Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I’m a Cal Newport fan. Deep Work and Digital Minimalism changed my life (as did So Good They Can’t Ignore You to a lesser extent) by showing me how living according to the fragmented particles of attention on social media was ruining my ability to write good books. So I wasn’t surprised that I loved his newest book, Slow Productivity.
I know many of you are either planning on reading this book (or already are), so I’m not going to make this too much of a book report. I will say that, if you tend to like this type of self help book that is about crafting your life intentionally, you’ll like it.
This book was deeply validating. It’s really been since around the time I read Deep Work in 2021 that I’ve been trying to figure this all out, this problem of being productive, of getting good work done. The subtitle is “The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” and there is a tendency toward burnout-producing productivity in the business of being a writer. You should shoehorn writing into every spare minute, and if you’re not doing that, you should at least be thinking about writing, and if you’re not doing that, then are you even a writer. The pressure of that has at times sent me in the opposite direction, which is to be vaguely terrified by needing to be writing great books at all times, so then I’d end up on social media, where I’d numb out and pretend that being on there was somehow checking the box of marketing and promotion.
The basic concept of Slow Productivity is that, by thinking less about being (or at least seeming) busy minute to minute, day to day, we can zoom out and see what we’re accomplishing over the process of years. Newport says we should: “Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality” and the book digs deeply into each of those ideas, and offers a ton of actual tasks and actions to help us accomplish those things (one of which I’ll talk about below). He writes about how our current culture is a mess of “pseudo productivity” (looking busy), based on outdated notions of how the output of people who work with their brains should be measured. (There is a video where he gives an overview of these concepts, if you’re interested.)
Stepping away from social media slowed my life down considerably, since I wasn’t spending hours looking at feeds and then rushing to get things done. But that’s a sort of backwards way into it. I stepped away intentionally, but the slowing down was a byproduct, and honestly it was more just “slow” and not necessarily the “productivity” part.
My next book, Help Wanted: One Rooster, took 12 years from first draft until it publishes in June, and is a better example, although one that still often felt less than intentional on my part. But if I zoom out and look at the process of that book, it is clearly a slowly productive event. The book took time. Sometimes because of things that were out of my control, but ultimately that time gave me the opportunity to make the book better in ways that wouldn’t have been possible if it had taken the standard (still slow!) publishing timeline of two to three years.1
In March I took a class about flower essences. I’m a fan of flower essences in general, and was interested in making my own. Does making flower essences have anything to do with writing books? Not really. I do have a novel I’m working on that has some herbalism in it, and I could theoretically say that learning about flower essences was research for that. But really, I wanted to know how to do it for me.
Flower essences are so slow. You find a flower. You listen to it. You sit with it. You spend time with the flower, with a bowl of water. Sometimes you ask a tree if you can make an essence and the tree says no. It might say no for years before it says yes. Time is different for trees. Time is different for flowers. They are working at a natural pace, the pace of nature, because they have no idea how to work at an unnatural pace.
The novel I’m working on (the one that flower essences might end up in) is so slow. I wrote a draft in 2022 and another in 2023 and am working on another now, and I have no idea when or if this book will be done. This novel is a seed I’ve planted, and as it grows (like making a flower essence), I sit with it and listen to it and maybe take only one small part of it and move that forward into the next draft.
To reiterate: stepping away from social media enforced an unintentional slowness on me that made me realize how unnatural the pace of my life had become. Having Help Wanted: One Rooster take years and years put me in a situation where some parts of it were out of my control, but the “obsess over quality” part was wholly in my control, and something that I kept working at as time went on. And making flower essences turned out to be a practice of doing one thing slowly over the course of a few hours, of stepping into the unknown (talking to flowers!) and making the choice to take my time.
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