Accomplishing over years

Zoom out, escape mindless busyness, and build a legacy

Mar 25, 2024

There is little I love more than finding a book that backs up my theories.

Having recently snatched up Cal Newport’s latest, Slow Productivity, I cannot overstate my delight reading the opening chapter, which details a period in writer John McPhee’s process when he spent two weeks lying on a picnic table, staring up into a tree, trying to puzzle out the next steps in his then-current project.

Two weeks. Two weeks staring at tree branches.

How many of us allow ourselves two days to feel scared about our writing’s direction before we freak out and shut down? Not many.

Full disclosure: I am a big fan of Cal Newport’s books

What I’ll discuss here is how I the principles he shares in the book are especially valid for writers. He doesn’t neglect this topic in the book, since anecdotal case studies include numerous writers, from John McPhee to Maya Angelou to Jane Austen.

However, after I finished reading the book my head was still humming with possibilities it inspired, so I’ll share my first response here. I expect, as I test-drive the ideas he suggested, there will be more to report.

Slow Productivity

The title of the book alone made me sigh with relief. How often have you worried that the best time to have completed your current writing task was yesterday, or even last week or last year?

I feel behind almost all the time, because of a combination of many ideas I want to work on and pressure to have something to show for my efforts on a daily or weekly basis.

It was this impulse that led me to grind away, trying to write two vastly different books simultaneously because I was unwilling to set one aside. The desire to complete them both put me in an ineffective workflow that led to exactly zero books published for nearly two years.

Cut to this January, when I decided to set one book aside and finish the other, and I’m on track to finish that same book this week, right on schedule for pub day May 23rd.

I think Cal Newport is onto something with this concept.

The three principles:

Do fewer things.
Work at a natural pace.
Obsess over quality.

To get the full explanation Newport provides for each of these principles, I recommend reading the book. At just over 200 pages, it’s a quick read that is well worth the investment of time and attention.

I’m going to dive into each of these principles at this point to share how they’ve impacted my writing life thus far, and the plans I have to keep the benefits coming.

Do fewer things.

My translation for this principle is “One writing project at a time.” Neither in my exploration nor Newport’s book does this principle translate to “write less.” As I shared above, by following this rule, I’m able to write far more.

This year, I’ve completed a nonfiction book I’ve had on the back burner for a few years in less than six months.1 Another way to think about this for myself is, “If I want to write something, I have to find a chunk of time to make it my primary focus.”

If I can’t or don’t want to find space in my schedule to put the project first, it isn’t important enough to me at that point to finish.

Having realized that neither of my books got finished last year since I was half-heartedly bouncing between both of them, I put in the effort to decide which one I wanted to focus on first and also committed to not work on the other book until I finished the first.

Now that I’ve gotten to within pages of the end of the draft, I realize that this pace is sustainable for me (more on that with the second principle) so I can now envision writing a nonfiction book every year, as long as I have a topic I’m invested in writing about.

By writing fewer books,book, suddenly I can have a book out annually, rather than waiting several years between books, as I did between Story Arcana and my new book, Writing through Fear.2

Work at a natural pace.

Yes, “natural” is up to interpretation, by design. A natural pace varies depending on the writer, but the principle that you’ll get more and better work done if you honor your rhythm does not.

With trial and error, I have learned that my natural pace — when also working with clients and maintaining a business — is about an hour a day, five days a week. In the past, when I’ve gone on writing retreats, I can manage up to two hours a day writing, or three hours a day revising. The schedule during the window I planned to write this book didn’t allow for a retreat, so I stuck with an hour a day on weekdays.

As a result, I’ve been able to write the whole book without feeling burned out, something I never thought was possible. Now I never want to work any other way.

Getting to this clarity on my natural pace has taken years, and a lot of experimentation. I’ve done NaNoWriMo to completion five times, I’ve tried working in marathon sprints, and I’ve worked in fits and starts as I felt inspired. None of those methods worked as well as this one does for me.

I recommend trying any approach that appeals to you and seeing how it fits. It’s a lot of playing warmer / colder until you get a balance that fits. For me, the ideal fit is enough writing to feel like something has gotten done while still able to show up for the rest of your life. As I call it, Manageable yet Meaningful. This is my version of a natural pace.

Obsess over quality

Having interviewed hundreds of writers for the Secret Library, I can say with confidence that not a single one of them wished it had taken longer to write their book. However, nearly all of them said it took as long as it did because that was what a satisfying result required.

We want to finish things fast. We want the payoff quickly, but when we step back and reflect, which is more important: an ok book now or a book we can be proud of a little later?

Newport’s suggestion to help achieve a natural pace is to take your first estimate about how long you think the project will take and double it. I think this is also an excellent failsafe to protect quality. Rushing doesn’t result in books we’re proud of.

I could have rushed Writing through Fear by making a more aggressive timeline and writing more hours to complete more sessions faster. But what I realized early on was that writing at a natural pace also gave me another gift: time to ponder the book between writing sessions.

When I first outlined the book, I made notes on each section, clarifying the concept I wanted to cover. Partway through the draft, I started to write one and a half sections per writing session, both because I was more in the flow and because I got so much out of writing part of a section one day and finishing it the next.

The bones were all down after drafting the content, but when I came back after a day, the ideas felt deeper and the examples I used to illustrate more resonant because they’d been simmering in my brain for a day before I added them.

Building simmering time into your schedule results in a more delicious book. I grew up in Baltimore, and one of the local specialties is crab soup. My favorite type was the spicy vegetable variety, especially a day or two-day-old batch. The soup that had mingled in the fridge, getting spicier and more complex, was heaven.

Despite now eating a plant-based diet, I can still taste that soup in my memory. The full flavor was worth the wait, and the same goes for writing.

When you read a phrase like “obsess over quality” it’s easy to snap to perfectionism as the expression of this principle. Newport takes time to advise against striving for perfection, as do I. Going for perfect is not the same as obsessing over quality.

For me, obsessing over quality means paying close attention to what circumstances produce my best work and being vigilant about sticking as closely to those parameters as I can.

I don’t write well on very little sleep, when I’ve overdone it with social commitments, or when I’m not reading a consistent stack of books I enjoy. When I am working on a book I am even more of a grandmother with my bedtime than usual, churn through my TBR pile at an accelerated pace, and have weeks when I live like a hermit. This is how I write at a level I’m happy with.

What I try very hard to avoid is setting a standard I can’t reach. I give writing my full attention when I’m working on it, but I also write knowing I will re-read and revise later. If I can’t remember an exact quotation, I put it in square brackets and keep going. I stay with the flow of the ideas so the piece can take shape rather than trying to get the reference perfect at the time I remember it.

Know your parameters and know what success looks like for you. Keeping notes on your writing process can help with this. We think we’ll remember what worked for us over multiple writing sessions, but memory distorts itself quickly.

Zoom out

The concept that hit me the hardest when reading this book was the idea that we sacrifice producing meaningful work over years in favor of feeling busy and productive in the short term.

A major goal of writing Slow Productivity, Newport writes, was “ to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you’re proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way.”

He also argues that we need to get rid of pseudo-productivity, which he defines as “the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.”

By pseudo-productivity’s metric, John McPhee was doing nothing when he lay on that picnic table for two weeks, even though it led to a breakthrough in his writing one of his most popular articles of his career. And by the same measurement, I am more productive when I do a bunch of fiddly admin and cross a ton of items off my to-do list, but don’t write a word of my book.

Zooming out shows us that McPhee has written numerous books, has been a successful New Yorker contributor for decades as well as Princeton professor whose courses inspired many other successful writers to start their careers.

At the scale of years, do a few weeks staring up into the trees feel like wasted time?

What if staring into trees is how you create big results over years instead of a bunch of checklists of tasks we don’t much care about?

Yes, there’s a fine line between going slower and procrastinating, but that’s a story for another day.

If you think in terms of years instead of weeks, what do you want to accomplish? What would make you proud to have done?

Let’s start there and see what comes next.