Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”

He stayed on that table for two weeks before a solution to his quandary finally arrived: Fred Brown. Early in his research, McPhee had met Brown, a seventy-nine-year-old who lived in a “shanty” deep in the Pine Barrens.

The revelation that jolted McPhee off his picnic table was that Brown seemed to be connected in some way to most of the topics that he wanted to cover in his article. He could introduce Brown early in the piece, and then structure the topics he wanted to explore as detours from the through line of his adventures with Brown.

working in a modest rental office off Nassau Street in Princeton,

It couldn’t have existed, however, without McPhee’s willingness to put everything else on hold, and just lie on his back, gazing upward toward the sky, thinking hard about how to create something wonderful.

As that anxious spring unfolded, a long-simmering unease with the demands of productivity among those who toil in offices and at computer screens for a living began to boil over under the strain of pandemic-related disruptions.

“The pleasure in thinking and doing things well is such a deep-wired human pleasure . . . and it feels (to me) diluted when it’s linked to productivity.”

and Oliver Burkeman’s delightfully sardonic Four Thousand Weeks.

First there was the so-called Great Resignation. Though this phenomenon encompassed retreats from labor force participation in many different economic sectors, among these many sub-narratives was a clear trend among knowledge workers to downgrade the demands of their careers. The Great Resignation was then followed by the rise of quiet quitting, in which a younger cohort of workers began to aggressively push back on their employers’ demands for productivity.

The pandemic didn’t introduce this trend so much as push its worst excesses beyond the threshold of tolerability.

When I first encountered the story of John McPhee’s long days looking up at the leaves in his backyard, I received it nostalgically—a scene from a time long past, when those who made a living with their minds were actually given the time and space needed to craft impressive things.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a job like that where you didn’t have to worry about being productive?” I thought. But eventually an insistent realization emerged. McPhee was productive. If you zoom out from what he was doing on that picnic table on those specific summer

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation. I came to believe that alternative approaches to productivity can be just as easily justified, including those in which overfilled task lists and constant activity are downgraded in importance, and something like John McPhee’s languid intentionality is lauded.

habits and rituals of traditional knowledge workers like McPhee were more than just inspiring, but could, with sufficient care to account for the realities of twenty-first-century jobs, provide a rich source of ideas about how we might transform our modern understanding of professional accomplishment.

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality.

this philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.

providing both theoretical justification for why they’re right and concrete advice on how to take action on them in your specific professional

want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done.

we must first understand how the knowledge sector stumbled into its current malfunctioning relationship with productivity in the first place, as it will be easier to reject the status quo once we truly understand the haphazardness of its formation. It’s toward the pursuit of this goal, then, that we’ll now start our journey.

work creates better results than less. It’s a manager’s job to ensure enough work is getting done, because without this pressure, lazy employees will attempt to get away with the bare minimum.

in Highland Park, Michigan, to this method in 1913, the labor-hours required to produce a Model T dropped from 12.5 to around 1.5—a staggering improvement. By the end of the decade, half of the cars in the United States had been produced by the Ford Motor Company. These rewards were too powerful to resist. The story of economic growth in the modern Western world is in many ways a story about the triumph of productivity thinking.

But then the knowledge sector emerged as a major force in the mid-twentieth century, and this profitable dependence on crisp, quantitative, formal notions of productivity all but vanished.

was, as it turns out, a good reason for this abandonment: the old notions of productivity that worked so well in farming and manufacturing didn’t seem to...

In knowledge work, by contrast, individuals are often wrangling complicated and constantly shifting workloads. You might be working on a client report at the same time that you’re gathering testimonials for the company website and organizing an office party, all the while updating a conflict of interest statement that human resources just emailed you about. In this setting, there’s no clear single output to track. And even if you do wade through this swamp of activity to identify the work that matters most—recall Davenport’s example of counting a professor’s academic publications—there’s no easy way to control for the impact of unrelated obligations on each individual’s ability to produce. I might have published more academic papers than you last year, but this might have been, in part, due to a time-consuming but important committee that you chaired. In this scenario, am I really a more productive employee?

“He can only be helped. But he must direct himself.”

“personal productivity” of offices, in which individuals deploy their own ad hoc and often ill-defined collection of tools and hacks to make sense of their jobs, with no one really knowing how anyone else is managing their work.

using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. If you can see me in my office—or, if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly—then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something.

Similarly, the busier I am as a freelancer or entrepreneur, the more I can be assured I’m doing all I can to get after

As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work. It’s why we gather in office buildings using the same forty-hour workweeks originally developed for limiting the physical fatigue of factory labor, and why we feel guilty about ignoring our inboxes,

In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness, we also gravitate away from deeper efforts toward shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list. Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—it’s

it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.

while a project manager named Doug explained that doing his job well reduced to “churning out lots of artifacts,” whether they really mattered or not.

PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

not a formal system that can be easily explained; it’s more like a mood—a generic atmosphere of meaningful activity maintained through frenetic motion.

cause of this deterioration was the arrival during this decade of networked computers in the office.

activity provides a proxy for productivity, the introduction of tools like email (and, later, Slack) that make it possible to visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort inevitably led to more and more of the average knowledge worker’s day being dedicated to talking about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through incessant electronic messaging.

following us home at night or to our kid’s soccer field on the weekend.

when combined with pseudo-productivity they ended up supercharging our sense of overload and distraction, pushing us onto a collision course with the burnout crisis that afflicts us today.

seems like the benefits of technology have created the ability to stack more into our day and onto our schedules than we have the capacity to handle while maintaining a level of quality which makes the things worth doing. .

I think that’s where the burnout really hurts—when you want to care about something but you’re removed from the capacity to do the thing or do it properly and give it your passion and full attention and creativity because you’re expected to do so many other things.

that it becomes difficult to recognize what the priorities are for them,” she told me. “So they just try to work on a lot and hope they make progress that way.”

Concrete productivity metrics of the type that shaped the industrial sector will never properly fit in the more amorphous knowledge work setting. (Nor should we want them to fit, as this quantitative approach to labor ushers in its own stark inhumanities.)

And when this option is combined with low-friction communication tools and portable computing, the result is the ever-amplifying cycle of activity that pushes us, as Myra so aptly described, toward simply working a lot—cramming professional effort into every corner of our lives, hoping that this ceaseless action somehow adds up to something meaningful.

He was now at a loss to figure out how to deliver on these skills. “In [Zuiker’s] darkest moments,” writes Bill Carter in Desperate Networks, “he found himself asking God why he had been given these unusual talents if he was never going to get a chance to use them.”

Now fully invested in his vision, Zuiker reacted to this failure by forming his own production company, Dare to Pass, dedicated to the singular goal of bringing his crime investigation show to life.

Moonves tried to save his network by pushing his employees to work more. What ended up mattering, however, was instead the obsessive efforts of an eccentric creative talent who spent over three years nurturing a vision, coming at it again and again in an attempt to create something special.[*]

definition of meaningful and valuable work that doesn’t require a frenetic busyness. Its magic instead becomes apparent at longer timescales, emanating from a pace that seems, in comparison with the relentless demands of high-tech pseudo-productivity, to be, for lack of a better word, almost slow.

Against those—or, rather, the vast majority—who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment.

with an enjoyable and life-affirming alternative.