Three Ways To Apply Slow Productivity To Avoid Burnout and Overload
Guest Post: Janice CK, Notion Consultant & Ambassador, writes about how she applies Cal Newport's slow productivity principles to her business and life
Burnout doesn’t stop when you stop working for someone else.
In fact, it could get worse if you don't mindfully and intentionally manage your time, focus and energy.
Why?
Because poor habits and the lack of structure and system can be exacerbated when you go from working for someone else to working for yourself.
For the last 4+ years, Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity philosophy has helped me re-frame my relationship with burnout and toxic productivity.
Over this time, I’ve integrated these Slow Productivity systems and strategies into my Notion, which has been the backbone to preventing burnout and overload as a Solopreneur.
Before we dive into the strategies, lets get clear on what exactly is Slow Productivity.
What is slow productivity and why should we care?
Modern day tools and technology has misled us to believe that we can achieve more and more tasks and projects with less and less time.
As a result, our lives have become busier and less joyful.
Slow Productivity, coined by Cal Newport, consist of three core principles:
1. Do fewer things
We suffer from chronic overload and burnout in our modern day work because we’re trying to tackle too many things at the same time.
Focusing on fewer projects and tasks at any one time, actually makes us more productive because we’re more focused and efficient with our time. We’re feeling the mental overwhelm that often stops us from focusing on the task at hand.
The net result is that we’re more deliberate about doing things that are important and can do more of the things that are important in the same amount of time.
2. Do things at a natural pace
Humans are not machines.
We can’t be always be working at high intensity for 8-10 hours a day week after week. We need to implement seasonality and rhythm into our daily and weekly work.
There should be times of day and/or days of the week where it is more or less intense.
We can’t be doing deep and focused work all the day every day. That's exhausting.
Instead, we need to recalibrate our expectations and adjust the timescale for achievement so that we’re working at a more natural pace.
3. Obsess over the quality (without being paralysed by perfection)
Once you have fewer things on your plate and you’re scheduling your work out such that you’re working at a natural human pace, doing top quality work becomes easier to do.
Producing high quality work is what will truly move the needle in your business, career or personal life goals.
Practicing these three principles in tandem will not only boost your productivity without burnout and help you feel good about how you spent your time; it will make you so good at your craft and work that you’ll be hard to ignore!
Three strategies you can use starting today
Now that you understand the principles, it’s time to turn strategies into actionable systems to help you integrate Slow Productivity into your life.
Starting with these three practical and powerful strategies that are simple to implement today.
I’ve built these systems in Notion but these principles apply no matter what tool you use to manage your life and work.
1. Stop over scheduling your days and weeks
As a solopreneur, you are in charge of everything - content creation, delivering on client projects, marketing, sales, updating your website etc.
Because of this, it’s easy for us get militant about scheduling our days and overestimating how much we can actually accomplish in a day. Humans are optimistic like that.
To avoid this, I plan out my tasks daily and weekly in Notion, and then time block plan my working hours in Notion and Notion Calendar.
My energy levels peak in the morning, so that time is reserved for deep work. Once my energy dips after lunch, that time is used for less intense activities like meetings, emails and social media.
Aim for 2 to 4 hours of focused deep work a day.
Science has shown that the most productive thinkers and creators in history like Charles Darwin, Henri Poincaré and Stephen King only work around 4 hours a day.
The rest of their time was for mind wandering, resting and ideating.
2. Plan to do nothing, especially on the weekends
Scheduling “do nothing” time is equally important for productivity as scheduling deep work time.
Rest is what fuels our energy and productivity.
For me, weeknights and weekends are for relaxation, socialisation and spending with family.
Drawing this boundary around work is vital to prevent burnout and exhaustion.
3. Use a Pull (not Push) system for workload management
It’s so easy to add (Push) more and more projects to our plate.
Especially if we don’t add with intention or set healthy boundaries about the work we’re willing to take on.
With each new project comes administrative overhead to manage, taking you away from focus work time.
A simple but powerful way I approach managing my workload as a solopreneur is using the Pull System, where I only have 1 to 3 active projects on my plate at any one time.
All other projects sit on my Backlog List in my Notion project management system, until they’re ready to be “Pulled” onto my Active Project List.
Kanban boards in Notion and other digital tools are a fantastic way to easily visualise and manage all your projects and tasks.
This intentional planning and workload management has been a game changer in avoiding burnout and feeling good about how I spend my working hours.
A big mistake people make when applying these strategies
Change and habit building takes time and effort at the beginning.
But the rewards are well worth it.
A mistake people make is trying to implement all these strategies into their life all at the same time.
Don’t do what I did and implement all the slow productivity strategies and build all the systems at the same time. That was exhausting and overwhelming.
Instead, I recommend you pick one strategy and do that for 2 to 4 weeks before adding the next strategy into you life. This makes sure one strategy has been fully embedded in your life before you add another one.
I’ve only shared my top 3 most strategies from Slow Productivity to get you started.
There are a ton more actionable ideas and strategies in Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity book that you can apply to your career, life and business.
I’ve picked these 3 strategies because they’ve been the most impactful strategies that I’ve incorporated into my Notion systems that has help me avoid burnout and has made the pursuit of running a solo business productive, enjoyable and fulfilling.
Key takeaways
Here’s a recap of the top 3 Slow Productivity strategies you can start applying today:
Stop over scheduling your days and weeks.
Plan to do nothing, especially on the weekends.
Use a Pull (not Push) system for workload management.
P.S. Do you currently use Notion but feel like it’s a messy dumping ground of pages and templates you’ve never used?
If you’re looking to simplify, streamline and supercharge your organisation in Notion to boost your productivity and save time… You might be keen to join the waitlist for the 5-day email course: Clutter to Clarity in Notion Roadmap.
You’ll learn and apply the 5 Steps to Find What You Need, When You Need It and Stop Wasting Time in Search Mode.
Join the waitlist to be the first to get the free course in September.
Connect with Janice:
If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear them!
You can connect with me on LinkedIn, X/Twitter or through my newsletter, The Slow Digest
Great tips, thank you. Cal Newport's work really speaks to me. And using Notion to implement them is a good idea. I'm looking forward to your help with that Janice!
I've read Cal Newport's book, and these observations are spot on. I've found that when I do one thing at a time and stop worrying about everything else, life is much simpler.
Make a list.
Prioritize it.
Work through the tasks one at a time.