The magic of slow productivity

Redefining productivity to feel better, do better work—and tackle the important projects that scare us the most

Your Five-Year Plan is a newsletter about embracing life’s profound uncertainty.

Maybe your own plans went up in flames; maybe you’re considering a big, scary leap. This is your trusty companion while you’re writing the next life chapter.

Welcome to the conversation—and to the adventure that unfolds when your plans go sideways. This is letter #25. ✨

👋 A warm welcome to new readers!

If you’re here by way of my guest essay in Cait Flanders’ newsletter, thank you for bearing witness—and for being here.

Writing that piece, and connecting with you in the comments, helped me navigate the ongoing uncertainty of dealing with my departed mom’s belongings. I appreciate you! (And I’d love to hear a bit more about you, if you’ll share.)

On to today’s letter!

The magic of slow productivity

Readers on the Peaks Island ferry, captured on Kodak Portra 400 film

Exactly eight years ago today, I bought a book called A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra).

I hadn’t flunked algebra; in fact, I received high marks in the last math class I’d taken.

But that had been a full decade ago. While I hadn’t given the subject a passing thought since, that was about to change.

As a career-changer signing up for my Introduction to Financial Planning class, with Investing close on its heels, I felt anxious. Was I too rusty to tackle the quantitative stuff?

I found reassurance in Dr. Barbara Oakley’s book—both its lessons and her story.

She actually had failed math and science in high school, only to tackle these subjects again, by choice, later in life. Succeeding the second time around required her to learn new mathematical and scientific concepts, but also to learn how to learn.

One counterintuitive lesson from her book: after a hard study session, we synthesize our new knowledge—and help our minds solve problems we’re stuck on—by stepping away from our desks.

This was the first productivity tip I’d heard that didn’t require relentless white-knuckling.

In fact, this approach promised more durable knowledge that would stick around for client conversations someday, rather than evaporate after passing the next exam.

So I followed Dr. Oakley’s advice: I studied intensively, but took regular breaks. I valued my diligent note-taking as much as my sleep.

It worked. Her sustainable take on academic productivity helped me launch a new career—because starting and sustaining, of course, are prerequisites for succeeding.

This lesson resurfaced six months ago when I began to write a weekly newsletter.

That might sound…curious. How can productivity lessons for learning math and science be applied to creative productivity? But before too long, I’d find significant overlap.

After many years as a practicing financial planner, my definition of productivity had changed. It meant swift replies to Slack messages and emails. Productivity was inextricably linked to responsiveness, availability, and busyness.¹

To keep up, I had worked harder—and stretched myself thinner to placate my boss while caring for my dying mother. It was an exhausting juggling act that felt designed to fail.

When I got laid off and began writing here, I brought that same definition of productivity. It may have been toxic, but it was familiar—a salve for the unnerving uncertainty of the blank page.

I felt guilty about stepping away when stumped by the challenge of structuring a piece for this newsletter. Even when my sentences were choppy and awkward—when I couldn’t progress any further—I didn’t feel good about closing my laptop. Begrudgingly, I’d head out for a run or take a much-needed shower, but only because I was truly stuck.

That is, until I noticed a pattern: as I began jogging or shampooing my hair, inspired solutions to my writing problems appeared like bolts of lightning.

I realized that creative productivity—measured by high-quality ideas and concrete output—wasn’t correlated with the number of hours spent in my chair.

Here’s what it was correlated with:

1. Giving my subconscious mind enough space to chew on a specific problem, and

2. Having an effective idea-capture system (by which I mean “using my phone’s Notes app”), so I could apply those ideas later with a fresh burst of energy and insight.

Now, I regularly pause long runs to jot down my next five newsletter topics. I wipe the post-shower condensation from my phone screen in order to capture the outline of a complex personal essay.

If I’ve been subconsciously working through a piece for days or weeks, I’ll produce my best writing at a blistering pace. If I haven’t, and sentence myself to eight torturous hours at my desk anyway, I’ll eke out a few soggy paragraphs.

I’ve become less precious, by which I mean less rigid, about how I get work done. I log fewer hours doing stuff you’d recognize as work, and yet I’m always working. Despite having fewer boundaries with my work than ever, I also have fewer boundaries with play. To me, that’s freedom.

Under this new definition of productivity, doing the necessary tasks of caring for myself—cooking a meal, moving my body, spending time with loved ones—doesn’t compete with my writing. It’s fuel for it.

The passage of time has taken on new meaning, too. I used to wish the workday would speed up, then lament how quickly months and years flew by.

Now, each passing week means my body of work has grown. Instead of shaking my head and asking “Where did the time go?” I smile at my newsletter archive and say “This is where the time went.”

When author Cal Newport announced his book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, I pre-ordered it immediately.

I’d been sold months earlier when this New York Times interview was published. He’d teased slow productivity as “at the large time scales, the production of things you’re proud of and that have high impact, but on the small time scale, there’s periods where you’re doing very little.”

Slow productivity, therefore, is sustainable productivity. It is the antidote to burnout. There’s a reason that Navy SEALs say that “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

Life is full of long-term projects and so-called “infinite games,” in which the goal isn’t to reach a finish line, but simply to stay in the game as long as possible. Both are ideally suited to slow productivity.

In the Times interview, Newport says (emphasis mine):

Right now, I open the book with a story of John McPhee working on one of his first really complex New Yorker pieces. He spent two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard trying to figure out, How am I going to make this piece work? On the small scale, you’re like, you spent all day lying on a table, you’re incredibly unproductive. But zoom out to John McPhee’s career, and you’re like, you’re one of the most productive and impactful writers of all time. So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.

Can you imagine what you might accomplish by narrowing your focus to just a few important things (quitting others when necessary!), chipping away at them at a manageable pace, and doing your very best work?

Can you imagine if you did all that, and just…never stopped?

What might your body of work add up to, after six months of slow productivity? Two years? A lifetime?

When our lives are rife with uncertainty, our impulse is to run toward safety and certainty, to close the gap between here and some hoped-for stable future.

But closing that gap quickly encourages us to equate “productivity” with “speed and intensity.”

We think: if we can only finish this one thing as quickly as possible, then we’ll feel safe enough to slow down.

But that idealized stable future may not ever arrive. Even if it does, it’ll bring a new horizon into view—one that, I promise you, will be characterized by just as much uncertainty as before.

The sooner we begin practicing slower, more sustainable forms of productivity, the better we’ll feel, the better work we’ll do—and the likelier it is that we’ll begin and stick with the important projects that scare us the most.

💬 What do you think?

I’m curious to hear from you. How has your definition of productivity changed over time? How does it show up in different areas of your life?

Had your own plan-in-flames experience? Taking a leap into the unknown? I’d love to hear more. Just hit “reply” to get in touch, or introduce yourself here.

Warmly,
Maddie

1.

Paul Millerd

argues in this banger of an essay that office workers tend to feel guilty if they’re not busy each hour of the workday—but often, their true value lies in being on call: “You are in fact being paid to sit around for the future potential crisis.” It’s a perspective-shifting read!