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.

Few people know, for example, how long it actually took Isaac Newton to develop all the ideas contained in his masterwork, the Principia (over twenty years). They just know that his book, once published, changed science forever. The value of his ideas lives on, while the lazy pace at which they were produced was soon forgotten. Slow productivity supports legacy-building accomplishments but allows them to unfold at a more human speed.

As in the industrial sector, we continued to work all day, every day, without seasonal changes, as any such variation would now be received as nonproductiveness. But unlike in the industrial sector, in this invisible factory we’d constructed for ourselves we didn’t have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits. 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.

When it comes to taming appointments, a good target is to ensure that no more than half of the hours in any single day are dedicated to meetings or calls. 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. As a given day starts to fill up with appointments, it also fills up with protected blocks, making it increasingly harder to add something new. No day can end up with more than half of its time dedicated to meetings or calls. At the same time, however, this approach is more flexible than simply declaring certain hours to be always off limits. As a result, you won’t seem so obviously intransigent to your colleagues.

For now, however, the key observation motivating this advice is that in most knowledge work employment situations, it’s possible to surreptitiously slow down for a handful of months each year without any major consequences. A boss might notice if you’re always deflecting projects, and a client might become concerned if you’re rarely available to take on new work, but a month or two of a relatively slower pace is unlikely to be noticed. This strategy might not be as dramatic as Georgia O’Keeffe’s languid summers at Lake George, but any sort of extended relief of this type, even if surreptitious, can make a major difference in the sustainability of your professional life.

As his brother-in-law clarified in a 2007 NPR interview, when Kerouac told Allen he “wrote” On the Road in three weeks, what he really should have said is that he typed an initial draft of the manuscript in that amount of time. His full effort on the book stretched out over a much longer period: Kerouac worked on the novel in his journals between 1947 and 1949. Then, after his famous typing binge, he spent another six years completing six additional different drafts, trying to find a form that he could persuade a publisher to accept. “Kerouac cultivated this myth that, you know, he was the spontaneous prose man and that everything that he ever put down was never changed,” said Kerouac scholar Paul Marion. “[But] that’s not true. I mean, he was really a supreme craftsman and devoted to writing and the writing process.”

To obsess over quality is to become the Beatles in 1967, walking into EMI Studios with no limits on how long you can spend experimenting with your sitars and multitrack tape machines. To walk out one hundred twenty-nine days later with Sgt. Pepper requires you to traverse a razor’s edge. Obsession requires you to get lost in your head, convinced that you can do just a little bit better given some more time. Greatness requires the ability to subsequently pull yourself out of your self-critical reverie before it’s too late.