Slow Productivity: Do Fewer Things
Cut simultaneous projects to kill the admin overhead that blocks deep work
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Cal Newport argues the enemy of meaningful work is not effort but overload. Each active project necessarily brings overhead — meetings, emails, coordination — and when too many projects run in parallel, that overhead overlaps and consumes the same time you need for deep work. The mechanism is simple: reduce the number of things you are actively working on so the overhead shrinks, then run remaining projects in series rather than parallel. He compares this to series versus parallel circuits — working on a book, videos, and a business a little each day gets almost nothing finished, whereas one intense focus at a time actually completes work. The compromise for large projects is to break them into chunks handled one at a time, accepting the friction of macro-switching to escape the impossibility of micro-switching between ten things.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal. Newport developed this as the first principle of his book Slow Productivity, drawing on years of research into knowledge-work overload and his own pandemic-era experience of piling on too many projects then discovering the overhead had made deep work impossible.
Core principles
- 01Overload, not laziness, is the true villain of knowledge work.
- 02Every active project drags admin overhead with it; overhead compounds when projects stack.
- 03Do projects in series, not parallel — near-zero gets finished when everything runs at once.
- 04Activity does not automatically alchemise into results.
- 05Sometimes doing something great requires doing much less, not pushing more in.
How to run it
- 1
Name overload as the villain
Recognise that your inability to do deep work comes from too many concurrent projects, not from insufficient effort or discipline.
Pro tip Notice that projects themselves are good — it is their accumulated overhead that clogs the schedule.
- 2
Inventory everything you have said yes to
Write down every project and commitment currently on your plate, active or dormant.
Watch out You will likely find you have implicitly agreed to far more than you can hold in mind at once.
- 3
Reduce to a minimum set of active projects
Decide the maximum number of projects you must have going at once and hold to it, letting the rest wait.
Pro tip Aim for one to three active things at any moment.
- 4
Work in series, not parallel
Focus intensely on one project for a block of time, finish or advance it, then move to the next rather than touching everything daily.
Pro tip Match the block length to the project's scale — a video is half a day, a chapter a week or two, a full book a month.
Watch out Trying to work on a book two hours a day loses half an hour each session just reloading context into your head.
- 5
Contain the overhead of what remains
For each active project, get structured about where information goes instead of leaving it as ad hoc back-and-forth messaging.
Pro tip Either get super structured about process or simplify the project count further — those are the only two levers.
In the wild
Ali Abdaal assumed the best way to write a book was a little each day alongside YouTube and business work — the parallel-circuit approach. In practice almost nothing got done. Switching to series (one week only on the book, next week batching videos, next week the product) meant work actually completed, even though the macro-switching felt annoying.
→ Work got finished instead of stalling across ten half-touched fronts.
Early in the pandemic Newport, fearing pay freezes and a collapsing publishing industry, went into hustle mode and got more irons in the fire. A year and a half later he realised he had too much and could no longer do deep work — the overhead from stacked projects had swallowed his focus.
→ He scaled back to fewer active projects to recover capacity for deep work.
Common mistakes
Believing parallel work is more efficient
Working a little on every project each day feels productive but produces almost nothing because context-reloading and overlapping overhead dominate the time.
Confusing activity with results
Piling on more effort and hours does not reliably improve output — a zero-prep video can outperform one painstakingly produced over six months.
Is it for you?
Best for
Knowledge workers, writers, and creators drowning in overhead from too many simultaneous commitments.
Not ideal for
Roles that genuinely require rapid context-switching across many small reactive tasks with no control over intake.
From the transcript
“overload is the the the key villain here”
“the projects are awesome it's the overhead that comes with the projects that that adds up”
“activity doesn't by default alchemize into results”
From the episode
Cal Newport: The Secrets of Slow Productivity
Cal Newport