Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

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.

love my audience, but fired up is not usually a term I used to describe them. Until now. Something was clearly changing.

at least four major books were published that took direct aim at popular notions of productivity. These included Celeste Headlee’s Do Nothing, Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even, Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist, and Oliver Burkeman’s delightfully sardonic Four Thousand Weeks.

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.

As you’ll learn in the pages ahead, 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. In

“Work” is a vague thing that employees do in an office. More 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. The most successful companies have the hardest workers.

Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers. Davenport ultimately became frustrated with the difficulty of making meaningful progress on this topic and moved on to more rewarding areas.

It was from this uncertainty that a simple alternative emerged: 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.

As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work.

Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—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.

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

Good Concept - Bad Name. The term should be performative psuedo-productivity. the act of going through lots of high visibilty actions that look productive but are short uninvolved tasks. Lots of it done for the sake of social pressure or apperence to alleviate guikt, peer preasure, or managerial scrutiny.

the sustainability of pseudo-productivity as a means for organizing knowledge work had begun, seemingly all at once, to quietly but rapidly degrade. The cause of this deterioration was the arrival during this decade of networked computers in the office.

The subsequent arrival of portable computing and communication, in the form of laptops and smartphones, made this trend even worse, as the demand to demonstrate effort could now extend beyond the workday, following us home at night or to our kid’s soccer field on the weekend.

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 was only when, through circumstance and contrivance, her obligations were greatly reduced that Austen was able, finally, to complete her best work.

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.

My goal in this chapter is to persuade you not to give up on this aspirational vision of engineered simplicity.

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead:

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. This feedback loop can quickly spiral out of control, pushing your workload higher and higher until you find yourself losing your entire day to overhead activities:

the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions

You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.

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.

our brains work better when we’re not rushing.

Much of the existing discussion I encountered about these issues adopted ideas from a traditional conflict theory framework that claims we are pushed toward overwork because an exploitative entity, such as a manager or business owner, is trying to extract as much value as possible from our labor.

Commie shit

In knowledge work, by contrast, pushing employees into larger workloads can decrease both the quantity and quality of what they produce.

In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation.

The problem with deploying this stress heuristic, of course, is that you don’t start turning away incoming tasks until you find yourself already creeping up to the edge of unsustainable workloads.

A teacher named Aurelia, fed up with the overload that’s endemic in K–12 education, quietly adopted a clear rule: “I no longer do work that is not compensated and clearly expected as part of my job.”

An anonymous senior consultant told me about how his career turned around when his company put in place a policy that gave its consultants allotments of nonbillable hours that they could use for whatever they wanted. “This has been life changing,” he explained. “I was able to learn and branch out into new areas . . . it reengaged me in the field . . . it has reminded me why I enjoy all this in the first place.”

There are only so many times you can offer an unqualified no without either losing your job or being sidelined as an unreliable curmudgeon.

There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.

My recommendation here is simple: work on at most one project per day. To clarify, I don’t intend for this single daily project to be your only work for the day. You’ll likely also have meetings to attend, emails to answer, and administrative nonsense to subdue (we’ll talk more about these smaller tasks in the upcoming proposition about containing the small).

Small tasks, in sufficient quantity, can act like productivity termites, destabilizing the whole foundation of what you’re trying to build. It’s worth going to great lengths to tame them.

my book Deep Work, for example, I included a chapter titled “Drain the Shallows,” which explored this theme. In it, I recommended better organizing your hours using time blocking—a

I also suggested writing more structured emails to minimize unnecessary back-and-forth messaging, an objective I elaborate in much greater detail in a follow-up book I published a half decade later titled A World Without Email.

I recommend capturing as many categories of regular tasks as possible into an increasingly elaborate autopilot schedule:

David Allen’s Getting Things Done

The introduction of personal computers, followed soon after by electronic communication tools like email, transformed office collaboration into an ongoing, haphazard bazaar of asynchronous, back-and-forth messaging—a colleague asks you to handle something, you reply to clarify what he means, you then write another colleague to gather the needed information, but based on her response, you realize you don’t fully understand the task, so you send a new message to the original requester, and so on.

The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussions that can be used to resolve many different issues.

Make it clear that you’re always available during this period—your door is open, Zoom activated, Slack channels monitored, phone on—to chat about any and all relevant questions or requests.

Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Brigid Schulte,

What follows is a three-step strategy for implementing a simulated pull system as an individual without control over the habits of your colleagues or clients.

The active position of the list, by contrast, should be limited to three projects at most. When scheduling your time, you should focus your attention only on the projects on your active list.

This leaves open a free slot that you can fill by pulling in a new project from the holding tank. For larger projects, you might want to instead pull onto your active list a reasonable chunk of work toward its completion.

To avoid a barrage of incessant prodding, you need to combine your lists with a smart intake procedure. This is the step we’ll discuss next.

If your colleagues and clients don’t trust you to deliver, they won’t stop bothering you.

We often believe those we work with care only about getting results as fast as possible. But this isn’t true. Often what they really want is the ability to hand something off and not have to worry about whether or not it will be accomplished.

Relief, in other words, trumps...

You should update and clean your lists once a week.

Prioritize what’s due soon, and send updates for any work that you know you’re not going to finish by the time promised.