all right so over the last 15 years of being a productivity nerd I have learned a huge amount about how to get stuff done but there is one mistake that most people including me still make when we're trying to be more productive and that is trying to do too many things now so many of us don't make progress towards our goals because our energy is just being pulled in way too many directions which causes us to burn out before we make any real progress and then we feel bad because we're always at risk of falling short of achieving the things that we actually want in life but in this absolutely incredible book slow productivity Cal Newport explains how we can stop making this mistake and how we can understand the art of accomplishment without burnout now if you haven't heard of cal cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of eight books including most famously so good they can't ignore you deep work and digital minimalism and his latest book slow productivity has three core principles that are super interesting and that we're going to discuss in this episode of book club the ongoing Series where for the last four years I've been distilling And discussing highlights and learnings from some of my favorite books and if you're new here hi my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and I'm also Al the author of this book feel-good productivity and this book is about how to do more of the things that matter to us in a way that's enjoyable meaningful and sustainable so it goes really well with the stuff that we're going to be talking about in this video okay so before we talk about these three core principles let's talk about the foundations here and Cal basically makes the case that how we think about productivity is pretty flawed cuz you know back in the day productivity was really about like how many widgets a factory could produce per day or per month or whatever the thing might be it was about like how much can you do but then when we switched into knowledge work and suddenly productivity became about the work we can produce with our minds we don't really have a good way to measure that and because we don't have a good way to measure that we started using activity I.E how many hours you're working at your computer typing away as a rough proxy for productivity and this led to a lot of bad things Cal calls this pseudo productivity this is why you know people feel burned out because they feel as if they have to be on the computers for 8 hours a day or like the dude who's working 12 hours a day in the office is some how more productive than the person who's doing 6 hours even though really the person doing 12 hours might be wasting their time doing a load of crap but they look as if they're being more productive rather than actually necessarily being productive and Cal basically argues that this is one of the root causes of the burnout that we're seeing the increased like people not enjoying their jobs the feeling that you have to be on all the time have to work weekends and evenings Zoom fatigue all of this stuff broadly stems from this idea that activity is the core metric of productivity and what he basically argues for in the book is a slow Revolution and that's why the title is slow productivity so similar to how this fast food and slow food fast food is like McDonald's and slow food is where it's organic and nice and more sustainable and stuff there's fast fashion which is like H&M and Zara and then there's slow fashion Which is higher quality stuff it's probably a bit more expensive to be honest it's probably more sustainable similarly he argues that we want to have this slow Revolution when it comes to productivity and what he does in the book which is really interesting is that he looks at famously productive knowledge workers from back in the day so people like Galileo and ISAC Newton and Jane Austin these people that we wouldn't traditionally think of as knowledge workers in the modern era but they they were the knowledge workers from back in the day and they had so much autonomy over how they would spend their time so what C is basically trying to do here is he's trying to figure out like okay if you have all the freedom in the world and you want to create like masterpieces that span centuries that we're still reading today what were the sorts of rituals and habits and processes that these famous people from like hundreds of years ago how did they produce all these amazing works and based on doing an a study of these and telling some really cool stories in the book which you should definitely read he teases Out Three core principles and that is what we're going to be talking about in this video next oh quick thing if you're watching this before the 30th of June 2024 you might like to check out a completely free quarterly alignment webinar that I'm hosting completely freely for everyone in my audience it is happening 3: to 5:00 p.m. UK time on Sunday the 30th of June 2024 the idea is we're going to spend 2 hours together I'm going to be facilitating here on a zoom call with like hopefully hundreds if not maybe thousands of people from all around the world we're going to be spending some time reflecting on the last 3 months and setting goals I.E Quests for the next 3 months it is completely free anyone from anywhere in the world with an internet connection you are very welcome to join there is a link down below if you want to check it out all right let's start with principle number one and to illustrate this Cal tells the story of Jane Austin who is one of the most famous writers in history and wrote a bunch of apparently literary masterpieces in the 1800s now one version of how Jane Austin wrote her stuff was that she was super busy she was like a socialite and in between sort of seeing visitors and doing loads of stuff she would take out these little pieces of paper and she would like Scribble notes on them and then that's how she wrote her books and that's kind of one popular explanation for Jane Austin which seems kind of nice it's like whoo you can make time for writing even amidst A busy life but then if you look at the story in a bit more detail it turns out most of that was just myth and was somewhat fabricated by Jane Austin's like nephew or something who wrote this decades after she died and primary sources who were actually around at the time basically say that the four or 5e period in which Austin was able to produce her bangers was when her family retired to a country house in the middle of nowhere reduced all of their social obligations to basically zero and she had expansive amounts of free time to just focus on her work so on the one hand we have like this very busy like busy Jane Austin who's like doing all these things and like juggling all these different things and is able to on the side somehow produce these absolute masterpieces but that's a bit of a myth really it's when she had large expanses of free time that she was able to do her best work and so writes this lesson that doing less can enable better results defies our contemporary bias towards activity based on the belief that doing more keeps her options open and generates more opportunities for reward but recall that busy Jane Austin was neither happy nor producing memorable work while unburdened Jane Austin writing contently at quiet CH Chon Cottage transformed English literature indeed simplifying is so important to our emerging philosophy that I'll enshrine it here as the official first principle of slow productivity and so Prin principle number one is to 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 I think it's worth reading the followup paragraph as well so the request made here of course is easier explained than actually implemented easier said than done in the context of your professional life busyness likely seems unavoidable clients demand attention and managers drown you in requests even if you're a solar preneur and full controller of your days the need for income might undermine your intention to reduce your workload Jane Austin's long writing sessions at her desk in Chon Cottage can seem a fantastic Mirage for the knowledge worker facing an endlessly full inbox crucially he says and this is sort of like the philosophy of the whole book my goal in this chapter is to persuade you not to give up on this aspirational vision of engineered Simplicity it is possible in most modern work settings if you're willing to be creative and perhaps at times even radical in how you think about selecting and organizing your work in the pages ahead I'll detail my case for why a commitment to Simplicity can be just as beneficial and achievable in modern knowledge work as it was for Austin's Victorian error fiction writing and then detail some concrete tactics for implementing this first principle of slow productivity okay so for me the most important kind of mental shift in this section was the idea of overhead tax like let's say at work you've got three different projects you're working on Project one project two and project number three the fun stuff and the interesting stuff and the stuff that creates value is sort of the deep work the focus time you spend actually working on the project but the stuff that creates no value but has to be done anyway is the overhead tax and the overhead tax is the extra time that you spend communicating about the project sending emails about it arranging meetings about it updating your team on how the project is going figuring out who are the stakeholders to get input on the project and you have to do that for every new project that you take on that means if you're doing three projects at once you're going to get three lots of overhead TXS which means you're probably not going to have much time to focus on the projects whereas if you're doing fewer things at once I.E following the first principle of slow productivity you are focusing on I'm just doing one project at a time and I'm going to forget about the other stuff for now and then ideally once you're done with that project you move on to project number two and it's Associated overhead tax and then ideally once you're done with project number two you move on to project number three and it's Associated overhead tax and then you might be thinking okay that's easier said than done and so so to that I would say firstly read the book because he's got like eight different tangible practical things that you can actually apply to your corporate job or whatever your situation is to actually apply this in real life the one that I find most interesting um is essentially the idea of something similar to what I've talked about in the past the energy Investment Portfolio what you want to do is essentially you want to make it more visible what you're working on so you have for example a backlog and then you have active projects and you make like a Google doc or an oce page or whatever with this and so active project might be I don't know book first draft PowerPoint about thing X and I don't know committee about thing Y and then you've got a backlog which is that thing that thing that thing that thing that thing that thing and that thing and you make this list visible to your manager your boss and all of your co-workers to be like hey you know I like to manage my time effectively I keep I'm very meticulous about what I take on and what I don't this is all the backlog of things that I need to work on at some point and these are the things I'm actively working on now when you make this visible if a new request comes in from your manager then you say to them okay you know I'll have a look at my list you know these are the active projects I'm working on I'll estimate that these will take I don't know another four weeks to complete and then this is the backlog I've got and so you know this new project of yours that you've asked me to do over here um you know I estimate that I'll probably be able to get round to it in about 3 months time and then the boss is either going to say like yeah 3 months is fine cool just let me know and then they feel profound sense of relief because the boss basically just wants to get rid of their own stress they want to offload this project to someone and you know I'm the boss of my team so I can relate to this I just want to know that someone will get R to it at some point or if it's something particularly urgent the boss might say no no this really needs to be done in the next 2 weeks to which you then say okay sure I can get this done in the next 2 weeks but which of my projects would you rather I de prioritize to make this happen in the next two weeks then the boss really has to think and they say either actually you know what never mind just sort of get around to it whenever you want or they'll say actually you know what committee why that's actually not completely necessary we actually don't need you for that so we can just delete that project and now you're operating on this principle of being able to do fewer things a lot of workers a lot of knowledge workers sort of have the idea that that my boss is looking for any reason to fire me and so like I couldn't possibly say no to this thing because my boss is like you know if I just if if I say no then they might fire me and blah blah blah blah blah blah but really now that I've run a company and I have like 22 people working for me it's actually really hard to find and hold on to people who are good and so if you if you are good if you're good at your job you actually have way more power than you think the boss is not looking for a reason to fire you they're going to do whatever they can to keep you around because it's such an absolute nightmare to find new people and the only thing is that like there's still a thing in the back of the boss's mind of like what are they actually doing like I've given them that project but it hasn't been done yet and I haven't heard an update and like what's what's going on the uncertainty for a boss is the most painful thing so if you can make your list of projects visible and say to them hey this is what I'm doing this is what I'm working on it gives the boss a profound sense of relief and it means you can genuinely app apply this first principle of slow productivity which is to do fewer things at a time you maintain an active projects list you maintain a backlog and you make this visible to your entire team now with all the spare time that you're definitely going to unlock from doing these fewer things you might like to spend it learning and a great way to do that is by using brilliant who are the sponsor of today's video brilliant is an amazing interactive platform where you can learn maths programming and Ai and they've got thousands of lessons and their focus is on learning by doing rather than just consuming I've been using brilliant for the last 5 years and they've been supporting the channel during that time as well they've got a really nice first principles approach to learning which helps you build understanding from the ground up and it's all crafted by an award-winning team of teachers researchers and Prof professionals from funky places like MIT Caltech Microsoft Google and way more cool places and really brilliant helps you build your critical thinking skills through problem solving rather than just memorizing things so while you're building real knowledge on specific topics you're also becoming a better thinker I personally think learning every day is one of the most important things you can do especially if you do care about productivity and the new courses on programming are also particularly good which will help you get familiar with python and start building programs on day one with their built-in drag and drop editor if any of that sounds good and you'd like to try out everything brilliant has to offer completely for free then head over to brilliant.org abdal or click the link in the video description and that will give you a completely free 30-day trial and you'll also get 20% off the annual premium subscription so thank you so much brilliant for sponsoring this video all right now we come on to principle number two and there's a bunch of stories in here but I think there's an interesting one about kernus so Cernic's revolutionary ideas about planetary motion for example were sparked by a new commentary on to me published in 1496 which the youngest one ofer read when he was 23 years old it wasn't until 1510 however that kernus got round to writing down his theories in a working draft that he passed around to friends so 14 years later it then took another three decades before he finally published his Masterwork on the Revolutions of the celestial spheres for a broader audience the emergence of physics was similarly languid Galileo famously used his pulse to time swinging chandeliers in the Cathedral of Pisa in 1584 but he didn't get round to conducting his follow-up experiments which led to the identification of the laws of pendular motion until 16002 so so again 15 years later Isaac Newton began thinking seriously about gravity in the summer of 1655 after he fled the plague in Cambridge it took him until 1670 before he felt he really had a handle on the inverse Square law so 15 years and another 15 years or so before he finally published his Paradigm shifting theories Cal writes the second principle of Sol productivity argues that these famous scientists were on to something our exhausting tendency to grind without relief hour after hour day after day month after month is more arbitrary than we recognize it's true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands but they don't always dictate the details of our daily schedule it's often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest Taskmaster I love that it's our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest Taskmaster we suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness in the 16th century Galileo's professional life was more leisurely and less intense than that of the average 21st century knowledge worker yet he still managed to change the course of human intellectual history and that's where we get to principle number two which is to 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 Now cal goes on to argue that essentially This Modern Obsession we have with like working at hours a day 40 hours a week and stuff is really a relic of the Industrial Revolution and factories and stuff actually from most of human history humans have operated on fairly seasonal and variable intensity kind of modes of operation all these famous scientists people back in the day who had lots of autonomy over their schedule the modern construct of the of the 8 hour work day the 40-hour work week is kind of arbitrary and is not really conducive for a most important work and again there's like a dozen different practical tactics that are in the book so you should definitely read the book but one thing that I really took away from this was the idea of embracing seasonality um meaning that like just being a little bit slower during the summer months or not taking on too many projects during the Christmas break for example so that's seasonality on kind of a long-term scale but also embracing seasonality on a more micros scale so for example what I've done is I now have Mondays and Fridays that are completely devoid of any kind of work obligations any meetings anything like that so I have one day a week which is sort of my intense filming day I have one day a week which is for meetings and I have all the rest of the time to work at a more natural pace where I can let ideas simmer and sort of Tinker away in the background and be working on my next book and thinking about the IDE years for that and before reading slow productivity and really appreciating these principles I kind of felt like ah you know I really should be really should be working on this new book I want to sort of carve some time out to really focus on it but now I'm like actually eh it's probably fine like I don't need to work on this book right now I can allow it to sort of percolate in the background because I want the next book to also be really good kind of like the first one by the way if you haven't checked out my first book feel good productivity you should check it out um I want the book to be really good and so really good things take time and working at a natural pace is better for us it's more sustainable it's more Humane and it often leads to better work than trying to hurridly Sprint towards something in this age of overwhelm and this era of busyness oh quick heads up by the way if you would like to read summaries of Cal newport's other books then you should definitely check out short form there will be an affiliate link with a 20% discount in the video description they're not sponsoring this but that is an affiliate link I've been using them for years it's an amazing service that summarizes over a thousand non-fiction books and you might like to also check out the brand new podcast guides feature which is pretty sick so if you like books you like learning and you want to do it in a time efficient way you should definitely check out short form and then finally we come to principle number three which is to 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 now I think it's worth emphasizing here he's got an interlude about perfectionism because obsessing over quality can be like if you take that too much to heart you might end up thinking that everything has to be perfect and you have to spend way too long work on the thing this is a delicate Balancing Act you know he tells tells a couple of stories and this interlude about perfectionism but I really like this this is a good General strategy for balancing Obsession and perfectionism give yourself enough time to produce something great but not unlimited time focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece progress is what matters not Perfection now I found that this bit of the book reminded me of some advice that I heard from a friend and mentor Brendan bashard which is that often the difference between good and great is an extra 2 to four weeks of effort and we think about this a lot when it comes to stuff within the business where you know if we release a course or something it's like it's it's pretty good it's good enough but if we were to give it an extra month it would that would be the final layer of Polish we wouldn't want to give it an extra year because on the you know the grand scheme of creating online courses which are somewhat meaningless the grand scheme of things like an extra year is probably a bit too long and trying to do it in an extra 2 or 3 days would result in a lot of this busyness and stress and stuff which also isn't conducive to good work so it's really this delicate Balancing Act which is going to vary depending on what industry you're in and what work you do around how do you balance quality with the idea of done is better than perfect some people I know who are like really really perfectionistic and could do with obsessing less about quality some people I know are not very perfectionistic at all and could do a little bit more obsessing over quality the key thing that I personally took away from the book and and reading this stuff is recognizing that it takes that good things take time and that's not necessarily even time in terms of like it takes 10 years to produce something good but it's just time to focus on the thing and that means saying no to other shorter term obligations one thing that I'm you know this is very much a first world problem right now but it's like the thing I want to do is just keep on making good YouTube videos and keep on WR writing books but now that I've released my book you know I'm now getting all of these like speaking gigs where companies are paying me literally tens of thousands of dollars to fly business or first class to give a talk at their conference which is often in the US now thinking about like oh I get to fly to America and go to New York and give a talk for insert big company here and they're going to pay me 30 grand to do that and then I get to fly back home and that that would take me like 4 days of my time bloody hell that's more money than I would have earned in a year working as a doctor it's like those sorts of opportunities are coming up but those sorts of opportunities take me away from the work that I really care about doing which is writing good books and making good YouTube videos and everyone has this balance to some degree of like do you want to take the short-term commercial opportunities or do you want to focus on your craft now obviously if you have bills to pay and stuff your circumstances might mean that you have to lean more one way than another but I found myself saying yes to a lot of these speaking gigs because I was l by the short-term siren Call of oh there's all this money up for grabs and then I found that like ah you know I'm not actually giving myself any time to write which is the thing I want to do cuz writing creates YouTube videos and creates books but to give myself the time to write means saying no to extra money because I don't get paid to write more words until a book comes out way further down the line and books don't make that much money anyway so I found that reading this chapter was super super interesting and quite inspiring in a way of just helping me appreciate that okay this is actually a difficult balancing act all of us whatever work we're doing have to balance this idea of quality with actually getting the thing done saying no to things that make money in the short term versus giving ourselves the time and space to potentially focus on something that could have better long-term results it's a hard one I don't really know the answer but if you've got to this point in the video and you haven't yet checked out the book you definitely should because I think you'll really like it it's absolutely sick I've highlighted the crap out of it on my Kindle and within productivity lab which is my community for entrepreneurs creators and professionals to double their productivity we're also starting a book club where every month we read a new book together and so this is going to be one of the first ones that we do cuz I just think it's super super valuable and I think everyone should read it and if you like this video and you're interested in a video about a book that complement this but with a slightly different approach you might like to check out that video over here which is my video about the 12we year which is also a pretty solid productivity book that sort of goes against some of the principles of slow productivity but also works nicely complimentarily so you should check that one out as well thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye