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 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