Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.
Those are the three principles for sustainable knowledge work, as laid out in Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity—and yes, I’m talking about it again. Go read it if you haven’t yet, it’s genuinely insightful and a pretty quick read.
I find it incredibly tough to “do fewer things”, especially as a business owner trying to keep up with client projects and technical improvement, while also figuring out how to run a business in the first place.
But yesterday I got a really valuable illustration of the power of this advice.
One of my clients is right here in town, and every so often I go down to their shop for a change of scenery and to get some in-person collaboration. I started the morning with a whole mess of things on my list, thinking I could knock them all out with some really meaningful work time.
Instead, I spent the entire day on one single task: figuring out how to get flight telemetry turned into a file format I could use for my plotting and analysis.
For the five hours I was there working, I learned about the output variables I needed, tried and failed to use an existing utility, slowly stepped through installing and using a Python package made for this use case, and with help finally got it all installed and successfully converted the telemetry file. And for all that effort, I only got to check one thing off my list.
So much for my plan from that morning.
But you know what’s funny? I somehow felt more satisfied and accomplished from working on that one single, meaty task than on days where I check off ten or more items. (Part of that may also have been from working in an energizing environment with cool people, but you get my point.)
Being able to sit and focus on just the one thing I needed to work through allowed me to actually get through it and develop a plan for what my next steps will need to be, without feeling pulled in all different directions by a bunch of smaller tasks.
It was also psychologically helpful: instead of giving a little energy to a variety of contexts and feeling like I’m just treading water, I made substantial, meaningful, observable progress on just one thing and showed myself that actually, yeah, I can get things done.
So yes, “do fewer things” really does work. It just doesn’t necessarily mean you have to fling all your non-critical projects into a box and only have one or two you care about for the next eight months.
Sometimes it can be enough to work on one or two notable, high-effort tasks in a day. Apply it on a smaller scale. Accomplish something substantial, meaningful, and observable, and then keep that momentum rolling.