It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity An Article by Cal Newport www.newyorker.com The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focussing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase. Efficiency is the Enemy productivity
Some emptiness in us Whenever we encounter beauty we become aware, each time with a sense of shock and pleasure, faint though it may be, that some emptiness in us, not consciously felt but continually present, has been assuaged and fulfilled. We have a sudden high sense of completeness and harmony. David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design The Timeless Way of Building beauty