A Busy Project Manager Finding the Courage to Slow Down

I am not being paid to read or promote the book discussed below.

I love being a project manager.

But one of the hardest things about my job is that my direct report and I, who make up the project management department, support over 300 active projects at a time between us.

We have a number of structural factors in place to make this not totally awful, like the fact that every project has an “owner”—a ‘buck stops here’ person and a day-to-day decision-maker who is ultimately responsible for the project’s success. As project managers, we play a vital role and provide a lot of expertise, but we are a support to the owner.

Still, our project load is a challenge. I’ve had many days when it feels like my brain has switched between projects every five minutes. It’s one thing to switch between tasks on the same project, but switching between projects is essentially the “context-switching” idea decried in productivity circles as one of the biggest wastes of employee time. It is not always necessarily a waste of my time as someone who supports many projects—but doing it frequently is exhausting.

In my blog “Too Many Projects: Move Past Overwhelm and Make Meaningful Progress,” I talk about many techniques I’ve used in the past 8 years to make a high project load manageable. I stand by those techniques; they are all helpful.

But now, in addition to my project load, I am also a new PMO leader. I have a lot of ambition to develop our PMO into something that can provide new types of value to our company. And doing this well requires decent swathes of time to learn and focus and think, not to mention develop plans for change and execute them. With all the regular projects I’m managing, where am I going to find time and focus for these new endeavors that I know can bring a ton of value, but that no one is directly asking for?

This week I’ve started listening to the book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, and I believe I’m finding part of the answer.

I will not be able to summarize the book fully as I am only partway through it, but Newport talks about how the typical 21st century knowledge-worker juggles many tasks and often struggles to find the time, energy, or focus to do an excellent job on any of them. This not only creates an exhausted worker who is unsatisfied with their work, but it also means their total work output is less valuable than it could be.

The solution he proposes is “slow productivity,” which draws inspiration from the “slow food” movement, a response to the excesses of fast food. The slow food movement values producing, preparing, and eating food slowly and well, drawing on many traditions around food valued in centuries past. With slow productivity, Newport posits and demonstrates, more value can be produced by a knowledge worker in the same amount of time if they take some counterintuitive, seemingly old-fashioned approaches to their work. His three key principles of slow productivity are (1) do fewer things, (2) work at a natural pace, and (3) obsess over quality.

Newport’s book is full of practical advice on how to implement these principles, most of which I haven’t gotten to yet. But what has surprised me is that he has already done a ton to help me navigate my demanding job simply by convincing and encouraging me that doing fewer things and working at a natural pace is better. I maybe don’t need help with tactics to address my context-switching woes, so much as I need help believing that working this way is better across the board for both my company and my mental health.

With Newport’s encouragement, I immediately found myself re-implementing a work approach that I’ve tried before but haven’t stuck with because my environment and my own habits are always working against me. The approach is this:

STOP working at a heightened state of stress all day to pursue the elusive goal of getting everything done.

INSTEAD, work at your natural pace, doing one thing after the other, always doing the next most important thing.

What I gain in this approach is the freedom to work at my natural pace, which is a luxury I long for. The trade-off is I can’t pick whatever I feel like doing next. I always have to do the next most important thing…even if it’s organizing that complex, thorny project that I would have put off for days or weeks in my previous approach.

I may not finish everything at the end of the day, but if the things I did accomplish were the most important things on my list, I am confident my approach is completely defensible to anyone at my company who might question why I didn’t complete some other item. If I explain I did all the most important items I had time for, under most normal circumstances that will be the calm end of the conversation and I’ll be left alone to carry on.

In my first two days re-trying this approach, I certainly haven’t implemented it perfectly. My habits, the allure of an empty to-do list, and the dopamine rush of responding to a message immediately are strong. Adjustments will take time. I likely need ongoing encouragement if I am to keep this up! One very practical thing I am trying to do is to start my day with the biggest, most focus-intensive thing on my list. Often it IS the most important, and this way it doesn’t get pushed to the part of my day when I’ve done so much context-switching on the little things that I don’t have the brainpower left for something complicated.

I am looking forward to Newport’s tactical suggestions in this book. But whether as a project manager trying to juggle too many projects, or a leader trying to carve out time for non-urgent but important initiatives, I am fascinated to observe that I didn’t necessarily need someone to tell me how to respond to the demands of my job in a more sustainable way. I maybe have just needed someone to convince me it was worth doing.