Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Author:Cal Newport [Newport, Cal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

DEFINE A SHORTER WORK YEAR

After the war, Ian Fleming, the novelist who would go on to write the James Bond spy thrillers, accepted a job with Kemsley Newspapers, a British media company best known for its ownership of the Sunday Times. Fleming was hired as its foreign manager, which put him in charge of the group’s extensive network of overseas correspondents. He was well qualified for the job given his work with British Naval Intelligence—a position that had sent him around the world during the war. What’s relevant to our purposes here, however, is less the details of Fleming’s new employment than the contract he signed when he agreed to the position. Fleming made a deal with Kemsley that required him to work only ten months each year. The other two months would be taken as an annual vacation.

The motivation for this unusual agreement came in 1942, when Fleming, then a thirty-four-year-old commander, was sent to Jamaica as part of Operation Golden Eye, which was investigating potential German U-boat activity in the Caribbean. Fleming fell in love with the quiet and beauty of the island, and vowed that when the war was over, he’d find a way to return. His opportunity to make good on this promise came in 1946, when he learned of a fifteen-acre property, near the small port town of Oracabessa Bay, that had just gone up for sale. It wasn’t stunning. A former donkey racetrack, the parcel was perched on a low headland, choked with tropical overbrush. But Fleming saw the potential. He telegraphed his agent to purchase the land, then cleared a plot to build a modest one-story house, with concrete floors and barely functioning plumbing. “The windows that look towards the sea are glassless,” explained the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who visited Fleming’s new home soon after its construction, “but equipped with outside shutters against the rain: enormous quadrilaterals . . . tame the elements, as it were, into an ever-changing fresco of which one can never tire.” In honor of its inspiration, Fleming named his ramshackle estate Goldeneye.

This is why Fleming demanded two months’ vacation in his contract. Each year, in fulfillment of his wartime promise to himself, he could now escape the dreary London winters to revel in the intentional slowness of life at Goldeneye. Initially, Fleming’s retreats were purely hedonistic. When on the island, he would snorkel in the morning, in the inlet below his house, then turn his attention toward carousing—compensating, with a decidedly British upper-class vigor, for the darkness of his war experience. But then in 1952, at the urging of his new wife, Ann Charteris, Fleming took to writing while vacationing in Jamaica. She thought the activity would distract him from stress in his personal life.[*] That winter he wrote a draft of Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel. He went on to write a dozen more, always following the same general routine: outline the new novel’s plot in London in the fall, write a full

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