Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

Even after this moment of insight, it still took McPhee more than a year to finish writing his article,

The finished piece would stretch to more than thirty thousand words and be divided into two parts, to appear in two consecutive issues of the magazine.

McPhee was productive. If you zoom out from what he was doing on that picnic table on those specific summer days in 1966 to instead consider his entire career, you’ll find a writer who has, to date, published twenty-nine books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards.

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.

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.

a stereotypical case study about the various ways the knowledge sector came to think about productivity during the twentieth century: “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.

By far the most common style of answer simply listed the types of things the respondent did in their job.

None of these answers included specific goals to meet, or performance measures that could differentiate between doing a job well versus badly.

knowledge workers have no agreed-upon definition of what “productivity” even means.

As with growing crops, the key idea was to measure the amount of output produced for a given amount of input and then experiment with different processes for improving this value.

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.

identify the work that matters most—

In the knowledge sector, by contrast, decisions about organizing and executing work are largely left up to individuals to figure out on their own.

And as freelancers and small entrepreneurs in the sector became more prevalent, these individuals, responsible only for themselves, weren’t sure how they should manage themselves. It was from this uncertainty that a simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity.

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,

the subjects they studied checked their inbox once every six minutes on average.)

demonstrate effort

The details of CBS’s turnaround provide a useful contrast between differing conceptions of productivity. Moonves tried to save his network by pushing his employees to work more. What ended up mattering, however, was instead the obsessive efforts of an eccentric creative talent who spent over three years nurturing a vision, coming at it again and again in an attempt to create something special.fn1

There’s a personal satisfaction in grimly pointing out the flaws in a system, but sustainable change, Petrini came to believe, requires providing people with an enjoyable and life-affirming alternative.

“Those who suffer for others do more damage to humanity than those who enjoy themselves,”5 Petrini explained.

Petrini recognized, however, that when it came to presenting an appealing alternative to fast food, he would be wise to draw from traditional food cultures that had developed through trial-and-error experimentation over many generations. Slow Food doesn’t just support longer meals, it promotes a style of communal dining that had been common in Italian villages for centuries.

Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements—focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—

maybe when it comes to combating the inhumanity of our current moment of professional overload, what we really need—more so than righteous disdain or brash new policy—is a slower conception of what it even means to be productive in the first place.

question so many more of the arbitrary assumptions that have come to define the modern workplace.”

rising interest in the four-day workweek. In February 2023, the UK released the results of a large-scale pilot study that followed more than sixty companies that experimented with a reduced schedule.

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

but there’s a key insight lurking in that story about the value of slowing down to prepare to tackle a hard project.

reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality.

These justifications are then followed by a series of propositions that detail specific ideas for implementing the principle within the messy realities of a standard knowledge work job.

Each chapter also includes an interlude, which provides self-reflective commentary and critique on the ideas being developed.

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.

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).

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. This obviously include freelancers, solopreneurs, and those who run small businesses. 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.

And with her obligations suddenly dramatically reduced, Austen entered a period of “phenomenal” productivity.

it was Austen’s ability to “abstract herself from the daily life going on around her”7 that allowed her to find her literary voice.

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.

Even if you’re a solopreneur in full control of your days, the need for income might undermine your intention to reduce your workload.

his very first resolution among the six he listed: “I’m not spending all day on Zoom anymore.”

“I started then to actually work weekends.”

A work trends report published by Microsoft revealed that time spent in meetings had increased by a factor of 2.5 during the first year of the pandemic, while the quantity of instant message chats and emails received also exploded. As the report summarizes, “The digital intensity of workers’ days has increased substantially.”

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. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished.

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: meeting after meeting conducted against a background hum of unceasing email and chat.

“When we work remotely, this kind of ad-hoc coordination becomes harder to organize,” I wrote in a 2020 article about the costs of remote work, “and decisions start to drag.”

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.

our brains work better when we’re not rushing.

it’s easy to mistake “do fewer things” as a request to “accomplish fewer things.”

They exist at that point of maximum sustainable overhead tax that seems to represent the worst of all configurations, as it maintains the pain of having too much to do, but keeps this pain just manageable enough to avoid reform.

self-regulation. How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation.