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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is that being productive doesn't always look productive.

Good ideas take time.

And true productivity is measured over the long haul.

But often, achieving a lot in the long haul doesn't mean filling every minute.

Today's tip comes partly from Cal Newport's new book, Slow Productivity.

In this book, Cal talks about how to achieve great things without burnout.

He opened slow productivity with a tale of someone who is important to me,

Professor John McPhee of Princeton.

Many years ago, I took McPhee's famous nonfiction writing class.

I learned a lot from his discussions of his own life as a working writer.

One of McPhee's most famous stories is about the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. After compiling all his notes from traipsing around the forest, he had some fairly serious writer's block. So we wound up laying on a picnic table day after day

for about two weeks. Finally, he realized that much of his reporting could come back to one central

character who could form the spine of what became a long New Yorker piece.

Cald notes that if you looked at McPhee during those two weeks, spending his working hours lying there,

seemingly doing nothing, you would not have considered him to be terribly productive.

But that would be a mistake.

McPhee has been incredibly productive.

He's written around 30 books over his lifetime,

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