👋 Hi, I’m Jeff. I write weekly about lessons I’ve learned leading product teams and working to lead well in chaotic environments, drawing on 25+ years of building.
⏱ Read time: 6 minutes
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
— Lao Tzu
If you’re anything like me, you’ve checked your inbox six times in the last half hour.
It’s okay—you can admit it.
That stat comes from research by Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine. Her work explores how often knowledge workers switch tasks. The answer: often.
You feel this. I do, too. We’re living in an informational blizzard. Slack pings. Emails. Small tasks piling up. Workloads can become unsustainable, which leads to burnout.
When I’m in these cycles, I don’t even do my best work. A few months ago, I cleared meetings off my calendar, blocked a single afternoon, and made progress on a difficult project that made a large impact on our teams. It wasn’t dramatic, it was quiet.
Doing less—not more—is the answer.
That’s the case Cal Newport makes in his 2024 book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.
What Is Slow Productivity?
Newport’s argument is simple and uncomfortable: modern work rewards visible activity, not meaningful progress—and the two are often opposites.
His three-part framework is: do less, work at a natural pace, and focus on quality.
McPhee, Moonves, and Zuiker: Three Stories About Work
We often measure productivity by motion. But the most meaningful work sometimes happens in stillness. Newport gives us three stories—two creators who embraced stillness, and one executive who didn’t.
His book begins with a story about legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee at work. In this scene, McPhee is seen in the summer of 1966 flat on his back on a picnic table in his yard, staring upwards at tree branches.
He’s not relaxing. He’s thinking through how to structure eight months of research and reporting into a feature magazine article. This apparent stillness is doing the hardest part of the work: deciding what matters. His work later became The Pine Barrens, first published in The New Yorker in 1967, then expanded into a classic nonfiction book in 1968.
Later on, Newport introduces us to Anthony Zuiker and Les Moonves as another example of work about work versus actual work.
In the early ‘90’s, CBS was in third-place in the ratings vs NBC and ABC, but then vaulted to first place. Newport contrasts two different paths and asks us to consider which drove the larger impact.
Moonves, CBS’ head of Entertainment, once got angry about a quiet, empty office on a Friday afternoon, and sent a memo to employees.
“Unless anybody hasn’t noticed, we’re in third place [in the ratings],” he wrote. “My guess is that at ABC and NBC they’re still working at 3:30 on Friday. This will no longer be tolerated.”
That memo treats time spent as a proxy for value created.
Or was it Anthony Zuiker, who was initially working in Las Vegas transporting tourists between casinos? Zuiker wanted to work as a writer, bought a book on screenwriting and started in on ideas for scripts.
Eventually, the 26-year-old Zuiker is pitching CBS on a new idea for a procedural police drama. He began researching, writing, pitching, and revising what would eventually become CSI, which debuted in 2000 and helped CBS pass ABC and NBC to land in first place.
At its height, CSI reached 30+ million US viewers, expanded to nearly 800 episodes, aired in 200 countries, reached ~2 billion people globally, and generated billions in syndication and licensing revenue for CBS. (Moonves, himself, greenlit the pilot.)
Zuiker spent three years—moving slowly, thinking deeply, and shaping the idea over time. Not the type of thing that happens following an executive memo.
The point is: time spent thinking deeply led to high-quality, impactful work. McPhee wasn’t just delaying; he was connecting ideas. Thinking slowly and structurally. That kind of thoughtful synthesis takes time, but it enables long-term impact.
Zuiker followed a similar path. His creative process stretched over years, not weeks, and was slower and iterative work—researching, drafting, rethinking. CSI wasn’t just a hit. It became a global phenomenon that spanned 200+ countries, multiple spin-offs, and billions in licensing.
What struck me in both cases wasn’t just the slowness—it was how much thinking was happening before anything visible appeared.
This Problem Hits More Than Just Solo Workers
While Newport’s ideas can come across at first glance as tailor-made for solo workers, the underlying disease of “doing too much, too fast” applies to leaders and companies too. I’ve seen this up close. A few examples come to mind.
Matt Mochary is a Silicon Valley CEO coach known for distilling leadership into clear, practical systems—captured in his book The Great CEO Within: A Tactical Guide to Company Building. Mochary shares advice he borrows from Greg McKeown with his CEO coachees: Block protected time early each day to work only on your single most important long-term goal—starting small and building toward about 2 focused, interruption-free hours—to avoid getting lost in daily fires and make real progress on your work that matters most.
“Schedule two hours each day to work on your Top Goal only. And do this every single workday. Period.”
Companies also struggle with doing too much. In 2006, Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse put it bluntly in his now-famous “Peanut Butter Manifesto”
“We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone.”
Nearly two decades later, this same dynamic shows up in how companies approach goal setting. Molly Graham, an early Facebook operations leader who now advises startups, offers a sharp, current take I love, in the context of the death spiral that can be company goals:
If you have 6 or 8 or 10 company goals, here’s the truth: You actually have 3 goals. You were just too scared to kill some of them.
Something I say a lot: Either you prioritize for people, or they will prioritize for you by choosing how they spend their time.
Either you choose which goals are most important, or your team will choose for you—quietly, unevenly, and without alignment. Good goal setting is painful. That pain is called prioritization.
How We Got Here
Where did this context and problem come from?
Newport suggests the 2021 pandemic played a part. Workers scrambled to appear productive while life flooded in. Think: elementary school on Zoom, one room away from your desk.
We’ve also created challenges by shortening the time-scale of impact. Work that truly moves the needle often takes time—and doesn’t always look like “work.” Cue the question: “Hey, what has Brad produced lately?”
So companies and people use visible activity as a proxy for work being done.
The Trap of Pseudo-Productivity
Newport calls this pseudo-productivity: work that signals motion instead of progress. We gravitate toward tasks that are visible and measurable, even when they crowd out the thinking that actually creates value.
We default to Slack and email so others feel reassured work is happening when deeper work can’t be easily seen.
How to Start Working Slower (and Smarter)
Here’s how you might begin applying Newport’s slow productivity principles. After watching this play out across individuals and teams, a few patterns hold up.
1. Do Less
Cut with courage.
- Set a “Top Goal” for your quarter—and make sure daily actions align.
- Protect time blocks like a budget: if something new comes in, something else must go.
2. Work at a Sustainable Pace
Protect the white space.
- Double your default timeline. Most of us are overly optimistic.
- Leave white space on your calendar—if there’s no time to think, there’s no time to create.
- Forgive yourself for “slow” days. They often produce the best results in the long run.
3. Focus on Quality
Repeat what works.
- Build “autopilot slots” for deep work: same time, same task, same place.
- Replace constant availability with scheduled office hours.
If you’re checking your inbox six times in a half hour, you’re doing it more than 80 times a day.
You don’t need to do more.
You need to protect the time where real work happens.
If this helped you think more clearly about leading teams or products, I write here once a week.
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As the Joseph Kosinski/Brad Pitt film F1 recently repeated: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Or, to quote one of UCLA coach John Wooden's aphorisms: be quick, but don't hurry.