Edsger Dijkstra's One-Day Workweek - Cal Newport

Abstraction: Dijkstra's minimal schedule enabled maximum research output

Key points:

• After winning the 1972 Turing Award, Dijkstra accepted a Burroughs Corporation research fellowship requiring only occasional visits to company research centers
• He reduced campus presence to one day per week (Tuesdays) for paper discussions with colleagues
• During this "Burroughs years" low-activity period he produced nearly 500 hand-written EWD research documents — his most prolific output
• Dijkstra deliberately avoided time-consuming peer-review publication process, distributing ideas via sequentially-numbered personal reports
• Newport uses this as evidence that busyness is an obstacle to great work, not an engine of production

Connections: Edsger Dijkstra · Cal Newport · Deep Work · Slow Productivity

Source: https://calnewport.com/edsger-dijkstras-one-day-workweek/