📧 PivotList: "Do Fewer Things" — Celebrating Cal Newport's New Book
+ Free workshop for solopreneurs on March 28!
Hi Friends,
I’m delighted to celebrate my friend Cal Newport’s new book this week, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.
An added bonus was discovering I had a small mention on page 71! It was a delightful surprise after a few friends reached out — shout out to
of — another excellent Substack that you should all subscribe to :)In a chapter called “Do Fewer Things,” Cal shares a little bit of my story upon realizing I was juggling too many things in my business:
My friend Jenny Blake, for example, writes in her 2022 book, Free Time, about how her small consulting and training business kept expanding until, one day, exhausted by the demands of work, she looked up and realized she was supporting more than ten different sources of income, which she described as “legacies from years of experimenting.” No amount of clever time management or streamlining tactics can keep the work required to maintain ten missions tractable.
After Blake began fantasizing about “winning the lottery or burning it all down,” she realized she had to simplify if she had any hope of achieving a sustainable and meaningful professional life. She slashed her income streams and reduced her staff to only three part-time employees. She now works, on average, twenty hours a week and takes off two full months each year for vacation. It's likely, of course, that Blake would be making more money if she hustled to support more missions. When you're enjoying twenty-hour workweeks, however, it's hard to care too much about such possibilities.
Check out our conversation about free time for his podcast:
And I love his new mantra, from the book’s description:
Do Fewer Things.
Work at a Natural Pace.
Obsess over Quality.
Now onto this week’s #PivotList, with bonus goodies over the paywall rainbow at the end :)
📆 Upcoming Events
🏝️ Solopreneurs: Does your business pass The Fiji Test?
Speaking of streamlining, it’s time to say goodbye to overwhelm from repeating yourself, death-by-a-thousand-question cuts, struggling to remember where something lives, and letting important client work fall through the cracks.
Freeing time is a skill, and it is one you can get better at.
The Details: Thursday, March 28 at 12 p.m. ET on Zoom. Those who attend live will get a special one-time discount for working with me 1:1 on your business operations ☺️ The recording will only be available for those who register. Learn more and sign up here »
🧡 Office Hours for Paying Subscribers
Join us on May 15 at 1pm ET for our Quarterly Office Hours hang: ask me anything, connect with fellow Pivoters, and talk through your pivot-in-progress.
Want to join us? See footer (below the paywall) for the link, with lots of additional resources and ideas in the show notes. Upgrade your membership here »
⚙️ Tools
Readwise’s new-ish Reader app (second tab at the top of that link) is a game-changer for saving long articles to revisit later!
I have experimented with many of these in the past, like Instapaper and Pocket, but this one takes the reading inbox cake. You can save or send PDFs, .mobi (kindle) files, and articles from the web. I also love that it sends me summaries of whatever I saved the day prior the next morning.
Reader helps me clear my inbox, and I love their audio playback option for listening to long reads while on-the-go—for an AI voice, it’s remarkably calm and nuanced.
I also use Readwise to import my Kindle highlights (on an ongoing basis) and send me five each day via email, as well as export all those highlights automatically to a Notion library for easy searchability within my business backend. Check out my
conversation with their cofounder :
🍿 Watching
Even if the premise is algorithmic viewer catnip that mashes up preexisting popular shows, there’s a lot to like in Guy Ritchie’s latest Netflix project, The Gentleman. I appreciate that it doesn’t take itself too seriously; there’s enough levity to keep it fun and watchable rather than veering into depressing or anxiety-inducing.
Like Reacher on Amazon Prime, it doesn’t hurt that the actor who plays Eddie, Theo James—also the hot husband in White Lotus Season 2—is verrrry easy on the eyes!
📚Reading
I have been counting down the days and months for Geraldine DeRuiter’s new book, If You Can’t Take the Heat, out this week! I first heard about it when I had her husband, Rand Fishkin, on the Free Time podcast.
Geraldine’s book started from a viral post she published on her website, I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter.
From the description:
From the James Beard Award–winning blogger behind The Everywhereist come hilarious, searing essays on how food and cooking stoke the flames of her feminism.
When celebrity chef Mario Batali sent out an apology letter for the sexual harassment allegations made against him, he had the gall to include a recipe—for cinnamon rolls, of all things. Geraldine DeRuiter decided to make the recipe, and she happened to make food journalism history along with it. Her subsequent essay, with its scathing commentary about the pervasiveness of misogyny in the food world, would be read millions of times, lauded by industry luminaries from Martha Stewart to New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, and would land DeRuiter in the middle of a media firestorm. She found herself on the receiving end of dozens of threats when all she wanted to do was make something to eat (and, okay fine, maybe take down the patriarchy).
I also loved
’s excellent piece on chronotypes:
🎧 Listening
🎁 For complimentary Free Time audiobook access for you and a friend, submit your proof of purchase here and Faye on my team will get you all squared away! You can also host your own book club with this Free Time Leader Kit.
I loved the episode “Dream on a deadline” from This is Uncomfortable:
At what point do you walk away from your dreams? Kashy gave himself a deadline: if he didn’t become a pop star by the time he turned 25, he’d give up music. But years after he left his music career behind, the universe gave him a second chance . . .
✍️ Writing
Recently on :
🎙 Podcasting
Pivot:
363: 🌈 Taking a Quiet Sabbatical and Pausing the Podcasts — For Now . . .
362: Setting Creative Intentions Instead of Expectations with James McCrae
361: On Decision Engineering and Evaluating Quality instead of Outcomes
360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts
358: Crossing the Cringe Chasm when Taking Career and Creative Risks
Subscribe wherever you listen here »
Free Time:
269: “I am not a bank” — Strategies for Getting Clients to Pay on Time
268: Strategies for Surpassing “The Magic Number” of Book Sales (Part 1) and Specific Road-Tested Tips for Book Sales and Marketing (Part 2) with Todd Sattersten, publisher of Bard Press
264: 🦧 What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client: Part One and Part Two
Subscribe wherever you listen here »
That’s it for now . . . thank you for reading and listening!
❤️ With Love,
P.S. Extra Goodies Over the Paywall Rainbow 🌈💰
🔐 Thank you to our generous paying subscribers who help sustain PivotList!
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