:

• Understand your own field, to be sure, but also focus on what’s great about other domains.

• Book of Five Rings, A - Water

page 172:

• Simply by placing yourself in a situation where there exists pressure to succeed, even if moderate, can provide an important accelerant in your quest for quality.

Conclusion

page 181:

• As he explained in Draft No. 4, he would begin by copying all of his observations from his notebooks, and transcribing all of his tape-recorded interviews, onto fresh pages, pounded out on an Underwood 5 manual typewriter. “The note-typing could take many weeks,” he explains, “but it collected everything in one legible place, and it ran all the raw material in some concentration through the mind.”

• Once he completed this step, McPhee would be confronted with a stack of neatly typed pages, many containing multiple unrelated scraps of thoughts or observations, separated by a few lines of white space. To make sense of this collection, he would code each section with a short description in the margin, indicating the relevant story component it covered. A standard long-form article might include notes on around thirty different components. Encounters with the Archdruid, McPhee’s epic two-part profile of the environmentalist David Brower, required thirty-six.

• McPhee would photocopy these pages, and then use a pair of scissors to cut out each self-contained chunk of notes into its own “sliver” of paper. (When McPhee eventually bought a personal computer in the 1980s and began using an electronic system to organize his notes, he referred to the machine as a “five-thousand- dollar pair of scissors.”) Each sliver was placed in a plain manila folder that corresponded to its story component. The result was a stack of folders, each dedicated to a single subject, filled with scraps of paper that collectively contained every relevant fact, quote, or observation.

page 182;

• Next, McPhee would label a three-by-five index card for each of these story components, and spread them on a sheet of plywood propped up between two sawhorses—“an essential part of my office furniture in those years”—so he could physically move them around in search of a workable structure for his story. Sometimes the right conceptual architecture would come to him in just a few hours. Sometimes he had to let the board sit there for days, returning to it occasionally. There was no rushing this stage of the process: he couldn’t write until the order of cards made sense.

• Once McPhee was finally pleased with his structure, he could turn, at long last, to putting words on the page. When writing, he would deal with one story component at a time, tackling them in the order in which they were arranged on the plywood sheet. When writing about a specific component, he would remove all the relevant slivers of notes from the corresponding folder and lay them out ladderlike on a card table set up next to his Underwood 5. “The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated just the material I had to deal with in a given day or week,” McPhee explains. “It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.”

page 185:

• John McPhee marveled at the idea that anyone might think of him as being unusually hardworking:

• And if somebody says to me, “You’re a prolific writer”—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

page 186:

• This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there