Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

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, or experience internalized pressure to volunteer or “perform busyness” when we see the boss is nearby. 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 safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy. In her response to my reader survey, a social worker who identified herself only as N described the necessity of “not taking breaks, rushing, and hurrying all day,” 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. This switch from concrete productivity to this looser proxy heuristic is so important for our discussion to follow that we should give it a formal name and definition: