Hustle culture lied to you (here’s a better way)

Hustle culture is back. Louder, prouder, and somehow even more extreme. Early morning routines, bold claims, and whatever the f*** this is. But a counter movement is also gaining ground. Call it anti-hustle, essentialism, or slow productivity, a generation of knowledge workers are starting to rethink what it actually means to find success. And I'm one of them! After years of grinding 50 plus hours a week, I cut my schedule down to about 25. It's the slowest and most intentional pace I've worked at in over a decade. And the really surprising part about this entire experience is that I haven't lost momentum at all. And in fact, if anything, I think I'm starting to make some of my best work yet. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. I'll share more about why I use them for all my websites later. There's no shortage of books, podcasts, and YouTube videos promising the secret to productivity, each one sharing a new tip, routine, or morning ritual. Productivity is how much money you get out for the time you put in. There is actually a hidden secret to productivity and fulfillment. You know exactly what you need to do right now. I've always secretly wanted to be a machine. Instead of spending time getting in the mood to work, just stop working. When people ask me like, hey Dan, what did you do to be successful to drive those cars or fly around on your plane? It's what I don't do. You ain't been getting s*** done. The advice is a mixed bag. On one side, you've got the hustle bros telling you to wake up at 4am, down a protein shake and grind until your eyes bleed. On the other end, you've got the quiet quitting movement. People telling you to do the bare minimum and coast towards your bi-monthly paycheck. Somewhere in the middle, you'll find Cal Newport. His best-selling books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism push back against traditional wisdom. Cal recently laid out a more sustainable approach to work in his book Slow Productivity. There's been a lot of talk about productivity in recent years. What did you feel was missing from the conversation that led you to introduce this idea of slow productivity? Well, in knowledge work in particular, we use the word productivity all the time, and we have no idea what we mean by it. So if you look back at industrial manufacturing, you look at farming, productivity is really clearly defined, right? It's a ratio. How much output did you produce for each unit input? How many bushels of wheat were produced per acre of farmland? How many Model Ts came out of the factory for paid worker hour that is on your payroll? And if that number got better, then whatever you were doing was more productive. But when we moved to knowledge work, we were largely using our brains to produce value. we lost the ability to make those simple measurements because there was no one thing that we were doing. There was no one collection of widgets we could point to and say, here's what I actually produce today. Maybe I'm working on four or five different things and what those things are might vary over time. And they're different than what the person next to me is working on as well. So without the ability to measure inputs and outputs, all of our existing definitions of productivity began to falter. And I think this has been one of the defining problems, especially of the late 20th and early 21st century in work. I've always had difficulty finding balance with my work from my early days as a freelancer and especially after starting my YouTube channel back in 2017. I've been pretty open about those struggles. Over the past two weeks, I've had pretty severe anxiety, pretty crippling anxiety. I have thought about quitting YouTube. I'm not saying that I'm having a full-blown mental breakdown. I'm just saying that it's getting close. For years, I found myself stuck in a cycle of churn and burn. I called it ambition, but really, I didn't know how to stop. But after becoming a parent, my priorities have changed. The nights and weekends I used to spend catching up on work are now time that I'd rather spend with my family. I needed a completely different framework. And that's where Slow Productivity came in. A philosophy for approaching knowledge work in a sustainable and meaningful way built around three core principles. If you really want to create a sustainable career, produce stuff that matters, do in a way that is satisfying so you don't burn out, there's three things that matter. You need to be careful about how many things you're working on at the same time. And in fact, do fewer things at once. Two, you have to work at more of a natural pace. So the amount of time you assume things are going to take, make that realistic. Finally, you have to obsess over quality. So the quality of what you produce really matters and you should care a lot about it. Those three principles stand in opposition. to suit our productivity, which says all we care about is visible business. I'm going to break down the rest of this video into three sections, diving into each, and explain how they helped me finally find work-life balance. I've been a content creator for the past 15 years, and I've seen all the advice about how to build a successful business. Most of it boils down to one clear message. Do more. Make more videos, write a newsletter, post shorts on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Launch a podcast, engage with every comment and DM, and publish a Patreon page. Create a digital course, a free giveaway to promote it, and an email sales funnel to run on autopilot. Oh, and don't forget to stay on top of trends, repurpose your content, track analytics, experiment with new formats, and somehow manage the never-ending admin of running a business. There's always another skill to pick up, always another project to tackle, another plate to keep spinning. But if you want to start reclaiming your time, the first key is to do fewer things. Well, when I tell people they should do fewer things, they get worried that what I'm suggesting is that they accomplish fewer things. But actually, it's a very pragmatic recommendation because what happens when you have too many things on your plate? Well, each of these things that you've agreed to do brings with it administrative overhead. I mean, I have to send emails to people. I have to have meetings with people. I have to think about it. There's just overhead to tasks that you take on from small to large. I call that overhead tax. As you say yes to more and more things, the amount of total overhead tax you're paying begins to add up. And because your time each day is finite, there's only so many hours you can actually work, after a while, if your plate is sufficiently full, most of your day now becomes wrangling overhead tax. The real work might take a certain number of hours, say writing an article in 10 hours. But the hidden costs pile on. Email threads with editors, revisions, chasing permissions, invoicing. Your 10-hour project turns into 20 pretty quickly. A few months ago, I started to think about how I could reduce my own workload. And the first idea I came up with seemed a little bit crazy, if not completely reckless. I asked myself, what if I only made long-form YouTube videos? And that was it. Could that be enough? Would I still find it fulfilling? Would it help me grow creatively and professionally? Or would it be a financial disaster? I decided it was worth it to experiment, and that meant making some really hard cuts. No more weekly newsletters, no more endless social content, no more behind-the-scenes videos of my bonus channel, no more podcast episodes, no more interviews, practically no meetings, and very little phone calls. I stopped doing about 90% of the work I thought was essential, even if I enjoyed it, even if it was fun, to make way for my core mission, my most important work. So, of course, there are still some things that I do outside of YouTube videos, like managing my YouTube course and doing business administration stuff, but I was noticeably less busy with my overall workload. The first month of adjusting to this new pace, I felt so much lighter. I was less frustrated that I was constantly falling behind, and I was more proud of the work that I was making. But there was still one thing that I had to contend with, my inner hustle bro. That voice in my head that kept whispering, In many corners of the internet, hustle is romanticized to the extreme. Endless workdays are glorified, rest is dismissed as weakness, and some people literally don't even know what a weekend is. I'm going to Spain Friday till Monday morning. That's a mini-retirement. That's a weekend. It's a weekend. It's a mini-retirement. There's this cultural reverence for hard work, as if the more hours you put in, the more virtuous you are. They are so soft. They have no work ethic. I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill. I'm 22 miles in, motherfucker! Ripple down. 4x, 5x down your hustle. Most people are weak. Most people don't want to go to that extra mile. No one will outwork me. No one. It just takes work. Shitloads and shitloads of work. You're allowed to be selfish. You're happy to give up leisure, sleep, family time. I will not be outworked. period. To suggest that hard work isn't the foundation for success would be a slap in the face to most Americans. So there are plenty of examples of high achievers and organizations that thrive on hustle from tech startups to obsessive athletes. There are TV shows with extremely demanding production schedules. What would you say to someone that points at these examples as proof that hard work and hustle creates better outcomes? So there are some fields. In which it is inevitable that you have to work really long hours because structurally it's been set up that way. But most definitions that people have for avoiding mediocrity and having a professional life that is this interesting or successful that they're proud of, isn't actually well served by that approach. You study the lives of people who get really good at things. Master chefs, you look at master comedians or writers. It's not about a hustle in a given day. It's about, I stuck with this craft for 10 years. I didn't get distracted by other things. It's orthogonal. to hustle. There's rarely been a time in this 20-year writing career where I'm up late writing or something like this, but I've never not been writing. It's not hard in the sense of, oh God, I worked 15 hours and I'm not sleeping, but I'm always writing and it's focused and it's relentless and I'm always trying to get better and I'm always trying to hone that craft. Doing the stuff that really is making you better that other people aren't willing to do and just insisting on doing that day after day after day, that's almost always the recipe for things that are awesome. When the only productivity tool you have is to act like a human battering ram, the consequences are inevitable. Burnout, anxiety, depression, a life that serves your work instead of the other way around. And that's why one of the key principles of slow productivity is to work at a natural pace. The important thing to focus on is time scale. The real question isn't how much you can produce in a single day, week, or month, but how much you can accomplish over the course of years. When you think this way, it suddenly makes sense to have leisurely days, to take an afternoon siesta, or to even, brace yourself, take a weekend. So to have lots of mini retirements during the year is what I've tried to do in the last few years. I'm not sure I'm doing it very successfully. When I cut down my commitments and gave myself a reasonable deadline of one video every two weeks, I naturally began working at a calmer, more sustainable pace. Fewer projects meant less overhead tax, which gave me hours back that I hadn't had in years. I used that time to invest in my health. I doubled my strength training days from two to four. I kept up my weekly game of squash and I found time to prepare more healthy meals versus resorting to the processed meals I would go to when I got super busy. All in, I usually work five to six hours a day now, which feels crazy compared to the past. But here's the important thing. Moving slower hasn't made me less ambitious. It's made me more focused. Because even though I'm working at a slower pace, it doesn't mean that I don't want to produce exceptional work. I'm really into this whole slow productivity thing. So much so that I'm going to do my whole Squarespace ad for this video in slow motion. Everyone needs a website. But not everyone can design. That's where Squarespace comes in. This... was a stupid idea. Squarespace has professionally designed templates. An easy to use website builder. Built-in tools to manage your domains, review your analytics, set up an online store, and much, much, Go to Squarespace.com. Okay, I can't do this anymore. Go to Squarespace.com to start your free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash Matt D'Avella to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and for putting up with my dumb shit. For those that embrace slow productivity, the whole point isn't just to work less. While they might have four day work weeks or take multiple months off per year, their goal is still to create better work. The third principle of slow productivity is obsess over quality. At first glance, it seems like it doesn't belong with the other two. Why did you think this was an important part of the puzzle? You take that piece out. The whole slow productivity project is going to begin to falter because without that piece, you're just building up an antagonistic relationship with work. If you obsess over quality, you're going to get better at things that people care about. When you get better at things that people care about, you have more leverage over the way that your working life unfolds. If you're on the ball, if you're organized, like, yeah, I'm going to get this done next Wednesday and you give it to him next Wednesday and it's good. Yeah, sure. You've got this queue or these quotas or like whatever you want to do. You want to quote a lot of Cal Newport? Like, that's great because you deliver. Personally, I think about quality a lot as a content creator. I see it as an opportunity to stand out in an increasingly noisy landscape. But that's not exactly a popular opinion. If you want to write down one word and stick it in your mirror from this whole talk, the word is volume. 30, 40, 50, 60 pieces of content a day. There's a lot of talk online about output. How often you post, how many times a day you show up on every platform. But for creators and artists who aren't merely personalities, who actually care about their work, and who find purpose in the creative process, churning out more content isn't the answer. Instagram currently gets 22 million videos uploaded to its platform every day. Do you really think making an extra three videos this week are going to help you stand out? If you want to rise above the noise and make something that people actually remember and that leaves an impact, it makes more sense to put your energy into fewer things. It's not about sheer volume. It's about using the time you have to create the best work you're capable of. So the videos that I've been making lately, videos like this one, have been a big shift for me. I've cleared my plate, I've done fewer things, and I've poured everything into each one. And something really cool happened. I started getting comments saying these were some of my best videos yet. And while that was encouraging, if I'm being honest, it wasn't the most important part. What mattered most was that I was proud of the work that I was making. Instead of just rushing from one project, to the next. Thanks so much to Cal for joining me for this one. I'll link his book in the description below. I highly recommend it. And if you want to catch my full interview with Cal, you can subscribe to me over on Patreon. Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.

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"Slow Productivity" by Cal Newport: https://amzn.to/47llYHb
Other stuff from Cal: http://calnewport.com/
My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattdavella

Video Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:46 The world of productivity
01:47 Why it’s hard to define productivity
02:56 My struggles with burnout
03:39 The Solution
04:27 Do fewer things
07:22 Work at a natural pace
12:17 Obsess over quality

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New here? I'm Matt 👋 I made an award-winning documentary called Minimalism a few years ago and now I make YouTube videos. Please subscribe so my mother-in-law thinks this is a better career than being a doctor.

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Credits:
Written & edited by Matt D'Avella
Original cinematography by Leo Keller