Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.

In Cal Newport’s upcoming book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, he discusses the question of what we should do in the face of all the burnout and exhaustion we’ve been seeing for the past 4-5 years.

Now, if you’ve ever read Cal’s work, you’ll know that his research goes deep! As a matter of fact, for this book, he started taking a look at what productivity meant for our Paleolithic ancestors!

I’m not going back that far, but as we look back over the past few years, we can certainly see that the productivity pendulum has swung far to the extreme of loading ourselves up with too much work and too much pressure and not enough rest and recovery.

Judging from the number of books on the subject recently available, there now seems to be this reactionary swing back to the “Do Nothing” movement.

So Cal’s take seems to be that there is a middle path between these two extremes. There is a sustainable, thoughtful, more natural pace to approach our work and to be productive without killing ourselves and everyone around us.

His adage of “do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality” seems to be a nod to Michael Pollan’s dietary advice of “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” And that makes sense as Pollan was the one to introduce the idea of slow eating into the American lexicon.

For years now, I have continued to come back to this idea of a Middle Way. I tend to be someone who gravitates toward extremes. They sound exciting and sexy, don’t they? But then when I’m deep into a long month of work where I’ve overcommitted, or I’m over my head in a project that I should’ve asked for help on, I find myself regretting the extreme and moving back towards a middle path.

All of my clients lately are my age (50-ish) and we all seem to be at the same point in life where we’re done working ourselves to a state of exhaustion to agitation. We’re tired of missing out on life and we’re fully convinced that earning more money, reputation, and accolades ain’t doing shit for us. Not really. So we’re all coming back to this slower approach to productivity where we can do great work, maintain our health and sanity, and not lose ourselves in our careers.

If this is what the second half of life looks like, I’ll take it all day long!