Cal Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. He also writes books about time management. Nature career summarized from his latest book Slow Productivity, the 7 ways to practise slow productivity in the lab:

Limit daily goals.

Newport recommends working on, and obsessing about, one large project a day rather than switching back and forth between multiple big tasks. This is something Newport learnt from computer scientist Nancy Lynch, his doctoral adviser at MIT.

Megan Rogers: Trying to task-batch goals and projects on specific days (or even portions of days) has been extremely helpful to me. I try to schedule student mentorship meetings back-to-back on a couple of days, teaching tasks on a different day and reserve one full day for deep research work (generally focused on one or two papers) without any interruptions. I’m a big advocate of minimizing task-switching as much as possible.

Combine rituals and locations.

This will help to develop a regular ‘autopilot’ pattern. Newport cites an academic who, after Friday lunch in the university canteen, chooses the same library booth to work through grant reports before heading back to her office with a coffee.

Introduce docket-clearing team meetings.

Have a fixed, weekly meeting to work through pending tasks that require collaboration or clarification, all logged in a shared document. One 30-minute session can save hours of back-and-forth e-mails, says Newport.

Take your time.

Notable scientists Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Marie Curie helped to shape the modern scientific enterprise, but the pace at which they worked straddled many decades and involved periods of rest and reflection. Like them, allow your most important work to evolve over a sustainable timeline at various levels of intensity.

Craft a five-year or similar long-term plan for major goals.

Newport did so during his doctorate, and it enabled him to pursue a writing career alongside his academic interests, giving him the space to experiment, for example with different writing styles.

M.R.: I have done this loosely for key goals and milestones, but it’s a challenge to get more specific than that. You never know what opportunities might arise and change your plans in the meantime.

Don’t schedule meetings on Mondays.

It will help you to ease back into work after the weekend and make Sunday evenings more enjoyable.

M.R.: This is excellent advice but it doesn’t need to be Monday; rather, it could be any day that makes sense for the individual. I sometimes actually like having some of my meetings on Mondays or early in the week to be able to plan and delegate tasks to the team for the week.

Invest in high-quality tools.

As a postdoctoral researcher in 2010, Newport bought a US$50 notebook to record lab experiments, thinking that the high-end product made him more structured and careful in his thinking. He recently flipped through it and realized that it contained the seeds of seven peer-reviewed publications

reference

Anne Gulland (2024) Slow productivity worked for Marie Curie — here’s why you should adopt it, too. Nature 632, 461-463 (2024) doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02540-0