Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

But unlike in the industrial sector, in this invisible factory we’d constructed for ourselves we didn’t have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits. Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence: colonizing as much of our time, from evenings to weekends to vacations, as we could bear, and leaving little recourse beyond burnout or demotion or quitting when it became too much. Our estrangement from the rhythms of work that dominated the first two hundred eighty thousand years of our species’ existence was now complete. Lurking behind this exhaustion, however, are glimpses of a better future. Monotonous, all-day effort is unavoidable when you’re harvesting crops or working an assembly-line station—the best you can do is mitigate its worst impacts with rituals and laws.