I really enjoyed meeting so many of you at my Politics and Prose event a couple weeks ago. It was meaningful for me to be talking about my books in person again after having to launch my last title during a pandemic. It was also a great opportunity to thank people for their support of Slow Productivity, which just yesterday landed #4 on the NYT’s monthly business bestseller list. (If you haven’t bought Slow Productivity yet, you should! If you read this newsletter, you’ll love it…) It’s with all this in mind that I wanted to briefly share two upcoming opportunities to come meet me and hear me ..read more

Earlier this month, a group of scientists from universities around the world published the results of an ingeniously simple experiment in the journal PLoS ONE. Every month, for ten months, they randomly selected an article from a journal in their field to promote on their Twitter accounts, which, collectively, added up to around 230,000 followers. They then later compared the success of these tweeted articles with control articles randomly selected from the same issues. The result? No statistically significant increase in citations in the promoted articles versus the controls. There was a dif ..read more

A brief book update: I wanted to share that Slow Productivity debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list last week! Which is all to say: thank you for helping this book make such a splash. If you still haven’t purchased a copy, here are two nudges to consider: (1) due to the rush of initial sales, Amazon has temporarily dropped the hardcover price significantly, making it the cheapest it will likely ever be (US | UK); and (2) if you prefer audio, maybe it will help to learn that I recorded the audiobook myself. I uploaded a clip so you can check it out (US | UK). Last March, S ..read more

I know it’s been a minute since I’ve published one of my normal essays. I’ll be returning to these soon as the chaos of the Slow Productivity launch dissipates. In the meantime, I wanted to share two quick notes: one about the book, and one about something interesting (but completely unrelated) that several of you have sent in my direction recently… A note about the book On Saturday, March 16th at 3:00pm, I’ll be appearing at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. I’ll be joined in conversation with David Epstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Range. We’ll talk ..read more

My podcast producer recently turned me onto a show called Acquired, which features its co-hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, diving deep into the backstories of well-known brands and companies, from Porsche and Nike, to Amazon and Nintendo. It turns out I was late to this party. In the eight years since Acquired was originally launched, it has grown into a huge hit. The show now serves more than 200,000 downloads per episode. As Rosenthal revealed in a Fast Company profile last summer, they now face the problem of their audience becoming too large for their advertisers to afford paying t ..read more

In 1951, Abraham Joshua Heschel published a monograph titled simply, The Sabbath. It consisted of ten short chapters, comprising of less than a hundred total pages, illustrated with original wood engravings by Ilya Schor. Early in the book, Heschel establishes the unique importance the Bible places on rest: “It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word qadosh [a transliteration of the Hebrew term for ‘holy’] is used for the first time: in the Book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation. How extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time: ‘And God ble ..read more

It’s hard to believe that we’re less than two months away from the publication of my new book, ​Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout​, which comes out on March 5th. As promised by the subtitle, this book describes a groundbreaking new philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload, based around three principles that will sound familiars to long-time readers of this newsletter: (1) Do Fewer Things; (2) Work at a Natural Pace; (3) Obsess Over Quality. It’s here that I want to straight-up ask you a favor: If you were thinking of buying the ..read more

One of the least understood components of my time-block planner is the “daily metrics” box that tops every pair of planning pages. Given that we’ve recently arrived at the beginning of a new year, an event that inevitably suffuses our culture with talk of reinvention and self-improvement, it seems an opportune time to look a little closer at this under-appreciated idea. The mechanics of metric tracking are easy to explain. At the end of each day, you record a collection of symbols that describe your engagement with various key behaviors. These metrics can be binary. For example, you might hav ..read more

Earlier this week, Neil Gaiman was interviewed on Icelandic television. Around the twenty-five minute mark of the program, the topic turned to the author’s thoughts about the internet. “I love blogging. I blog less now in the era of microblogging,” Gaiman explained, referring to his famously long-running online journal hosted at neilgaiman.com. “I miss the days of just sort of feeling like you could create a community by talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world.” As he continues, it becomes clear that Gaiman’s affection for this more personal and independent version of online communica ..read more

In the context of knowledge work there are two primary ways to communicate. The first is synchronous, which requires all parties to be interacting at the same time. This mode includes face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and video conferences. The second way is asynchronous, which allows senders to deliver their messages, and receivers to read them, when each is ready. This mode includes memos, voicemails, and, most notably in recent years, email. Which communication style is better? This simple question requires a complicated answer. The great advantage of asynchrony is its low logistical ove ..read more