Sam Altman’s Forgotten Essay About How to Be Productive | Cal Newport

Back in 2018, Sam Altman, before he was famous, Sam Altman wrote a essay on the topic of productivity, where he laid out his theory about how to produce work that matters and how not to get caught up in distractions. Well, earlier this year, I tackled that essay in an episode of my podcast. I looked at what he said and pulled out the points that I think are actually really quite telling and actually really quite effective regardless how you think about Altman and his companies today. So in the clip I'm about to show you, we get into those details. I introduce the article and I pull out some ideas that I think might really make a difference when you're thinking about how to make your own work more impactful in an age where distractions try to pull you down. All right, check this out. You're going to like this clip. So as someone who writes and talks a lot about producing meaningful stuff in a distracted world, I always get excited when prominent individuals give us insight into their own processes for achieving this goal. So you can imagine how happy I was when I saw Tim Ferriss recently linked to a blog post that was titled simply Productivity that was published in 2018 by OpenAI's Sam Altman. Here's the opening two sentences of this essay. I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. So I'm excited about getting to this essay because when Sam wrote it, 2018, think about it, OpenAI was at a crucial turning point. They had just released GPT-1, but they were operating as a nonprofit. Elon Musk had just left the board of directors after failing to convince the board that they should merge OpenAI with his Tesla company to help out its financial situation. Instead, Sam led a move from a nonprofit the next year to a cap profit status that opened up venture capital funding. They could hire a bunch more talent. And that's really where the OpenAI story we know today really took off. So he was pretty productive during this period. So it's useful to look back and say, how was he thinking about getting important work done on the eve of OpenAI making all of these important leaps? So what I'm going to do is pull out, I think I have five, let me look at my notes here. I have five ideas from his essay and for each, we'll get into it. I agree with a lot. I disagree with others. I think there's some big, important ideas he highlights in some. So we will get in the Sam Altman's productivity essay. Let me just load it on the screen now for those who are watching instead of listening. This is what the essay looks like. I missed that classic blog format, Jesse, back in the end of web two, you kept things simple and just wrote long essays, but here it is published in April of 2018. So seven years ago, basically to the day is what it looks like. So I'm going to jump through here and I'm going to pull out some quotes. All right, Jesse, we can bring it back to full screen. All right, here's idea number one. I'm reading now from Sam's essay. Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well. And it is magic. A small productivity gain compounded over 50 years is worth a lot. So it's worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compound difference is massive. All right. So I have mixed feelings about this first idea of applying the compound growth idea to productivity. I think there's some piece of this that's right and some piece of this that's not right. The getting 1% better, sure. If you could get 1% better at something every day, you are compounding. So your current skill level grows that your 1% is being applied to. And if you put that out over a certain number of years, you would be the world's very best expert in like five years or however the math works out. That's not really how getting better works though. It typically has long periods of practice that leads to new levels of skill and each level of skill is harder to get to than the last. So it's almost more of a linear or like a slow linear function that an exponential function like compound interest would give you, you're kind of getting better faster. And then it really slows down. It just gets harder to get to each new level. Whereas compound interest, you get a curve that picks up speed as it's going. I also am concerned about him making the slight shift. He's combining getting 1% better as an example of compound growth to doing 10% more each day. This doesn't really jive with my study of long-term productivity. If you look at my book, Slow Productivity, which came out last year, one of the things I do is study some of the most historically productive people, meaning like what they produce, historical figures that produce things that we look back at now and say that was super important. What a productive intellectual life they had. So Galileo or Newton or Marie Curie or Jane Austen, et cetera. And what you find in these stories is their key was not getting more done each day. In fact, what I highlighted was there's a certain notable slowness or even lack of urgency behind their biggest achievements. They thought about it. They had long digressions into other interests. They would come back to them. They would let it marinate. And ultimately, it didn't really matter. The busyness or phoneticism of any given day wasn't important. It was more about the consistent application of thought over a long period of time that eventually led to really big breakthroughs. So when it comes to producing really meaningful stuff, I don't know that this idea of I get 10% more done each day really matters. I think where that will lead to more often than not is just busyness. That's the easiest thing to get 10% more done of, and busyness doesn't necessarily transmute into results. All right, so that's an idea where I'm not completely on board with the way Altman is summarizing things. Idea two, however, I'm very much on board with. Let me read now from Altman's essay. It doesn't matter how fast you move if it's in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more. I make sure to leave enough time in my schedule to think about what to work on. The best ways for me to do this are reading books, hanging out with interesting people and spending time in nature. Interestingly, this is somewhat contradictory to idea number one, which is like, hey, get 10% more done each day, it'll add up. And he'd say, no, take your time, don't get started. Think more, hang out in nature, hang out with interesting people, read. wait to get started. Really make sure that you have the right thing to work on. I'm a big believer in that idea. I remember I wrote an essay about this way back early in my writing career. I wrote an essay for Ramit Sethi's blog and it was called Don't Get Started. My argument was, it is basically Sam's argument. It is really hard to figure out the right thing to work on. The thing that's going to matter and it uses the rare and valuable skills that you currently possess. And you, it's probably gonna take a long time once you choose the right thing to get really good results. So you want to be really wary of just diving into things because when you dive into things, you're basically flooding your circuits with activity and you are taking them out of the game for working on other more important things. So resist working on things. I often say with big projects, resist working on them, think about them, read about them, get excited about them, but resist working on them until you can't help it anymore. sort of like me with book writing, me with this podcast, man, I resisted podcasting for a long time. I learned a lot of that. No, it's not quite right. I don't want to just do it for the sake of doing it. I don't like activity for the sake of activity. It took me years before I said, okay, I can't avoid this any longer. That's really what you should be looking for. Fewer things done better. That has been a theme through my work so long that the original, one of the original mottos of my study hacks blog back when it was still focused on students was do less, do better, know why. Do less, do better. It's a key idea. So I think Sam is absolutely onto it there. That's probably reflected in OpenAI. They kind of chose their points. They chose their battles where they thought there could be big work, for example, working on very large scale language models. And then they went down that road year after year. So they carefully chose what they were working on and then really gave that a lot of attention over time. That's where the big breakthroughs came from. All right, idea number three. Now we're going to get into the weeds of actual time management. Here's Sam. I highly recommend using lists. I make lists of what I want to accomplish each year, each month, and each day. Lists are very focusing, and they help me with multitasking because I don't have to keep as much in my head. If I'm not in the mood for some particular task, I can always find something else I'm excited to do. Later, he says, I don't bother with categorization or trying to size tasks or anything like that. The most I do is put a star next to really important items. I try to prioritize in a way that generates momentum. The more I get done, the better I feel. And then the more I get done, I like to start and end each day with something I can really make progress on. A couple of interesting points about his approach here. One, we do see him preaching a principle that I talk a lot on this show, which comes from David Allen, who himself took it from Dean Atchison, which is the notion of full capture. Having things written down and not being kept track of just in your head is critical for avoiding unnecessary stress and forgotten deadlines and scrambles. Do not use your brain as a task storage device or a calendar. Use task storage devices or calendars for that role. And he makes that clear here. He says, look, they help me with multitasking so I don't have to keep as much in my head. And by multitasking, he means just having multiple projects going on at the same time. So that's useful. I also noticed, however, the simplicity of his systems. He just just like writes things down on the list on paper. He doesn't break it up into categories. He doesn't do any sort of prioritization. He just sort of looks at the list and says, what do I want to work on next? Maybe he'll put a star next to something to really remind him that it's important to get it done. That type of basic system, a sort of what's known as an MIT system, most important task system. It's been around. It's an idea that's been around for a while. We hear it in the early 2000s. We hear Julie Morgenstern talking about this. We hear Brian Tracy talking about this. We hear Leo Babudov's Inhabits talking about this. Even more recently, when Oliver Berkman came on my show last fall, this was basically what he was pitching. Get the important thing done first, and then kind of do your best with the rest of the day. It works, and it doesn't. So, I mean, it works in the sense of if your goal is to make progress on what's important, This is emphasizing that really just means doing the important things and making progress. So I think the fact that Sam had this sort of simple system, I just make sure the important stuff gets done, shows how when it comes to long-term productivity, this is really different than busyness. This is really different than I'm quick on my emails and Slack. I'm jumping on a bunch of calls. For Sam, his productivity was dependent on doing a small number of things consistently well. The issue is for a lot of us, there's a lot of other stuff too that we have to do that is not just, hey, here's the project I want to work on. It is, I have to get back to this person. This dean wants to know this. My students need me to sign this. The parking office needs me to update my license plate for the new license plate readers they installed in the Levy garage. Just making these up on the top of my head here. And we can't say no to those things. So that's the context where you actually probably need a more complicated task storage system, because you can't just, if you have many unignorable demands on your time, so you have the big, like Sam's focusing on in the small, if you just have a big list and you're just trying to choose from there, hey, what's the big thing I want to work on today? That small stuff is going to eat away at you because you're going to miss things. People are going to yell at you. Small things will get missed. People are like, where's this? Where's that? Your car is going to get a ticket because you didn't update your license plate information. And that's going to become a source of stress and a problem. So I like the point that Sam is making here. It's like ultimately just doing something important every day is what matters for the stuff that people will remember you for. The busyness doesn't produce stuff that matters. But if you have a lot of that other stuff, smarter task storage might be important, right? This is why I like to store stuff in cognitive context. So I could say I'm going to spend time on like my professor role and just see tasks for that divided into statuses. So it's very easy to sort of see what's what, what needs to get done. So smarter task storage, I think it's necessary if you have a lot to do, but don't forget Sam's big lesson here, which is, yeah, but the small stuff is secondary. Do the best you can with that. Organize it in a way that's going to save you from stress, but it's really working on the important things each day that's going to matter. All right, idea number four from Sam Altman. Here's Sam. I try to be ruthless about saying no to stuff and doing non-critical things in the quickest way possible. I probably take this too far. For example, I am almost sure I am terse to the point of rudeness when replying to emails. I generally try to avoid meetings and conferences is I find the time cost to be huge. Again, I think there's a critical point here. Whether or not you have the power to say no to everything, it emphasizes how almost everything doesn't matter. This is a theme, I think, that goes through Sam's essay here. The things that mattered that made OpenAI from a struggling nonprofit to a company with a massive valuation and huge impact on the world technological and economic scene. The things that mattered were small and hard. and he was pretty ruthless about coming back to them. So if you worry about saying no to stuff, thinking that this somehow makes you less productive, keep in mind this uber productive individual's productivity was built on his default of, I really don't want to do stuff. Most stuff is just getting in the way of time. Taking my time away from the stuff I know for sure is going to be really valuable. More executives should probably follow that advice as well. right? I mean, I've talked to more than a few executives who would have been in Sam's position at different companies that say, no, my job is right. I have to be in meetings. How can I say no to them? And he's saying, well, because if you want to be good at what you do, the meetings aren't really what matters so much as like you understanding, pushing and developing the ideas are going to make the biggest difference. All right. Idea number five from Sam. I have different times of day. I try to use for different kinds of work. The first few hours of the morning are definitely my most productive time of the day. So I don't let anyone schedule anything. Then I try I do meetings in the afternoon. Another great idea, the morning is a good time for deep work for most people. So just having a simple rule, I don't do meetings until this point makes a big difference. I was chatting recently with the president of a former president of a large company. And he was saying this was a huge change for him is that they were just filling his days with meetings, his staff. And at some point they said, okay, you know, we're going to protect time in the morning for just working on your own stuff. And he was worried this would make him a worse executive instead made him way better. There's endless people that want your time. There's endless meetings you could take. You're already constraining the meetings you can take because your day is only so long. So why not just change those constraints even more so you have more time to work on the big thoughts that are going to matter as well. If Sam Maltman can do it, you can probably do it as well. But ultimately, I think Sam has a lot of non-surprising advice here. I I mean, I think he would, would have been, these ideas would have fit well in my book, Slow Productivity. These ideas would have fit well in my book, Deep Work. And perhaps this is not surprising because he ended up being very successful at what he did. He worked on deep stuff in a distracted world. I want to end with a quote from Sam's essay that I think summarizes well the gist of his whole philosophy here. Don't fall into the trap of productivity porn. Chasing productivity for its own sake isn't helpful. Many people spend too much time thinking about how to perfectly optimize their system and not nearly enough asking if they're working on the right problems. It doesn't matter what system you use or if you squeeze out every second if you're working on the wrong thing. And I think that gets to the heart of it. Spend a lot of time figuring out what matters. That's not an easy question. But once you've answered it, spend a lot of time working on that thing. And do your best with whatever else. And that'll work itself out. Don't stress yourself out too much. It's impossible to do it all anyways. But working hard on the right thing consistently, that's what matters. Everything else is just trying to take care of the details that are trying to get in the way of that. Great way of thinking about it. So you need some systems and some rules, but mainly you just have to do the work of finding what to work on and putting in the right time. I wonder, he probably, his rules probably have changed by now just because that company's so large. He's a lot richer. Yeah, he is a lot richer. I don't know if that changes. That's true. But I'm just thinking like the size of the company now versus then. Yeah. It'd be interesting to check in. I think now he probably is, is all meetings. I've never met Sam Altman, but busy guy. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.

Back in 2018, Sam Altman wrote a fascinatingly revealing essay about producing high-impact work. Regardless of how you feel about what he’s done with this ability (and trust me, I have thoughts!), the advice is really interesting and worth unpacking.

Buy Cal Newport's latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow 

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0:00 Sam Altman's essay on productivity
4:00 Getter better at things
10:30 Do the important thing first

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About Cal Newport:
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal's particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.

Cal is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He's also the creator of The Time-Block Planner.

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