Productivity

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY

A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. 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. »

« Most workers who are fortunate enough to exert some control over their efforts—such as knowledge workers, small-business entrepreneurs, or freelancers—tend to avoid taking on so much work that they crash and burn, but also tend to avoid working a reasonable amount. They exist at that point of maximum sustainable overhead tax that seems to represent the worst of all configurations, as it maintains the pain of having too much to do, but keeps this pain just manageable enough to avoid reform »

« We often believe those we work with care only about getting results as fast as possible. But this isn’t true. Often what they really want is the ability to hand something off and not have to worry about whether or not it will be accomplished. If they trust you, they’ll give you latitude to finish things on your own terms. Relief, in other words, trumps expediency. »

2. Work at a natural pace. « There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it. »

3. Obsess over quality.

The 70 % rule

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Seventy per cent The 70% rule: If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it. If you’re 70% satisfied with a product you’ve created, launch it. If you’re 70% sure a decision is the right one, implement it. And if you’re 70% confident you’ve got what it takes to do something that might make a positive difference to the increasingly alarming era we seem to inhabit? Go ahead and do that thing. (Please!)

There’s more power to this rule than meets the eye. It isn’t solely a way of pushing past perfectionism, though of course that’s valuable in itself. I’m convinced it’s also the way to cultivate a particular kind of sane, action-focused, peaceful-but-energised approach to life that’s becoming more essential by the day. At the risk of offending any sticklers for traditional mathematics, I’m even tempted to argue that 70% is actually better than 100%, at least in this context. Allow me to explain:

If you’ve any perfectionistic tendencies at all, the 70% rule is unlikely to feel brand new. You’ve probably often been advised to go easy on yourself, to remember that “perfect is the enemy of good”, and so on. Such advice is usually well-meaning, and true so far as it goes: perfectionists should indeed beat themselves up less, and be satisfied with less-than-perfect outcomes. But it still carries the subtle implication that being less than perfect is merely forgivable or excusable – that it would be nice to do better, but since you can’t, there’s no point fretting about it; instead, learn to settle for less. Which makes it tough advice for perfectionists to follow, because it amounts to little more than “don’t be so perfectionistic”. It’s like telling someone who’s a poor swimmer, and wants to become a good swimmer, that what they need to do is to become a better swimmer. I mean, yes. That’s correct! It’s just not especially helpful.

But the 70% rule – when you begin to grasp it, and to live by it – is something much more potent than that. Following it is a muscular and a muscle-building act. Moving forward at 70% takes more guts, more strength of character, than holding out for 100%, because it entails moving forward amid uncertainty, anxiety, and the disagreeable feeling that comes with putting less-than-perfect work into the world. As so often, a weight-training analogy applies: shooting for 100% is the equivalent of pointlessly straining to lift a dumbbell you can’t possibly lift, then usually giving up, resolving that when you try again tomorrow you’ll magically be strong enough. (But why on earth would you be stronger tomorrow?) Whereas aiming for 70% means lifting the weight you can lift, with a modicum of unpleasant effort. It’s not fun, exactly. But you develop a taste for it. And each time you do it, you’re building the capacity to do more of it in future.

So every time you release a creative work into the world, or make a commitment, or take an action, despite being no more than 70% satisfied with your output or confident in your abilities, you’re not only bringing something into concrete reality. You’re also expanding your ability to act in the presence of feelings of displeasure, worry and uncertainty, so that you can take more actions, and more ambitious actions, later on.

Crucially, you’ll also be creating a body of evidence to prove to yourself that when you move forward at 70%, the sky stubbornly fails to fall in. People don’t heap scorn on you or punish you. Much of the time, they’re thrilled or grateful you stuck your head above the parapet. The Youtuber Campbell Walker, aka Struthless (one of several people, I learn, who coined the 70% rule before I did) observes that over the long term, this helps you see that your worth isn’t defined by your actions. You don’t need a perfect track record of accomplishments in order to get to count as an adequate human. And this knowledge frees you up to take further, bolder actions, because you’re no longer so fixated on preserving your track record.

The 70% rule comes with a couple of caveats: You can’t really put a scientific percentage on your feelings, obviously, so perfectionists should beware the risk of obsessing, perfectionistically, over whether they’re at exactly 70% or not. (Note that the rule doesn’t say you should only act when you’re at at least 70% readiness, just that if you’re at 70% readiness, you should act. If you’re happy to act at 60% or 50%, go for it.) And there are big decisions – like, say, whether to get married or divorced, or whether to sign off on the structural safety of the 90-storey skyscraper you’re responsible for building – where a threshold higher than 70% is probably advisable. No need to get perfectionistic about wanting the rule to apply in absolutely every case.

But such matters aside, I’m willing to bet that making an effort to follow the 70% rule will leave you more productive, more fulfilled, and more able to focus on what matters to you the most. Beyond that, I have a hunch it’ll help you develop precisely the resilience we’re going to need in order to navigate a world that feels ever more beyond our control, and where every day brings destabilising headlines. In this sort of environment, the capacity to act without certainty is essential even just to get through the day, never mind if you’d also like to have an impact on things.

Or to put it in tough-love terms: If you think you might have something to contribute, don’t you have some kind of duty to move forward at 70%, instead of depriving us of your contribution thanks to your finicky and frankly rather self-indulgent insistence on perfection?

This very newsletter is one small attempt to walk my talk here. I’m still not entirely sure I’ve successfully conveyed why I think the 70% rule is more ambitious than 100%; why it takes guts; why it represents the very opposite of resignation or giving up. But am I about 70% sure I’ve made my point? Yeah, I think so. Time to press send.