It’s day 28th of 90 days daily writing challenge. I have started this challenge to improve my English writing and thinking skills to an extent where I can write high quality articles effortlessly.
Today I came across the concept of slow productivity through Cal Newport youtube channel, the author of the book Deep Work. With this article I am keeping track of whatever I have understood about this concept in my own words.
What’s do slow productivity mean?
Before diving into the slow productivity, it would be good to know in the first place what’s do we mean by productivity itself. Cal Newport referred productivity as “The general drive to get more things done”. The problem with the teaching on how to be highly productive is it encourages one to do too much of things at a time which in most cases lead to burn out. So in order to deal with this problem Cal Newport has suggested the concept of slow productivity. Slow productivity refers to doing less thing at our natural pace where we are more obsessed over quality rather than quantity. In simple terms we should do fewer things in longer period of time like instead of doing them in days or weeks, we should extend it to months and year with the goal to have lesser work of high quality instead of too much work of lacking quality.
What happens when we try to do too much things at a time?
When we try to do too much things at a time we reach a stage known as Chronic overload. Chronic overload is a stage where we have a large list of things to do and we have no idea how we gonna get them done. This leads to three major problem, the first one being Brain short circuiting which comes from the chaos of not knowing how to accomplish higher number of task in very short period of time, the second one is overhead spiral that occurs when we commit ourselves to too many tasks which takes over our whole schedule, the last one is relentless pace which is having no time to rest or relax due to the need to constantly engage in the overloaded works all throughout the day.
How to overcome Chronic Overload through Slow Productivity?
There’s a three step solution to this problem of chronic overload. The first step is to do many fewer things i.e. to do reasonable amount of task as per one’s capability. The second step is to work at natural pace i.e embracing seasonality by doing more work at certain month while less at other and also adjusting the time scale of accomplishments where instead of worrying about what’s been achieved in days or week, worrying about achievements over months and years. The third step is to obsess over quality i.e. to do fewer things in order to get better at them and reach a level where one becomes the best at what they do.
My experience writing this article
Writing this article was bit overhead for me because there’s a lot of concepts that I found bit complex and haven’t understood them yet but tried my best to put them in my own words. I will go through the video again and again unless I am satisfied with my understanding of the slow productivity concept so there will be re editing too in near future.
Time it took me to finish this article
It took me approximately 2 hours to finish this article. While writing this article, I was using the explanation video too as a reference and tried to put whatever I have understood from it into my own words that’s why it took some extra time and effort to come up with this article.