Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

“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.

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. There 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 apply to this new style of cognitive work.

“My clients are very busy, but are often so overwhelmed by everything they want or have to do, 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.”

Consider Isaac Newton working through the details of calculus in the countryside north of Cambridge University, or a sculptor named Anna Rubincam, who documented in 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.

Before diving into these specifics, however, I 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. This philosophy can be understood as providing a more sustainable path toward these achievements. 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. Slow productivity supports legacy-building accomplishments but allows them to unfold at a more human speed.

The book was Sense and Sensibility, and the pseudonymous author, of course, was Jane Austen, making her publishing debut. Austen had spent more than a decade working on a collection of manuscripts that she was now, seemingly all at once, polishing into impressive final forms. Sense and Sensibility initiated a remarkable five-year run of publishing, arguably unmatched in the history of modern literature, that saw Austen soon after also release Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and then finally, in 1815, Emma. Two years later, she died, all of only forty-one years old.

Hidden from the world at Chawton cottage, suddenly, almost miraculously free of most responsibilities both domestic and social, Austen, for the first time in over a decade, had gained real and meaningful space to think and work creatively. It’s here, working at a modest writing desk by a window overlooking the road, that she finally finishes the manuscripts for Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice before moving on to compose Mansfield Park and Emma. Austen’s nephew may have popularized the story of an overscheduled Austen, prim and proper in her sitting room, working in frenzied bursts between incessant distractions, but the reality of her remarkable years at Chawton is clearly quite different.[*] Far from glamorizing a surreptitious, disciplined busyness, Austen’s story, when told properly, seems to promote the opposite of this approach. 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.

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.

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: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying.

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 of experimentation and possibility. 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 you in a more fragmented state of attention. 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.

Wiles abandoned any work that was not directly relevant to proving Fermat’s Last Theorem and stopped attending the never-ending round of conferences and colloquia. Because he still had responsibilities in the Princeton mathematics department, Wiles continued to attend seminars, lecture to undergraduates, and give tutorials. Whenever possible he would avoid the distractions of being a faculty member by working at home, where he could retreat into his attic study.

When I graduated from college, for example, with a major in computer science and a book deal with Random House, I decided to keep my work intensely focused on just these two missions: academic research and writing. This lasted until I was hired as an assistant professor, at which point I had to add a third mission dedicated to servicing the necessary nonresearch aspects of academic life, including class preparation and student supervision. Three missions still feel compatible with slow productivity, especially if I’m careful to control it (see the next proposition for more on that), but, if I’m honest, I’m nostalgic for the simplicity of two, and salivate over the idea of one.

In Deep Work, I highlighted the following excerpt from a 1981 interview Feynman, then a professor at Caltech, gave to the BBC show Horizon: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time . . . it needs a lot of concentration . . . if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everybody I don’t do anything.

In the context of knowledge work, it turns out, autopilot schedules provide an effective means to contain tasks. Instead of setting regular times each week for completing school assignments, you can set times for accomplishing specific categories of regularly occurring tasks. A freelancer, for example, might schedule sending invoices for Monday morning, while a professor might schedule reviewing grant reports for Fridays, right after lunch.

The Industrial Revolution stripped away those last vestiges of variation in our work efforts. The powered mill, followed by the factory, made every day a harvest day—continuous, monotonous labor that never alters. Gone were the seasonal changes and sense-making rituals. Marx, for all his flaws and overreach, hit on something deep with his theory of Entfremdung (estrangement), which argued that the industrial order alienated us from our basic human nature.

Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. In the moment, it might exude a false sense of usefulness, but when continued over time, it estranges us from our fundamental nature, generates misery, and, from a strictly economic perspective, almost certainly holds us back from reaching our full capabilities. A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.

MAKE A FIVE-YEAR PLAN Most people restrict their long-term planning to cover something like the next few months. You might have a goal, for example, to write and submit an academic paper by the end of the fall, or introduce a new product over the summer. Planning at this scale is certainly necessary, as without it you might end up mired in shallow demands and never really move forward on anything important. I suggest, however, also crafting a plan that covers an even larger scale: what you would like to accomplish in the next five years or so. The specific choice of five years is somewhat arbitrary. You can adjust this quantity to fit the reality of your situation: if you’ve just started a four-year degree program, for example, a four-year plan might make more sense. The key to this suggestion, however, is that your time horizon should include at least several years.

Every time you add a meeting to your calendar for a given day, find an equal amount of time that day to protect. If I schedule thirty minutes for a call on Tuesday, I’ll also find another thirty minutes that day to block off on my calendar as protected for myself. As a given day starts to fill up with appointments, it also fills up with protected blocks, making it increasingly harder to add something new. No day can end up with more than half of its time dedicated to meetings or calls.

As previously argued, for most of recorded human history, the working lives of the vast majority of people on earth were intertwined with agriculture, a (literally) seasonal activity. To work without change or rest all year would have seemed unusual to most of our ancestors. Seasonality was deeply integrated into the human experience. This proposition argues that things don’t have to be this way. Seasonality might be impossible in settings such as industrial manufacturing, but knowledge work is significantly more flexible. For those who work in cubicles instead of factories, there are more opportunities than you might at first imagine to vary your relationship with your work throughout the year. The key is to recognize that you don’t need access to thirty-six acres of rural lakefront property to cultivate a beneficial seasonality.

If we’re willing to push aside all of this digital posturing, at the core of quiet quitting is a pragmatic observation: you have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload. The tactics of quiet quitters are straightforward. They suggest, for example, that you don’t volunteer for extra work, actually shut down at five o’clock, be comfortable saying no, and dilute an expectation of being constantly accessible over email and chat. As numerous quiet quitters report, these little changes can make a big difference on the psychological impact of your workload.

There’s a romanticism to these stories about seasonal escapes that can be both immensely appealing and frustratingly impossible. Amid the tropical sun of the Caribbean winter, Fleming found inspiration to create one of the most enduring characters of modern genre literature, much as Georgia O’Keeffe discovered her signature artistic style in the southern Adirondacks. We can imagine a similar relief and creative charge if only we, too, could find a way to spend extended time away from our normal professional routines each year. But what was easy for someone like Fleming in postwar Britain seems impossibly distant from reality for most who toil in twenty-first-century knowledge work.

There’s something about entering a movie theater on a weekday afternoon that resets your mind. The context is so novel—“most people are at work right now!”—that it shakes you loose from your standard state of anxious reactivity. This mental transformation is cleansing and something you should seek on a regular basis. My suggestion is to try to put aside an afternoon to escape to the movies once per month, protecting the time on your calendar well in advance so it doesn’t get snagged by a last-minute appointment. In most office jobs, no one is going to notice if once every thirty days or so you’re gone for an afternoon. If someone asks where you were, just say you had a “personal appointment.” Which is true. You should, of course, be reasonable in this planning to make sure that you’re not missing something important.

One of Basecamp’s more striking policies is the consolidation of work into “cycles.” Each such cycle lasts from six to eight weeks. During those weeks, teams focus on clear and urgent goals. Crucially, each cycle is then followed by a two-week “cooldown” period in which employees can recharge while fixing small issues and deciding what to tackle next. “It’s sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cooldown period to fit in more work,” explains the Basecamp employee handbook. “But the goal is to resist this temptation.” This strategy embraces the natural seasonality of human effort. If Basecamp demanded that employees work with focus and urgency without break, their overall intensity would drop as exhaustion set in. When they instead regularly take time off between cycles, the work completed within the cycles achieves a higher level of quality. This latter scenario can end up producing better overall results than the former. It’s also more sustainable for the employees involved.

Many writers leverage the details of their surroundings to support specific properties of their work. When composing Hamilton, for example, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrangled permission to write in the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the oldest surviving house in Manhattan, which served as both the headquarters for George Washington during the Battle of Harlem Heights and the home of Aaron Burr during his vice presidential years. “I love that we are just a bunch of layers above where all this shit went down,” Miranda explained.

Dan Brown, for his part, invested his Da Vinci Code fortune in a custom-built home near the seacoast in Rye Beach, New Hampshire, filled with the style of Gothic features one would expect to encounter in one of his popular thrillers. Push a button hidden in the library and a shelf swings open to reveal a display case. Touch the corner of a painting in the living room and a portal to a secret room appears. The inside of a bathroom door is decorated with a page from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, written, as was Da Vinci’s habit, in backward handwriting to conceal its content. When the door is closed, however, you can decipher the text by reading it through the bathroom mirror. You and I might find such a home unsettling and ostentatious. But if you make a living writing thrillers based on preposterous mysterious conspiracies, it might be exactly what you need to find your rhythm.

Francis Ford Coppola has a long-standing habit of keeping soldering irons, switches, and diodes in his various production offices over the years. He used to love tinkering with electronic gizmos as a kid, and thinks the presence of the tools helps recenter him on the primal importance of building things from scratch. Whenever I see a generic home office, with its white bookcases and office-supply-store wall hangings, I can’t help but think about all the ways in which its inhabitant could remake the setting into something more tailored to the work it supports.