I keep returning to a stack of notebooks my grandfather left behind. They smell faintly of pipe smoke and the glue that bound the covers. Inside are lists that look almost rude to our era of hacks and apps. They are simple. They are stubborn. And they do a better job at holding people to work that matters than most of the productivity playbooks written in the last decade.
What we mean by 60s and 70s habits
This is not nostalgia for the sake of sepia romance. The habits I mean are specific and quietly mechanical. Keeping physical to do lists. Blocking whole mornings for one type of task. Holding fewer meetings and turning many conversations into letters or short phone calls. Limiting the number of projects on the go to a handful that receive deliberate daily attention. These were not enforced by forums of experts or algorithmic nudges. They were habits forged from the logic of scarcity and the patience to live with it.
Context matters more than technique
When I say these habits outperform modern productivity culture I do not mean they are faster in every circumstance. What they win at is coherence. Modern productivity celebrates multipliers shortcuts and optimization trees. It promises more for less attention but often fragments the worker into a conveyor of notifications. The habits of the 60s and 70s trade frantic breadth for quiet depth. They create a structure where attention can be held for longer stretches without feeling like a borrowed commodity.
Why our current models fail
We are addicted to layers of optimization that mask poor prioritization. You can spend an entire day optimizing a process that should simply not exist. This is not an accident. There is cultural prestige tied to being busy and visible. The modern productivity industry supports that prestige with metrics and tools that reward motion over meaning. So people end up doing more but finishing less.
Technology amplifies old weaknesses
Technology was supposed to remove friction. Instead it removed pause. Consider the meeting. In the 1970s an agenda arrived printed. Expectations were narrowed. A meeting that needed a decision had a clear pathway to reach one. Today a meeting often begins with an unclear problem and ends with a vague list of next steps. The tools let us schedule with ridiculous ease and in doing so they erode the economic cost of convening. The outcome is more meetings that scatter responsibility instead of concentrating it.
I have argued before that discipline is not an aesthetic. It is an environment. The 60s and 70s gave people environmental discipline. A typist could not easily interrupt an author at three in the morning. Paper offers a natural serotonin dip that limits impulsive revisions. Fewer options produced better default behaviour. That sounds counterintuitive in an age that worships freedom but it is true in practice.
Concrete habits worth resurrecting
There is a temptation to cherry pick rituals without seeing the scaffolding that held them up. The difference between mimicry and revival is where you put the boundaries. Revival is not about wearing a tweed jacket and using a typewriter. Revival is about adopting the constraint logic these practices used.
Single purpose blocks of time
Block the calendar for one type of cognition and protect it. The 1960s office had whole mornings for composition and afternoons for administration. That separation is not romantic it is functional. It reduces task switching and encourages a rhythm where deep thinking can be reached without constant interruptions.
Paper and the discipline of handwriting
Handwriting forces slowness. It introduces a necessary friction. When the pen moves at the speed of thought a different gate opens. You find less polishing and more thinking. That style of production also makes commitment visible. A handwritten list gets crossed out. It is not an ephemeral toggle in an app that can be deleted at will. There is accountability in ink.
An expert perspective
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It is becoming increasingly rare and increasingly valuable in our economy.
Cal Newport Professor of Computer Science Georgetown University
Newport did not invent the idea that uninterrupted focus matters but he named a cultural fact. When the practices of the 60s and 70s are compared to modern life they look like simple ways to engineer deep work into daily life. The crucial part is not romanticising the past. It is identifying the structural choices then and translating them into our tools now.
Where the older ways fail us
I am not advocating for a return to the social arrangements of the 1970s. Many old practices were exclusionary and slow to change. They did not scale well for people juggling multiple caretaking responsibilities. They also assumed a pace of communication that modern projects sometimes legitimately require. What I am arguing for is selective rescue. Keep the constraints that aimed to protect thought and discard the social norms that protected power.
Selective rescue in practice
Allow remote asynchronous collaboration that actually saves time. Keep fewer projects on the go. Insist that certain meetings be replaced by short written summaries. Teach younger colleagues how to write a decent one page memo rather than how to schedule endless stand ups. These are modern translations of older habits not mere imitations.
Personal observations that don’t feel tidy
There were afternoons when I would sit with a fountain pen and overturn whole ideas in the space of an hour. Then there are weeks when even that ritual feels performative because the culture around me expects a constant stream of updates. You cannot simply reintroduce the past into a social system that now rewards constant visibility. What you can do is create islands within which older habits can thrive. Islands are messy to form. They require small stubborn acts and a willingness to tolerate being called old fashioned.
How organizations can adopt these habits without regressing
Start by asking which processes exist because they make work better and which exist because they make management feel secure. That is an uncomfortable question and it will not be answered by surveys. It requires observation and trial. Try a no meeting day twice a week and measure follow up quality not perceived busyness. Replace long weekly meetings with concise memos circulated in advance and a ten minute decision call. Encourage handwritten brainstorming and digitise only the decisions that matter.
Final thought that is intentionally incomplete
Habits from the 60s and 70s do not offer a recipe for utopia. They offer a set of choices that privilege concentrated attention over constant motion. If you take anything from this piece make it this. Culture is not a fixed backdrop. It changes when enough people choose discomfort over convenience for the sake of clarity. Whether you will choose that discomfort is not for me to decide and not for the algorithm to nudge either. It is yours to test and awkwardly to experiment with.
Summary table
| Old Habit | Why it helped | Modern Translation |
|---|---|---|
| Physical to do lists | Visible commitment and slower editing | Daily printed or handwritten rollup of priorities |
| Large uninterrupted blocks | Reduced task switching and deeper focus | Protected calendar blocks for single cognition types |
| Fewer projects simultaneously | Sharpened prioritisation and completion | Limit active projects and require one page status updates |
| Written agendas and memos | Clear expectations and record of decisions | Short memos before meetings and decision first calls |
FAQ
Will these older habits work for remote teams?
Yes with caveats. Remote teams can adopt the constraint logic easily because many of the habits are architecture not ornaments. Single purpose time blocks translate into shared calendars that mark deep work hours. Written memos are actually more friendly to remote teams because they standardise context. The caveat is about culture. Remote teams often suffer from hyper availability. You must name and protect the rituals. Saying you value deep work is not enough. Build signals and reward mechanisms so the habit becomes behaviour not aspiration.
Are these practices elitist or exclusionary?
They can be if misapplied. The 60s and 70s had many social systems that excluded people. The productive takeaway is technique not the social frame. When you adopt these habits you must do so with equity in mind. Provide flexible schedules for caregivers. Offer different windows for deep work. The point is to preserve focus without creating barriers for those who cannot conform to a single rigid schedule.
How do you measure success without falling back into busyness metrics?
Measure outcomes not motion. Track completion rates clarity of decisions and time between idea and implementation. If the metric is how many tasks were moved around that day you are back in the problem. If the metric is whether a team shipped a coherent piece of work within a time window you are closer to what matters. These measures require judgment and periodic calibration not endless dashboards.
What about creativity and serendipity which are said to come from noise?
Noise can produce creativity but noise without structure is chaos. The old habits did not eliminate serendipity they contained it. Scheduled time for reading informal cross team notes and structured social overlap can generate the same serendipity without dissolving focus. The experiment is to deliberately design for both instead of allowing noise to colonise your schedule.
How do I start tomorrow?
Choose one constraint and try it for two weeks. Protect three hours each morning for single purpose work. Replace one weekly meeting with a memo. Keep a small physical notebook for daily priorities. The aim is to create a working environment that makes focus the default option not the heroic exception. Expect friction. Expect people to push back. That is part of how you know the habit matters.
