Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout Paperback – 7 Mar. 2024

I read some of the reviews of this book before I started reading it and was at first sceptical that it would be helpful. I’m in a role where 90%+ of the job is knowledge work which squeezes out the remaining 10% which is the core purpose of the work. It is true that the author uses many examples from creative arts and entrepreneurial careers very different from my own, however I found these helpful and translatable into my own context - I’m a social worker.I have started implementing some of the elements of the 3 core principles in this book and within a week I’m already seeing small improvements in terms of a reduction in the mental overload caused by the constant demands of relentless email traffic, phone calls, virtual meetings, form filling. It’s early days but this book has definitely helped me.

I am a big fan of Cal Newport, but I was a bit disappointed with this book. Other reviewers have noted that it’s large font and generous line spacing, but from counting words per page I estimate the book is about 50,000 words, so it’s not short. I don’t agree that this book could have been a blog post – there is too much genuine content in it for that. If anything, I’d say it’s too long for the ground it covers. Perhaps it’s a valuable idea, but just an idea that’s quite quick to explain (and there’s nothing wrong with that!).Unfortunately, Cal mentions in the book that he’s changed his writing style, and in my opinion it's not particularly effective. He’s fallen into the style of writing lots of stories – Malcom Gladwell-itis – which to me often seems like a way to pad a book with filler, and leads to a low amount of value per page.As an example, the Slow Productivity book takes two pages to go through the Beatles 1966 tour that didn’t go well, explaining everything that went wrong in Japan, the US, etc., and giving chapter and verse on it. Really, that was all just a build-up to what could have been stated as “The Beatles 1966 tour was plagued with problems, so they decided to stop touring and focus on studio work.” Maybe he was writing to try and meet word count that was too high.I think if a writer is going to use lots of stories like this, it becomes important to give bullet-point summaries and clear headings as signposts, otherwise the actual points just get lost, which I feel is what’s happened here.The book is really split into three long chapters, and the chapters felt a bit long and unfocused to me. I think a tighter structure would have made the points clearer.I get the impression that somehow the author didn’t manage to quite get everything he wants to say on this topic into the book. It feels like it’s going somewhere, but never really gets there. Perhaps a stronger conclusion would have tied it together better.I actually wonder whether Cal needs to take his own advice a bit, and do fewer things better. He seems to churn out endless podcasts, and I wonder if he’s now going for quantity over quality. Perhaps less time podcasting, and more time in deep work and thinking, might have raised the quality of this book, which is ironic given that one of his chapters is “obsess over quality”.In conclusion, I think the book is worth reading, but it feels like this is a throat-clearing exercise of warming up, and a second book could more clearly distil the contents and add more flesh onto the bones.

This is an excellent book that asks us to think about a few simple principles that can make us more productive. Recommended reading - especially if you feel at risk of burn-out: either self-inflicted or imposed by others.

Good introduction but then the style gets boring. Still I did learn from the book. Good for tech workers perhaps that’s why it did not resonate in the later subjects

I enjoyed this book and it made me think. Recommended.

Exactly as described

A longtime fan of Cal Newport', the message from this book is that in today's world, it is essential to slow down and recalibrate how you think about and act on what you do, to deliver better, meaningful, and remarkable work. No longer is there room for pseudo-productivity. This is the era of slow productivity...

This is a good book for knowledge workers who are disillusioned with the endless grind of false urgencies and endless todo lists. It offers some actionable ideas for resisting this trend towards more pseudo productivity, such as recommending that your active todo list only include three items at any given time. I think there was a lot of repetition in the form of saying the same thing in different words in order to extend the word count to book scale. This should have been a long blogpost as all the core ideas sans the examples would fit in a few A4 pages.