Slow Productivity is about working on one thing for a long time. It feels like a love letter to research and writing, since a single publication can take years of work. Unfortunately, as with other self-help books, I think the summary obviates the rest of the book.

Newport observes that progress towards long-running projects is difficult to measure. This leads us into the trap of checking off easily measured or observable tasks from a to-do list. I noticed myself doing this while working on a poster this spring - I had to spend hours pulling data together into figures and then wrangling those onto the page, and then another several hours styling things in Inkscape. Because I wasn’t sure what the final poster would look like, I didn’t know how to make a good checklist to work through the project. I ended up spending at least half an hour each day instead playing around with different pieces of code and optimizing a microscope video converter. While those efforts were also useful for other projects, they weren’t useful at that moment.

I’ve been using David Allen’s Get Things Done framework for a few years now (first without knowing that it was GTD, and then with renewed interest after reading the book). GTD’s emphasis on cataloging open loops (unfinished tasks and projects) makes me confident that everything I need to know lives in my lists. (This confidence did once come back to bite me - there was a phone call I wanted to have with a friend that we both forgot about because neither of us wrote it down, and we had absolute faith in our calendars.) But I noticed over the past few months that it does not work well with projects where there are not easy concrete goals to set or measure. It’s much harder to check off a box on a to-do list when the box is not obviously actionable!

While I think GTD is unmatched for putting recurring tasks and single actions on autopilot, I do not think it works for more ambitious projects. I’ve used it to instantiate habits (hello, Anki) and review for courses, it’s not as useful for when I need to work through a literature search or draft an essay. Newport proposes time-blocking, where one allocates hours each week to a project. I like this idea, and it fits with how I’m able to spend time in the lab on an undergraduate schedule.

I’m somewhat tepid on the idea of an additional inbox, since it’s one more thing to keep track of. I see the use, since a separate method for projects would accumulate its own cruft. I’m more interested in the pull-based processes that Newport outlines, and I’m curious if there’s ways to modify the way that I use GTD scheduling to include those. If I have a system where completing something means I pull in another thing to replace it, that might help me sort through the mountain of things living in my “someday” lists.

Unfortunately I fell back into the realm of self-help books. Planning on not reading any more for the year after this; fiction is a better means of learning and growing as a person.