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Hustle culture is back. Louder, prouder,
and somehow even more extreme. Early
morning routines, bold claims, and
whatever the [ __ ] this is. But a counter
movement is also gaining ground. Call it
anti-hustle, essentialism, or slow
productivity. A generation of knowledge
workers are starting to rethink what it
actually means to find success. And I'm
one of them. After years of grinding 50
plus hours a week, I cut my schedule
down to about 25. It's the slowest and
most intentional pace I've worked at in
over a decade. And the really surprising
part about this entire experience is
that I haven't lost momentum at all. And
in fact, if anything, I think I'm
starting to make some of my best work
yet. This video is sponsored by
Squarespace. I'll share more about why I
use them for all my websites later.
There's no shortage of books, podcasts,
and YouTube videos promising the secret
to productivity. Each one sharing a new
tip, routine, or morning ritual.
Productivity is how much money you get
out for the time you put in.
There is actually a hidden secret to
productivity and fulfillment. You know
exactly what you need to do right now.
I've always secretly wanted to be a
machine.
Instead of spending time getting in the
mood to work, just stop working.
When people ask me like, "Hey Dan, what
did you do to be successful? To drive
those cars or fly around on your plane?"
Uh, it's what I don't do. You ain't been
getting done. The advice is a mixed bag.
On one side, you've got the hustle bros
telling you to wake up at 4:00 a.m. down
a protein shake and grind until your
eyes bleed. On the other end, you've got
the quiet quitting movement. People
telling you to do the bare minimum and
coast towards your bimonthly paycheck.
Somewhere in the middle, you'll find Cal
Newport. His bestselling books like Deep
Work and Digital Minimalism push back
against traditional wisdom. Cal recently
laid out a more sustainable approach to
work in his book, Slow Productivity.
There's been a lot of talk about
productivity in recent years. What did
you feel was missing from the
conversation that led you to introduce
this idea of slow productivity?
Well, in knowledge work in particular,
we use the word productivity all the
time and we have no idea what we mean by
it. So, if you look back at industrial
manufacturing or you look at farming,
productivity is really clearly defined,
right? It's a ratio. How much output did
you produce for each unit input? How
many bushels of wheat were produced per
acre of farmland? How many model T's
came out of the factory for paid worker
hour that is on your payroll. And if
that number got better, then whatever
you were doing was more productive. But
when we moved to knowledge work, where
we were largely using our brains to
produce value, we lost the ability to
make those simple measurements because
there was no one thing that we were
doing. There was no one collection of
widgets we could point to and say,
"Here's what I actually produce today."
Maybe I'm working on four or five
different things and what those things
are might vary over time and they're
different than what the person next to
me is working on as well. So without the
ability to measure inputs and outputs,
all of our existing definitions of
productivity began to falter. And I
think this has been one of the defining
problems especially of the late 20th and
early 21st century in work.
I've always had difficulty finding
balance with my work from my early days
as a freelancer and especially after
starting my YouTube channel back in
2017. I've been pretty open about those
struggles. Over the past 2 weeks, I've
had pretty severe anxiety, pretty
crippling anxiety. I have thought about
quitting YouTube. I'm not saying that
I'm having a full-blown mental
breakdown. I'm just saying that it's
getting close. For years, I found myself
stuck in a cycle of churn and burn. I
called it ambition. But really, I didn't
know how to stop. But after becoming a
parent, my priorities have changed. The
nights and weekends I used to spend
catching up on work are now time that
I'd rather spend with my family. I
needed a completely different framework.
And that's where slow productivity came
in. A philosophy for approaching
knowledge work in a sustainable and
meaningful way built around three core
principles. If you really want to create
a sustainable career, produce stuff that
matters. Do in a way that is satisfying
so you don't burn out. There's three
things that matter. You need to be
careful about how many things you're
working on at the same time. And in
fact, do fewer things at once. Two, you
have to work at more of a natural pace.
So the amount of time you assume things
are going to take, make that realistic.
Finally, you have to obsess over
quality. So the quality of what you
produce really matters and you should
care a lot about it. Those three
principles stand uh in opposition to
pseudo productivity which says all we
care about is visible busyness. I'm
going to break down the rest of this
video into three sections diving into
each and explain how they help me
finally find work life balance.
I've been a content creator for the past
15 years and I've seen all the advice
about how to build a successful
business. Most of it boils down to one
clear message. Do more. Make more
videos. Write a newsletter. Post shorts
on Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube.
Launch a podcast, engage with every
comment and DM, and publish a Patreon
page. Create a digital course, a free
giveaway to promote it, and an email
salesunnel to run on autopilot. Oh, and
don't forget to stay on top of trends,
repurpose your content, track analytics,
experiment with new formats, and somehow
manage the never-ending admin of running
a business. There's always another skill
to pick up, always another project to
tackle, another plate to keep spinning.
But if you want to start reclaiming your
time, the first key is to do fewer
things.
Well, when I tell people they should do
fewer things, they get worried that what
I'm suggesting is that they accomplish
fewer things. But actually, it's a very
pragmatic recommendation because what
happens when you have too many things on
your plate? Well, each of these things
that you've agreed to do brings with it
administrative overhead. I mean, I have
to send emails to people. I have to have
meetings with people. I have to think
about it. There's just overhead to tasks
that you take on from small to large. I
call that overhead tax. As you say yes
to more and more things, the amount of
total overhead tax you're paying begins
to add up. And because your time each
day is finite, there's only so many
hours you can actually work. After a
while, if your plate is sufficiently
full, most of your day now becomes
wrangling overhead packs. The real work
might take a certain number of hours.
Say writing an article in 10 hours. But
the hidden costs pile on. email threads
with editors, revisions, chasing
permissions, invoicing, your 10-hour
project turns into 20 pretty quickly. A
few months ago, I started to think about
how I could reduce my own workload. And
the first idea I came up with seemed a
little bit crazy, if not completely
reckless. I asked myself, what if I only
made long- form YouTube videos and that
was it? Could that be enough? Would I
still find it fulfilling? Would it help
me grow creatively and professionally?
Or would it be a financial disaster? I
decided it was worth it to experiment.
And that meant making some really hard
cuts. No more weekly newsletters, no
more endless social content, no more
behind-the-scenes videos of my bonus
channel, no more podcast episodes, no
more interviews, practically no
meetings, and very little phone calls. I
stopped doing about 90% of the work I
thought was essential, even if I enjoyed
it, even if it was fun to make way for
my core mission, my most important work.
So, of course, there are still some
things that I do outside of YouTube
videos, like managing my YouTube course
and doing business administration stuff,
but I was noticeably less busy with my
overall workload. The first month of
adjusting to this new pace, I felt so
much lighter. I was less frustrated that
I was constantly falling behind and I
was more proud of the work that I was
making. But there was still one thing
that I had to contend with. My inner
hustle, bro. That voice in my head that
kept whispering,
"Shouldn't you be doing more?"
In many corners of the internet, hustle
is romanticized to the extreme. Endless
work days are glorified. Rest is
dismissed as weakness. And some people
literally don't even know what a weekend
is.
I'm going to Spain Friday till Monday
morning. I call that's like a mini
retirement.
That's a weekend.
It's a weekend. It's a mini retirement.
There's this cultural reverence for hard
work. As if the more hours you put in,
the more virtuous you are.
They are so soft. They have no work
ethic.
I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill.
I'm 22 miles in, [ __ ]
Ripple down. 4x 5x down your hustle.
Most people are weak. Most people don't
want to go to that extra mile.
No one will outwork me. No one. Just
takes work. Shitloads and shitloads of
work.
You're allowed to be selfish. You're
happy to give up leisure, sleep, family
time. I will not be outworked. Period.
To suggest that hard work isn't the
foundation for success would be a slap
in the face to most Americans. So, there
are plenty of examples of high achievers
and organizations that thrive on hustle.
From tech startups to obsessive
athletes, there are TV shows with
extremely demanding production
schedules. What would you say to someone
that points at these examples as proof
that hard work and hustle creates better
outcomes? So there are some fields in
which it is inevitable that you have to
work really long hours because
structurally it's been set up that way.
But most definitions that people have
for avoiding mediocrity and having a
professional life that is this
interesting or successful that they're
proud of isn't actually well served by
that approach. You study the lives of
people who get really good at thing
master chefs. You look at master
comedians or writers. Uh it's not about
a hustle in a given day. It's about I
stuck with this craft for 10 years. I
didn't get distracted by other things.
It's orthogonal to hustle. There's
rarely been a time in this 20-year
writing career where I'm up late writing
or something like this, but I've never
not been writing. It's not hard in the
sense of, "Oh god, I worked 15 hours and
I'm not sleeping." But I'm always
writing and it's focused and it's
relentless and I'm always trying to get
better and I'm always trying to hone
that craft. Doing the stuff that really
is making you better that other people
aren't willing to do and just uh
insisting on doing that day after day
after day. That's almost always the
recipe for things that are awesome. When
the only productivity tool you have is
to act like a human battering ram, the
consequences are inevitable. Burnout,
anxiety, depression, a life that serves
your work instead of the other way
around. And that's why one of the key
principles of slow productivity is to
work at a natural pace. The important
thing to focus on is time scale. The
real question isn't how much you can
produce in a single day, week, or month,
but how much you can accomplish over the
course of years. When you think this
way, it suddenly makes sense to have
leisurely days, to take an afternoon
siesta, or to even brace yourself, take
a weekend.
So, to have lots of mini retirements
during the year is what I've tried to do
in the last few years. I'm not sure I'm
doing it very successfully.
When I cut down my commitments and gave
myself a reasonable deadline of one
video every 2 weeks, I naturally began
working at a calmer, more sustainable
pace. Fewer projects meant less overhead
tax, which gave me hours back that I
hadn't had in years. I used that time to
invest in my health. I doubled my
strength training days from 2 to 4. I
kept up my weekly game of squash and I
found time to prepare more healthy meals
versus resorting to the processed meals
I would go to when I got super busy. All
in, I usually work 5 to 6 hours a day
now, which feels crazy compared to the
past. But here's the important thing.
Moving slower hasn't made me less
ambitious. It's made me more focused.
Because even though I'm working at a
slower pace, it doesn't mean that I
don't want to produce exceptional work.
I'm really into this whole slow
productivity thing. So much so that I'm
going to do my whole Squarespace ad for
this video in slow motion.
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and for putting up with my dumb [ __ ]
For those that embrace slow
productivity, the whole point isn't just
to work less. While they might have
4-day work weeks or take multiple months
off per year, their goal is still to
create better work. The third principle
of slow productivity is obsess over
quality. At first glance, it seems like
it doesn't belong with the other two.
Why did you think this was an important
part of the puzzle? If you take that
piece out, the whole slow productivity
project is going to begin to falter.
Because without that piece, you're just
building up an antagonistic relationship
with work. If you obsess over quality,
you're going to get better at things
that people care about. When you get
better at things that people care about,
you have more leverage over the way that
your working life unfolds. If you're on
the ball, if you're organized, it's
like, "Yeah, I'm going to get this done
next Wednesday." And you give it to them
next Wednesday and it's good. Yeah,
sure. You got this queue or these quotas
or like whatever you want to do, right?
You want to quote a lot of Cal Newport,
like that's great. Uh because you
deliver.
Personally, I think about quality a lot
as a content creator. I see it as an
opportunity to stand out in an
increasingly noisy landscape. But that's
not exactly a popular opinion.
If you want to write down one word and
stick it in your mirror from this whole
talk, the word is volume. 30, 40, 50, 60
pieces of content a day.
There's a lot of talk online about
output. How often you post, how many
times a day you show up on every
platform. But for creators and artists
who aren't merely personalities, who
actually care about their work, and who
find purpose in the creative process,
turnurning out more content isn't the
answer. Instagram currently gets 22
million videos uploaded to its platform
every day. Do you really think making an
extra three videos this week are going
to help you stand out? If you want to
rise above the noise and make something
that people actually remember and that
leaves an impact, it makes more sense to
put your energy into fewer things. It's
not about sheer volume. It's about using
the time you have to create the best
work you're capable of. So, the videos
that I've been making lately, videos
like this one, have been a big shift for
me. I've cleared my plate. I've done
fewer things, and I've poured everything
into each one. And something really cool
happened. I started getting comments
saying, "These were some of my best
videos yet." And while that was
encouraging, if I'm being honest, it
wasn't the most important part. What
mattered most was that I was proud of
the work that I was making instead of
just rushing from one project to the
next. Thanks so much to Cal for joining
me for this one. I'll link his book in
the description below. I highly
recommend it. And if you want to catch
my full interview with Cal, you can
subscribe to me over on Patreon. Thanks
so much and I'll see you next time.
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