Slow Productivity is a book that could easily have been a blog post but the three sub-heading of that hypothetical post are sound and worth adopting. They could also fit on a fortune cookie:
- Do fewer things.
- Work at a natural pace.
- Obsess over quality.
These are as obvious as they are short. Of course, you don’t need a book to learn and understand them — it’s enough to see what people who do great things are doing themselves, like Nassim Taleb, or Stephen Wolfram, or any good writer who writes their own books. But if you are too busy to learn by example and dig into people’s work habits described peacemeal and without a big red arrow pointing to the things that everyone should do, well, then, this is the right book for you.
It is also a bit of a cuckoo’s egg, ready-made for wide distribution through book clubs and large corporate purchases, which it says right on the copyright page. But then if you are a large American corporation with a large American corporation’s goals and values, maybe having your employees all becoming part-time flaneurs may not be the best idea. The American number go up because of quantity not quality, and you get to quantity by grinding it out, not by taking long walks.
So, there may need to be an intermediate step there, another airport book for Newport to write for the executives and the board members about short-term goals not reigning supreme. Good luck with that.