All right, let's move on to some questions. We will start as always with some queries about deep work. Our first comes from Richard. Richard asks, "How can I find peace to work on long-term projects only for a short time each day?" As he elaborates, "I work on an important and non-urgent project with full focus for one hour each morning before I walk my dog.

This approach has helped me make significant progress on several different projects. However, I often become stressed about the sheer amount of work left to complete in the project and don't have the patience to stick to the plan." Well, Richard, I am a big believer in the slow but steady approach when we're talking about important but non-urgent projects.

So there's not a boss that needs this thing right away. It's not at the key intersection of your business thriving or folding, something that takes your time. You're writing the novel. No one is expecting it next week, so might as well write a little bit each day. I'm a big fan of that.

That falls under my rubric of slow productivity. So one of the big ideas in my slow productivity philosophy is that you should shift your focus, your time scale in which you're focusing, away from days and weeks and towards months and years. That is, instead of asking, "What did I accomplish over the last few days or weeks?" You said, "What do I accomplish?

What did I accomplish over the last six months, over the last two years?" That is a really cool scale on which to produce big things because you can produce things at a very human pace. When you are working to have a big project done in a year, you can have a two-week period in there where you're not doing much.

You can have a two-week period where you're doing a lot. You can have a vacation where you're really crunching away on it and then a three-day period where you're at a conference and doing nothing on it. You get this seasonality. You're able to ebb and flow your energy in ways that make sense for your current circumstances.

It's a great scale at which to get work done, and that's the scale you're working. All of that is preamble to say, "I like what you're doing." I will give you two potential adjustments. One, you might consider 90 minutes versus 60. That sounds like a small thing, but 60 is really on the border of getting a reasonable return on your time investment because you're probably losing up to 15 minutes context switching fully into what you're working on.

Now that's really leaving you with only 45 minutes where you're at full power. There's also a tail effect at the end of work periods where you're beginning to wrap up what you're doing, clean up loose ends, make sure you've captured loose thoughts. That's not actually peak production time. If we take 5 to 10 minutes for that tail off period at the end of each work session, we put those together, you now have 20 to 25 minutes that you're not just peak producing.

If you're only working for an hour, you're maybe only getting 30 to 40 minutes of production. That is not a lot. Now if you do 90 minutes, the way I think about it is that you're going to get at least a solid hour of full high-end production, but that's a small enough amount of time that you could probably do it even on low energy days or days where you're a little bit sick.

That would be one thing I would say. Start a little earlier, do 90 minutes. Then the second thing I would say is throw in dashes. I mean dash like a sprint. When you get to a milestone looming, I could finish the final draft or the final chapter and have something I could send to someone to look at.

You see that thing looming, an important milestone, make a much harder sprint at that point. All right, I'm going to take Friday off from work for the next two weeks. I'm going to go to the cabin. I'm going to start work at 10 a.m. and get three hours a day, and I'm going to go for it and push through the milestones.

That typically is the back and forth rhythm I like for important but non-urgent projects. The good 90 minutes most days, making progress, making progress, then a really hard push when you get to a milestone. You sometimes need those hard pushes to get the final hard thing done so you don't spin your wheels.

Do those two things and I'm fine. I'm fine with what you're doing here. Take on the slow productivity mindset. It's months and years is the scale at which you care about production, not days and weeks. Really cool things you're proud of will get done. That's a completely reasonable pace, so keep at what you're doing.

Do those adjustments, but otherwise put in those hours again and again and again. Diligently, you'll look up one day and say, "Huh, I produced something pretty cool."