8 Ways to Practice Slow Productivity
softening during a busy season
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I mentioned in last week’s newsletter that we’re in a busy time of the year. I wanted to take today’s letter to review Slow Productivity as an approach to navigating personal and professional productivity.
Slow Productivity 101
Slow Productivity is the lovely Venn Diagram overlap between Slow Living and Productivity. Today I want to offer some tangible ways you can put it into practice in your own life, but you can read a longer overview about Slow Productivity here or listen to me talk about it on The Slow Home Podcast (now “The Tortoise”) here. As a special treat, I’m linking to some “Dive Deeper” suggestions to give you insight into some of my earlier writing about these topics since 2018.
Leaving Blank Space in Your Days for Rest
In an effort to increase our productivity, we may try to optimize our schedules by booking ourselves back-to-back. While this approach may come with good intentions to knock out work and rest afterwards, we run the risk of getting upset and overwhelmed if a meeting runs over, we hit traffic when running an errand, or we burn through our energy mid-way through a productivity session. When we preemptively schedule blank space into our days between meetings or work sessions, we give ourselves space to rest our brains and bodies and we create buffer room in case anything runs over.
Dive Deeper: “Make a Rest and Recharge Toolkit”
Scheduling Time for Reflection
I love that the definition of reflect means both “to bend or fold back” and also “to make manifest or apparent.” When we practice reflection, we slow down and take time to acknowledge our previous experiences and emotions or thoughts about them. Reflection itself is a great tool for gaining perspective, and if we so choose, we can also use our reflection to brainstorm shifts we may want to make based in our actual lived experiences. I find that reflection is something that easily gets put on the back burner in favor of doing more immediate (usually work-related) tasks, so I try to schedule it into my calendar or (even better!) do it alongside others.
Dive Deeper: “Reflection: Whys and Hows”
Valuing Prep and Thinking Work as Real Work
In the world of knowledge work, productivity looks like brainstorming, creating, editing, analyzing, and never-ending email. While a lot of behind-the-scenes labor goes into reaching an outcome, we often reserve our praise for the final product. Some of the ways we can value our invisible labors are to recognize that ideating is a part of the creative process, to value our productivity based on time spent, and to respect and honor the work of others in our organizations and networks.
Dive Deeper: “Please Start Valuing Your Behind the Scenes Labor”
Spoon Theory (for people with chronic illness/pain)
Spoon Theory is a metaphor developed by Christine Miserandino to communicate the ways that energy levels shift day to day for people who live with chronic health conditions (see a PDF of the Spoon Theory here). In explaining her metaphor to her friend who did not have chronic illness or pain, Miserandino gave her friend 12 spoons. She then took away spoons to represent energy expenditure on tasks such as preparing for work, traveling, cooking, and dealing with emergencies. Miserandino used the metaphor of counting spoons to show “that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn’t have to.”
Dive Deeper: “Spoon Theory: What It is & How I Use It”
Giving Yourself Permission to Do “Good Enough”
When I was in graduate school, I always felt like I needed to go above and beyond if I wanted to win awards or publish my writing. In hindsight, I know that I overtaxed myself aiming for perfection when “good enough” truly would have sufficed. A quick way to adjust from perfection to “good enough” is to identify whether your goal is actually a stretch goal. Stretch goals stretch our limits and capacity, and while we may sometimes want to strive for increased success in our output, we should be cautious of over-expending our personal resources. In general, most things will be great when we do them “good enough.”
Dive Deeper: Why You Should Aim for “Good Job”
Actionable and Achievable Goal Setting
When we make our goals actionable, we shift from a broad focus (“write my book” or “build my website”) to a list of steps or milestones we need to hit in a particular order. Once we have an idea of what we need to do first, next, and last, we break down our goal into small tasks (“brainstorm a list of book ideas” or “check to see if my domain name is available”). When we make our goals achievable, we mindfully complete tasks from our task lists based on our time, energy, focus, and other personal resources.
Dive Deeper: “What is a Personal Productivity Session?”
Boundaries Around Your Availability
I talk a lot about this topic when I run workshops to organizations with teams all over the country (and sometimes world!) who depend on Slack and email to keep the ball rolling on overlapping projects. While you might not work for a corporation or nonprofit, you likely need to schedule your productivity and downtime around other people’s requests for your time. One way to set and hold boundaries around our availability is to preemptively identify our non-negotiables, or practices that we must show up for in order to care for our physical and mental health, and to attempt to preserve those in our week. That may mean we set strict start and stop times for our workdays or that we batch particular tasks to specific days.
Dive Deeper: “The Recovering Workaholic’s Guide to Taking Breaks”
Intentional Decision Making
Similar to the dual action of “tend” (to tend to something + to tend to do an action), the word intention suggests both bringing intention to a practice or setting an intention you hope to achieve. When we bring intention to our decision-making practices, we may find more ease in our schedules and a shorter to-do list. If you find that you tend to overcommit yourself and later feel resentful or overwhelmed, it may help to predetermine a set of criteria that new opportunities must meet in order for you to say “yes.”
Dive Deeper: “Three Mindful Productivity How Tos”
I’d love to hear how you practice slow productivity in your own lives. Feel free to leave a comment on Substack to share with other readers.
Today’s post was rich, so I’ll hold off on sharing my Curiosities (things that make me say “hmmm” or “wow!”) until next week. I hope you take good care this week and we’ll talk soon,
Dr. Kate
