Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

“Those who suffer for others do more damage to humanity than those who enjoy themselves,”

focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—are

haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience.

and focuses on making cities more pedestrian-centric, supportive of local business, and, in a general sense, more neighborly. They also include Slow Medicine, which promotes the holistic care of people as opposed to focusing only on disease, and Slow Schooling, which attempts to free elementary school students from the pressures of

Slow Cinema is increasingly used to describe realistic, largely nonnarrative movies that reward extended attention with deeper insight into the human condition.

All movements built on the radical but effective strategy of offering people a slower, more sustainable alternative to modern busyness that draws from time-tested wisdom.

These ideas are the work equivalent of responding to the growth of fast-food culture by demanding McDonald’s make its meals somewhat more nutritious—it would help tame some of the health impacts of this food,

not challenge the culture that makes hasty eating necessary in the first place.

This would require moving beyond attempts to simply constrain pseudo-productivity to instead propose a brand-new vision of what productivity can mean.

is where Petrini’s second big idea becomes relevant: draw from time-tested ideas.

KNOWLEDGE WORK (GENERAL DEFINITION) The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.

It’s exactly these rarefied freedoms that make traditional knowledge workers interesting to our project, as it provided them the space and time needed to experiment and figure out what works best when it comes to sustainably creating valuable things using the human brain.

territory to the more pragmatic constraints of standard twenty-first-century knowledge sector jobs. I might not be able to spend two full weeks lying on a picnic table in my backyard, but there’s a key insight lurking in that story about the value of slowing down to prepare to tackle a hard project.

If we can get over our frustration that these traditional knowledge workers enjoyed privileges that we don’t have access to, we might find in their experience the foundations for a conception of productivity that makes our harder jobs more manageable.

a beautifully edited video posted online how she plies her craft in a utilitarian studio in South London, the doors thrown open to a quiet tree-lined patio beyond. (The reader who sent me this clip titled her message “Epitome of deep work.” I agreed.)

I’ll elaborate later, Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, composed his classic thriller in the back room of a furnace repair shop, and Maya Angelou preferred scrawling on legal pads while propped up on her elbows on generic hotel room beds.

The second part of this book is dedicated to elaborating a philosophy of slow productivity—an alternative framework knowledge workers can use to organize and execute tasks that sidesteps the hurry and ever-expanding workloads generated by pseudo-productivity.

goal is to offer a more humane and sustainable way to integrate professional efforts into a life well lived. To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

But it’s worth noting that the general mindset and mood conveyed in these tales are also of stand-alone value. Following Petrini’s lead, I’m convinced that one of the best ways to truly introduce you to the “lost art of accomplishment without burnout” is to immerse you in the world of those who successfully built their lives around this goal.

want to reassure you that slow productivity doesn’t ask that you extinguish ambition. Humans derive great satisfaction from being good at what they do and producing useful things.

Few people know, for example, how long it actually took Isaac Newton to develop all the ideas contained in his masterwork, the Principia (over twenty years). They just know that his book, once published, changed science forever. The value of his ideas lives on, while the lazy pace at which they were produced was soon forgotten.

Though this book is about knowledge work productivity in general, it targets in particular anyone who has a reasonable degree of autonomy in their job.

Pseudo-productivity’s presence in these particular settings is not due to a boss’s demands but is instead largely self-imposed, which opens up vast potential for individual experimentation.

My imagined audience, however, also includes those who might work for larger employers but still enjoy significant freedo...

every revolution needs a starting point, and for something as momentous as rethinking the very notion of productivity itself, it makes sense to focus at first on those for whom self-experimentation is possible.

was not an exemplar of a grind-it-out busyness, but instead a powerful case study of something quite different: a slower approach to productivity.

largely absent themselves from the social scene in Chawton. This was not a decision made lightly. The fact that Austen’s brother essentially owned the town, and lived in an impressive estate just a few hundred yards down the road, meant that opportunities for active social striving were likely abundant. But the Austen party wasn’t interested. “There were no dances and few dinners,” writes Tomalin, “and they remained largely withdrawn into their private activities.”

Austen was not able to produce creatively during the crowded periods of her life. It was only when, through circumstance and contrivance, her obligations were greatly reduced that Austen was able, finally, to complete her best work.

But recall that busy Jane Austen was neither happy nor producing memorable work, while unburdened Jane Austen, writing contently at quiet Chawton cottage, transformed English literature.

PRINCIPLE #1: DO FEWER THINGS Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.

It is possible in most modern work settings, if you’re willing to be creative—and perhaps, at times, even radical—in how you think about selecting and organizing your work. In the pages ahead, I’ll detail my case for why a commitment to simplicity can be just as beneficial

As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new.

In isolation, these new tasks were not overwhelming in scale, but they arrived unexpectedly and accompanied by a sense of urgency. Many other knowledge workers had a similar experience. The pandemic didn’t drown them in new work, but it did seem to suddenly inflate the quantity of overhead tax they were paying.

If we’re working in the same building, and I have a question for you about a project, I can wait until I see your office door is open and then swing by for an impromptu five-minute chat.

this thought experiment, if you commit to just one report at a time, giving it your full mental attention until it’s done before you agree to start working on another, you’ll complete reports at the rate of one per day (assuming you work eight hours per day). If, on the other hand, you agree to take on four different reports simultaneously, the combined overhead tax of maintaining all four on your task list will eat up half your day in logistical

wrangling, effectively doubling the time required to complete a single report. In this example, doing fewer things ends up producing more results. The advantage of doing fewer things, however, is about more than just increasing the raw number of hours dedicated to useful activity; the quality of these hours also increases.

When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense ...

Maybe you’re able to identify a clever new business strategy, devise an elegant algorithm, or come up with a bold advertising campaign that would have eluded ...

There are boring physiological and neurological explanations for this effect involving the mind-constricting impacts of cortisol when your schedule becomes unrealistically full, or the time required to excite rich semantic connections among your brain’s neurons. But we don’t need science to convince us of something ...

it’s easy to mistake “do fewer things” as a request to “accomplish fewer things.” But this understanding gets things exactly backward.

Whether your task list is overflowing or sparse, you’re still working more or less the same number of hours each week. The size of your list affects only how usefully these hours produce results.

but because doing fewer things makes us better at our jobs;

not only psychologically, but also economically and creatively. Focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new, is objectively a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output.

“efficiency,” that the idea of

How is it that so many knowledge workers end up with workloads calibrated to the exact edge of the overhead tax tipping point?

They exist at that point of maximum sustainable overhead tax that seems to represent the worst of all configurations,

apply uneasily at best to the semiautonomy and ambiguity of knowledge work. If you toil at a computer screen for a living, tasks are not necessarily directly assigned to you by a stopwatch-wielding manager

haphazardly, from all directions—colleagues, the HR department, clients.

a factory, pushing employees to work longer shifts might be directly more profitable. In knowledge work, by contrast, pushing employees into larger workloads can decrease both the quantity and quality of what they produce.

It is the acceptance of this fundamentally uncontrolled nature of knowledge work that provides a solution to our mystery: self-regulation.