September always feels like a beginning. Some thoughts on Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, and how it might make the run to Christmas a calmer one.

September has always struck me as the real beginning of the year, whatever the calendar may think. The holidays are winding down, the children are going back, and ahead of us lies a clean stretch of weeks in which everybody privately intends to accomplish a very great deal. The financial planners I speak to at this time of year tend to have a particular look about them: a list, a good deal of resolve, and the air of somebody standing at the top of a diving board.

I’d like to make the case for going about the next few months rather differently. Not with less ambition – nobody has ever taken advice on that – but with considerably less noise.

I listen to a lot of podcasts – some occasionally, others more frequently. Cal Newport’s Deep Questions is the one I’ve never missed an episode of, and I’ve been reading his books for the better part of a decade, which is either loyalty or a mild dependency. Of all of them, Slow Productivity is the one I’ve thought about most recently, largely because nearly ten years of running Navigatus have taught me that the weeks when we look busiest are almost never the ones when we do our best work.

Newport opens with a question that had never once occurred to me, which is where our idea of productivity came from in the first place.

In a factory, the answer is mercifully clear. Widgets per hour: a number one can count, improve upon, and argue about over lunch. Knowledge work has no widgets, and rather than admit as much, we quietly agreed on a substitute: visible activity. Ours are not difficult to spot. How quickly somebody replies to an email. How full a diary looks from across the room. How many reports went out this week – a figure that means very little and is quoted very often. Newport calls all of this pseudo-productivity, and I’m afraid that once you have the phrase, you begin to notice it everywhere, not least in your own habits.

In its place, he proposes three principles – do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality – which I have been turning over ever since. They depend on one another rather more than the list suggests. They also transfer to our corner of the world better than most of what gets written about work, though seldom in the way one first expects.

The trouble with counting reports (or client meetings)

If we had a widget, it would be the report, which is why it is worth saying that we don’t hand our paraplanners a number of them to produce each week. What we agree is the work that has to be with our advisers by Friday, and that moves about a good deal according to how busy those advisers happen to be, which is a quantity nobody has ever successfully forecast.

There is a reason we work this way. We have been tracking our time for the better part of ten years, and if that data establishes anything at all, it is that a report is not a unit. Two cases that look identical on the way in can differ by hours. Averages, it turns out, are excellent for planning a month and very nearly useless for judging a Tuesday.

The part that resists averaging is, inconveniently, the part worth paying for. Anyone can produce a document quickly when it is largely a template. Making a report belong to one particular client takes precisely as long as it takes, and a different length of time on every single occasion. A decade of timesheets has not made this predictable. And I have made my peace with it.

You will recognise the shape of this in your own week. A client meeting is not a unit either. Two review meetings with almost identical numbers on the file can be an hour apart, and it is never the one you expected.

Do fewer things, which is not the same as having fewer cases

This is the principle most often misread, and I misread it myself for some considerable time.

Our paraplanners routinely have several cases open at once. That is simply the shape of the work, and I don’t think it ought to change: cases wait on providers, on planners, on clients, and on the with profits bonus rates that were promised a fortnight ago and chased twice since. A paraplanner with only a couple of live cases would be idle by Wednesday.

What matters is not how many cases are open but how many of them are pulling at you during the hour you are actually working. Newport’s argument about overhead is what makes this plain. Every open commitment carries a cost entirely separate from the work itself: the chase, the query, the four minutes required to remember where you had got to and why on earth you assumed what you assumed. Cases are perfectly manageable as items on a list you trust. They become ruinous as things tugging at your sleeve at once, each one half-remembered and none of them written down.

So the trick is not to carry fewer cases or fewer clients. It is to have fewer things pulling at you at any given moment – one worked on properly for a decent stretch, with everything else set down somewhere you know perfectly well you will look.

One thing at a time

A good many of the firms we work with are new or growing quickly, and I have enormous sympathy for the predicament that creates. When everything is still ahead of you, everything looks urgent, and all of it looks urgent at the same moment. The new back-office system. The website, three-quarters finished since spring. The second adviser. The tidy-up of the client bank you have been meaning to do since March and mentioned again in June. The process for taking on new clients, which everybody agrees is a bit ropey and which nobody has quite volunteered to fix. All of it needs doing. All of it would help. And the temptation is to begin all of it in the same fortnight – ideally, the fortnight immediately after the summer holidays.

The same problem, in other words, one storey up: a business carrying the overhead rather than a person. Six half-finished projects produce six sets of loose ends, and not one of them ever travels far enough to begin repaying the effort that went in. A year on, you have six things that are eighty per cent complete and nothing whatever that has changed how the week feels.

The alternative is unglamorous, but it works. One thing this week. One thing this month. One thing this quarter. Choose the one that will still matter in a year, finish it properly, and let the others wait their turn. They will still be there, and they will be easier when you reach them, because you will be starting from a practice that has genuinely improved in one respect rather than five that are half-built.

If the autumn plan is a new back-office system, a look at your fees, a marketing push and another adviser, one of those will get your attention, and the other three will get your guilt. Pick the one that will change how next September feels. If you intend to plan anything at all between now and Christmas, I would plan that.

Why outsourcing works at all

The same idea holds across our profession.

We write reports and do the research behind them. That is the whole of it. We are asked with some regularity whether we might also take on general administration, or act as compliance consultants, or absorb those parts of a financial planning practice for which nobody has ever volunteered, and the answer is almost always no.

This is not modesty. It is the entire reason the arrangement works. An adviser who outsources to us has concluded that the thing they are best at – and very often the only thing that genuinely requires them personally – is being in the room with a client. The administration goes to somebody who does administration all day and is unreasonably good at it. The compliance goes to somebody who has read the latest FCA paper cover to cover and can quote full paragraphs. The research and the writing come to us because that is what we do every day, and doing a thing every day is what makes one quick at the parts that ought to be quick and unhurried in the places that deserve it.

Nobody in that arrangement is doing fewer things for want of ambition. They are doing fewer things because it is the only route by which any of them becomes genuinely good at what remains. Newport is writing about individuals, but the argument survives the move up a level intact. The firms I most admire are not the ones doing the most. They are the ones who worked out what to stop doing.

Work at a natural pace

Of the three principles, this is the one I understood last, largely because I had it backwards. I took it to mean working slowly, which sounded like the sort of thing one says to a client in the hope that they will not press the point.

What Newport actually argues is that the even week — five days, the same intensity, every week of the year — is a factory inheritance, and has nothing whatever to do with how thinking works. It is a way of arranging people, not a way of arranging thought.

Our year has tides, and so does yours; they are the same tides, which is rather the point. Tax year end is a wall visible from six months out. August is its opposite, a month in which much less is completed, because the client is away, or you are, or the provider has one person on the desk and a fortnight’s queue behind them. Neither is a failure of planning. They are the shape of the year, and the year has that shape whether or not anybody acknowledges it.

The trouble comes from pretending otherwise. A week planned to run at ninety per cent is a week with no answer to the unexpected, and March is very little else. The firms that seem to suffer least at tax year end are not the ones with the most people. They are the ones who left February alone – which is something you can only do deliberately, and only in advance. By about November, in practice.

It is the least fashionable idea in the book, and the one I would defend hardest.

Obsess over quality

The third principle is what makes the first two defensible. If you are protecting somebody’s quiet hours, the only honest justification is that what emerges at the far end is noticeably better; otherwise, you have merely slowed down, which is not a philosophy but a symptom.

I used to think “better” meant “shorter”. A decade of this has taught me it doesn’t mean longer either. Length is a preference, and firms hold it strongly in both directions – some want twelve pages with nothing in them that isn’t load-bearing, others want the technical background set out at length, on the reasonable grounds that a client should be able to see the whole of their case and not merely its conclusion. Both are right, because they know their clients and we do not.

So the thing worth obsessing over is not a length. It is fit. A report has to belong to one particular client – their circumstances, their language, the objectives they actually expressed rather than the ones the fact-find has boxes for – and it has to sound like the adviser who will present it, since they are the one in the meeting, and it is their name on the front page. Two kinds of personalisation rather than one, neither of which can be averaged, and both of which are where the time goes.

Which makes for the one genuinely practical suggestion in this piece: tell your paraplanner what you actually want. Twelve pages or forty. Where the weight goes. Whether this client wants the reasoning or only the recommendation. We can ask, and we do, but you know the answer and we are guessing at it.

Which is also why nobody here is trying to get a report merely finished. They are trying to get it right, which is a different verb and a slower one. The moment reports begin to be produced rather than written, fit is the first thing to go, and it goes quietly: nobody complains, the compliance file is in perfect order, and the document is a little less about the client every month.

Producing pages was never the difficult part, and it is about to become easier still. Knowing which pages this client needs, or that half as many would serve them better, is learned slowly, one case at a time, and written down nowhere.

Newport makes a point here that I find sharp, and it points at us before it points anywhere else: becoming demonstrably good at something is what earns you the right to make demands about how you work. If our work were unremarkable, asking you for a little room would be an imposition. What makes it a reasonable request is what comes back at the end of it.

Where this gets awkward

I would be doing the book a disservice if I pretended all of it transfers neatly to our profession.

Newport’s exemplars are largely novelists, scientists and essayists – people whose deadlines are chiefly self-imposed and whose clients, where they have any, are not waiting to hear whether they can afford to retire. No novelist has ever had to produce anything by Friday because a provider took eleven days to send a valuation. We work in a service business inside a regulated profession, where tax year end does not negotiate, and Consumer Duty takes no interest whatever in the block of quiet you were attempting to protect. A client who has just been made redundant needs an answer this week, not whenever the thinking has properly matured.

It is also a great deal easier to hold these opinions when one owns the business. If you are employed, and your manager counts cases issued, explaining that you would like fewer things tugging at your sleeve is a conversation with a certain degree of difficulty attached.

So the version most of us can practise is a compromised one, which seems to me perfectly fine. A compromised version still beats the alternative, and nearly all of the benefit is in the small moves anyway.

Where I would start

Three of them, and nothing more ambitious than that.

Protect one morning a week, and put it in the diary as though it belonged to a client. Stop answering emails the instant they come in – not for a whole day, just for two hours at a time. And give anything that needs real thought a night before it goes out.

None of that requires rebuilding the way you work, and all of it is reversible by Friday if you hate it.

The quiet hour

What I keep returning to is that the good part of this job has never once happened in a hurry. The moment when you spot what nobody else spotted – the allowance about to be wasted, the assumption in the cashflow that quietly does not hold, the line buried on page nine of the provider’s plan information that changes your advice – has never once turned up while I was moving quickly with fourteen tabs open. It turns up in the quiet hour. It turns up on the second read.

Which brings me back to September. There are sixteen or so weeks between the start of the month and Christmas, and every instinct says to fill them. I would suggest the reverse: decide what genuinely matters between now and then, permit it to be fewer things than you first wrote down, and defend the hours in which those things are going to happen. The list will be shorter by December. A good deal more of it will be finished.

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Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout is published by Penguin, and is mercifully short. Worth buying from an independent bookshop — you can do so here. Cal’s podcast, Deep Questions, is the other half of it and every bit as good.