Frederick Douglass on Productivity

The power of "Regular, orderly and systematic effort."

My friend James Byrd directed me to one of the best historical passages in productivity that I’ve ever encountered. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a late-in-life speech titled “Self-Made Men.” It is worth reading in its entirety, but here I want to focus on what Douglass said about the importance of systematic, consistent productivity.

This advice was coming from one of the most phenomenally productive writers and lecturers in American history, so it bears much consideration. Douglass said

another element of the secret of success demands a word. That element is order, systematic endeavor. We succeed, not alone by the laborious exertion of our faculties, be they small or great, but by the regular, thoughtful and systematic exercise of them. Order, the first law of heaven, is itself a power. The battle is nearly lost when your lines are in disorder. Regular, orderly and systematic effort which moves without friction and needless loss of time or power; which has a place for everything and everything in its place; which knows just where to begin, how to proceed and where to end, though marked by no extraordinary outlay of energy or activity, will work wonders, not only in the matter of accomplishment, but also in the increase of the ability of the individual. It will make the weak man strong and the strong man stronger; the simple man wise and the wise man, wiser, and will insure success by the power and influence that belong to habit.

Douglass reminds us that regular, systematic effort over the long term is vastly more valuable than quick, short-lived bursts of “energy or activity.”

We can all identify with the person who resolves to get in shape, and immediately goes out and runs for several miles. Maybe they do this for a couple days, but within a week, they are back to inactivity, and months later, they are in the same shape as they were before.

Or the person who resolves to get serious about his/her devotional life, and spends a couple mornings reading Scripture and praying, but weeks later, they’re back to inconsistency and forgetfulness.

How much better if these people could develop a daily “habit,” even if just a small one, of devotion or exercise! What if they spent 10 minutes a day in vigorous activity, or in prayer and Bible reading? By the end of a year, they will have made enormous, transformative progress.

The same principle, of course, applies to writing - and how massively productive Douglass was in his writings and speeches! Some writers never get out of the undergraduate habit of mind, which is marked by procrastination and the (often futile) hope that at some point, inspiration will strike and you will knock out that article, dissertation, or book in a massive explosion of productivity. This doesn’t usually work out so well.

How much better to plan to make steady weekly progress, and to hold yourself accountable for doing so. If you are under the gun for an 80,000 page book or dissertation, it can seem totally overwhelming. But what if you committed to writing 2000 words a week, or 500 words four days a week, and did a daily word count to mark your progress? (This means about 2 pages a day, which is not a small amount, but still reasonable for most topics.) If you did this, you would finish your book/dissertation in 40 weeks.

One of the main obstacles to steady progress for a writer is that he/she doesn’t actually have a daily or weekly goal. They’re just “writing a book.” But with a daily word count, you know exactly what you’re trying to do each day, and even better, you know when you have done it.