A self-help book for the modern day laptop worker and/or achievement subject. I’m a low-key fan of Cal Newport, having read and experimented with advice from his books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism back in 2019. While it’s a very easy read,1 using extremely simple language and evocative anecdotes, I felt like this book was a bit thinner than his prior works. Still, there were some useful kernels, which I’ve tried to distill below.
Like any self-help book, this book is utterly useless if you don’t undertake the much more difficult step of actually applying Newport’s frameworks. Otherwise, reading self-help is just another form of pseudoproductivity.
Intro
- Knowledge work: Economic activity where knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.
- Office work, but also writers, musicians, artists, scientists, etc.
- We’re increasingly overwhelmed by the demands of pseudoproductivity—answering emails, slacks, endless sync meetings, etc.
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.
- Overhead tax: Every commitment (minor tasks, large projects) brings with it some ongoing administrative overhead.
- Back and forth email thread, sync meetings, etc.
- Can easily spiral out of control (see: Zoom Apocalypse of 2020-22).
- Doing fewer things does NOT mean “accomplish fewer things”.
- Doing fewer things makes us better at what we’re doing—psychologically + economically + creatively.
- Stress heuristic: We only let ourselves stop taking on new work when we’ve reached such a high level of stress that we feel comfortable/secure saying no.
- This means we are almost always operating on (or over) the edge of unsustainability.
- Limit the big
- Limit missions
- Pick up to three missions, e.g. (for Newport)
- Academic research
- Writing
- Being a great professor
- My missions
- Technical writing
- Essay writing
- Community building
- Pick up to three missions, e.g. (for Newport)
- Limit projects
- Any work-related initiative that can’t be completed in a single “session”
- Might be one-and-done, or ongoing efforts.
- When considering a new project, estimate how much time it will require and then go find that time and schedule it on your calendar. This will naturally limit how many you can take on as your calendar fills up.
- (Echoes of Deep Work.)
- Limit daily goals
- Work on one project per day.
- Doesn’t include emails, administrative nonsense, etc.
- (Unfortunately unrealistic for many people. Would have been an unattainable luxury when I was a TPgM.)
- Work on one project per day.
- Limit missions
- Contain the small
- Contain the overhead tax of tasks you can’t avoid tackling
- Put tasks on autopilot
- Synchronize
- Replace async comms with real-time conversation
- Office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussion
- Advertise these to your colleagues
- Make other people work more
- Reverse task list: Make other people add tasks to an open list of everything you’re working on (along with all the required details for completing the task).
- Avoid task engines
- AKA projects that generate infinitely more tasks.
- Spend money
- Pay for tools that help you tame/speed up your tasks.
- Pull instead of push
- Create holding tank and active task lists.
- No bound to the size of your holding tank.
- Formalize your intake procedure.
- Update and clean your lists once a week.
- (I think “holding tank” is just a fancy name for a backlog.)
Work at a natural pace
Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.
- Make a five-year plan
- Double project timelines
- Humans are terrible at estimating the time required for cognitive endeavors.
- We usually make an overly optimistic/ambitious prediction.
- “Grand achievement is build on the steady accumulation of modest results over time.”
- Simplify your workday
- Apply a heuristic for reducing your task list for a given day by 25-50%.
- Embrace seasonality
- Schedule slow seasons
- “Small seasonality”
- No meeting Mondays
- Rest projects
- After you complete a major “hard project”, schedule time for a “rest project”, e.g. blocking off afternoons/evenings to read or watch films, whatever.
- Work in cycles
- E.g. at basecamp, they have 6-8 week hard sprints followed by 2 week cooldown for fixing small issues and deciding what to tackle next.
- Work poetically
- Match your space to your work
- Make the space where you’re working somehow reflect the work you’re trying to do.
- Rituals should be striking
- Form personalized rituals around the work you find most important.
- Ensure rituals are striking enough to shift your mental state into something that supports your goals.
- Match your space to your work
Obsess over quality
Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.
- Improve your taste
- Immerse yourself in appreciation for fields that are different from your own.
- Start a community of practice to get feedback/ideas.
- E.g. writers group, like Tolkein/CS Lewis’ “Inklings.”
- Collective taste is often superior to that of any individual in the group.
- Buy high-quality tools
- Parable of the fifty-dollar notebook (lol).
- Bet on yourself
- Place yourself in a situation where there is pressure for you to succeed.
- Example from my own life: Deciding to stay in NYC after I lost my job, thus forcing myself to find another job in a shorter time horizon.
- Temporarily dedicate significant amounts of free time a project you care about.
- Reduce your salary.
- Don’t immediately quit your job to pursue a meaningful project—what until you have concrete evidence that your new interest satisfies these constraints:
- People are willing to give you money for it.
- You can replicate the result.
- Don’t immediately quit your job to pursue a meaningful project—what until you have concrete evidence that your new interest satisfies these constraints:
- Announce a schedule to add accountability pressure.
- Attract an investor (also for accountability).
- Place yourself in a situation where there is pressure for you to succeed.
What I’m going to try
- Put as many tasks on autopilot as I possibly can (self-reminder to call landlord and set up autopay for rent…)
- Spend money on subscriptions and tools when it makes sense.
- Get Grammarly for my job.
- Test drive a Claude subscription.
- Create a pull-list workflow, both for my job and creative projects.
- Simplify existing task engines (e.g. newsletter, potluck invites, etc.)
- Block off time (and a physical space) to work on essay writing.
- Rearrange & redecorate desk for a more “poetic” working environment.
Footnotes
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Might just be saying this because I started this book immediately after Crime and Punishment. ↩