Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

“We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher,”

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.

think about what it means to get things done.

“In most cases, people don’t measure the productivity of knowledge workers,”3 he explained. “And when we do, we do it in really silly ways, like how many papers do academics produce, regardless of quality. We are still in the quite early stages.”

Assembly lines are dreary5 for workers, but when Henry Ford switched his factory in Highland Park, Michigan, to this method in 1913, the labor-hours required to produce a Model T dropped from 12.5 to around 1.5—a staggering improvement. By the end of the decade,6 half of the cars in the United States had been produced by the Ford Motor Company. These rewards were too powerful to resist. The story of economic growth in the modern Western world is in many ways a story about the triumph of productivity thinking.

there’s no clear single output to track.

“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,”8 argued Peter Drucker in his influential 1967 book, The Effective Executive. “He can only be helped. But he must direct himself.”

Without concrete productivity metrics to measure and well-defined processes to improve, companies weren’t clear how they should manage their employees. 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. 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. The more activity you see, the more you can assume that I’m contributing to the organization’s bottom line. Similarly, the busier I am as a freelancer or entrepreneur, the more I can be assured I’m doing all I can to get after it.

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.

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

In a setting where activity provides a proxy for productivity, the introduction of tools like email (and, later, Slack) that make it possible to visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort inevitably led to more and more of the average knowledge worker’s day being dedicated to talking about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through incessant electronic messaging.

“In [Zuiker’s] darkest moments,” writes Bill Carter in Desperate Networks, “he found himself asking God why he had been given these unusual talents if he was never going to get a chance to use them.”

Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements—focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions—are obviously not restricted to food in any fundamental sense.

Moves to maintain telecommuting or reduce the workweek help blunt some of the worst side effects of pseudo-productivity but do little to address the root problem itself. These ideas are the work equivalent of responding to the growth of fast-food culture by demanding McDonald’s make its meals somewhat more nutritious—it would help tame some of the health impacts of this food, but not challenge the culture that makes hasty eating necessary in the first place.

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

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.

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.

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.

engineered simplicity.

during the first year of the pandemic, he dedicated an increasing amount of time to video calls. As a result, his workdays began to stretch out. “Whereas before I would finish sensibly anywhere between five and half past six, I’d be finding myself there on a Friday at 8 o’clock at night exhausted, thinking I need to prep up something for Monday and I haven’t got time,” he said. “I started then to actually work weekends.”10 Frostick wasn’t alone in feeling overwhelmed by his schedule during this period. 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.”

Typical change for knowledge workers working remotely

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.

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

How is it that so many knowledge workers end up with workloads calibrated to the exact edge of the overhead tax tipping point?

We’ve established that overload is not fundamental to knowledge work. It’s instead largely a side effect of the crude ways in which we self-manage our work volume. We further established that toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things, as it chokes our schedule in administrative kudzu and splinters our attention into fragments too small to support original thinking.

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). But when it comes to expending efforts on important, bigger initiatives, stay focused on just one target per day.

When I hit a wall or a problem, a walk often brings sudden illumination.

In many cases, it’s not the actual execution of a small commitment that generates distraction, it’s instead the cognitive effort required to remember it, to worry about it, and to eventually find time for it in your schedule.

From a slow productivity perspective, however, there’s good news embedded in this otherwise discouraging account. If much of your perceived busyness comes from talking about tasks instead of actually executing them, you might be less overloaded than you realize. In other words, if you can reduce the footprint of these conversations, the pile of actual, concrete obligations that remains might not be so forbidding.

single, overwhelming pile of unstructured urgency.

no one is going to tell you specifically how much is enough—that’s up to you.

Simulating a pull-based workflow works only if you maintain transparency.

when it comes to our understanding of productivity, timescale matters.

In contemporary work, it became clear, our bias is toward evaluating our efforts at the fast scale.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities.

It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster.

PRINCIPLE #2: WORK AT A NATURAL PACE Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.

a good place to start might be to identify where our current work routines most differ from what our prehistoric ancestors evolved to expect.

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. The workers eventually—inevitably—fought back against this grim situation. They pushed for reform legislation, like the Fair Labor Standards Act (passed by the US Congress in 1938), which fixed forty hours as the standard workweek,

We toil long days, every day, to satisfy the demands of pseudo-productivity, not because skilled cognitive efforts actually require such unwavering attention. If anything, we have evidence to believe that industrial-style work rhythms make us less effective. Recall that the scientists with whom we opened this chapter leveraged the freedom of their rarefied positions to implement an up-and-down pace that more closely resembled an Agta forager than a modern office dweller.

Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable.

Proposition: Take Longer

Frequent cold starts can inject more creativity into your efforts,

MAKE A FIVE-YEAR PLAN

X years. Based on context

This long-term plan kept me returning to my writing goals time and again. But equally important, it gave me the breathing room I needed to feel comfortable even when progress wasn’t immediately being made. Because my vision was established on the scale of multiple years,

DOUBLE YOUR PROJECT TIMELINES

A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.

SIMPLIFY YOUR WORKDAY

a good target is to ensure that no more than half of the hours in any single day are dedicated to meetings or calls.

The key to meaningful work is in the decision to keep returning to the efforts you find important. Not in getting everything right every time.