In this latest episode of our recurring Productive Reading series, we look at Cal Newport’s latest book, Slow Productivity.
Slow productivity – a more humane and sustainable approach to getting things done
In the past, we’ve talked about the lessons and key takeaways I found in books about productivity-related topics that I’ve found helpful and thought-provoking, including books by authors like Gary Keller, Charles Duhigg, Brené Brown, Courtney Carver, Jeff Sanders, James Clear, Michael Hyatt, Maura Nevel Thomas, Joshua Becker, Greg McKeown, Cal Newport, Dominique Sachse, Laura Vanderkam, Nir Eyal, Dr. Anna Lembke, and most recently a fascinating book called Switch Craft, by Elaine Fox, Ph.D. This time I’m sharing some of my most important takeaways from Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport. Quotes below are from the book
Who is Cal Newport?
The book cover flap copy says:
“Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for the general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. Newport lives with his wife and three sons in Takoma Park, Maryland.”
Why did I read this book?
I’ve read other books by Cal Newport and featured his prior book, Digital Minimalism, in an earlier Productive Reading episode, TPW366. In the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about the ever-increasing pace of life and the stress and pressures many of us feel about being productive, so when I saw the announcement of this book’s release I pre-ordered it immediately.
The book is subtitled: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
Newport says that our current definition of productivity–especially as it applies to knowledge workers–is “broken.” The book is aimed at redefining productivity for knowledge workers. Knowledge work is defined as “The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.”
This includes office workers like computer programmers, accountants, and so on, as well as lawyers, artists, business owners and executives, marketing professionals, educators, and research scientists.
“The knowledge sector emerged as a major force in the mid-twentieth century . . . 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.”
As a result, uncertainty about how to measure productivity led to “using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity.” What that looks like, he says, is “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.” In other words, the more I’m doing, the more evidence there is that I’m doing something, so busyness became the proxy for productivity. This is what he calls pseudo-productivity. His goal:
“My goal is to offer a more humane and sustainable way to integrate professional efforts into a life well lived. To embrace slow productivity, in other words, to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.”
The book is divided into several parts
It starts with a brief introduction that introduces the context of the book and the problem the book is intended to solve. Here he also introduces what he means by “slow productivity”: “A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:
- Do fewer things.
- Work at a natural pace.
- Obsess over quality.”
Section 1 is called “Foundations” — two chapters that discuss The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-Productivity and A Slower Alternative.
Section 2 is called “Principles” — one chapter for each of the three principles of slow productivity.
Many concepts are illustrated with case studies and real-life examples. Each chapter includes practical suggestions for implementing the principle it’s discussing
The book ends with a brief conclusion.
Introduction – introduces the context of the book and the problem the book is intended to address:
“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. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation.”
He talks about how the fundamental concepts of what productivity means and how it is measured were developed in the context of an industrial world and companies whose business was about producing tangible products. In that context, productivity was easily measured by calculating output per hour, basically, and more was always better. But, he says, this doesn’t work when applied to knowledge work.
The philosophy of slow productivity “rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride.” Instead, he says, when it comes to knowledge work (which ultimately is about producing ideas rather than widgets), “a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.” That is, when defining what it means to be productive as a knowledge worker it’s not the number of ideas that matters, but their quality.
At the end of the introduction, he says this about his purpose for the book: “My goal is not to simply offer tips about how to make your job somewhat less exhausting. Nor is it to merely shake my metaphorical fist on your behalf at the exploitative fiends indifferent to your stressed-out plight. . . . I want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done. I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you’re proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way.”
“Accomplishment without burnout not only is possible, but should be the new standard.”
Key takeaways and quotes
He looks at the epidemic of exhaustion and overwhelm, something I could very much relate to, as I’m guessing you might as well. Among other things, he talks about how the technology that was developed to make our work easier has, while doing that, also contributed to our overwhelm: “Computers and networks opened many new possibilities, but when combined with pseudo-productivity they ended up supercharging our sense of overload and distraction, pushing us onto a collision course with the burnout crisis that afflicts us today.”
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.”
This is consistent with things he’s written in his other books, like Deep Work, and that others have written about the importance of identifying what really matters and weeding out as much of the other stuff as possible to allow for plenty of time, energy, and attention for those things that matter most.
He gives examples of historical and contemporary people who’ve produced great works of art or important scientific discoveries but have taken a long time to do so, and extracts from those examples important lessons for us all. “This lesson, that doing less can enable better results, defies our contemporary bias toward activity, based on the belief that doing more keeps our options open and generates more opportunities for reward.”
“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. . . . 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.
He offers very practical ways to manage our workloads better, including limiting missions, projects, and daily goals (and he goes into some detail about how to actually do that). One of them is about managing/limiting the number of small tasks, such as the application of a concept he refers back to Benjamin Franklin: “his general belief that taming the impact of small details in your professional life opens up space to pursue bigger goals.”
He refers to the concept of “containing the overhead tax of tasks you cannot avoid tackling.” He notes that “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. If you can minimize this preparatory effort, you can contain the impact of the task itself.”
“Slow productivity requires that you free yourself from the constraints of the small so that you can invest more meaningfully in the big.”
He doesn’t just announce principles, though. He also offers practical suggestions, such as:
- Put tasks on autopilot. This is about automating certain tasks so you’re spending less time thinking about them.
- Synchronize. (Reduce “collaboration overhead”–the impact of conversations about work–meetings, chats, etc.) “If much of your perceived busyness comes from talking about tasks instead of actually executing them, you might be less overloaded than you think.” Here he talks about two techniques: office hours and docket-clearing meetings.
- Make other people work more (that is, set up systems that require people to be more specific and complete about the way they “lob tasks your way”)
There are lots more great ideas and techniques in this section, and he goes into sufficient detail about how to implement each of them.
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.”
The problem he identifies: “We toil long days, every day, to satisfy the demands of pseudo-productivity, not because skilled cognitive efforts actually require such unwavering attention.”
He points out that “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. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.”
Newport cites lessons learned from scientists who’ve made huge and innovative contributions to their fields: “an alternative approach to scheduling work in which we give our important efforts more breathing room, allowing them to take longer and unfold with intensity levels that vary over time.” (periods of intense work alternated with breaks where our focus is elsewhere).
- “Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. . . . Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. . . . A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.”
I think about my own writing or work on podcast episodes. I have felt like I should stay at it for however long it takes to get it done, but what actually works for me is periods of writing followed by breaks where I walk away, do something else, and let my mind work on the question or problem at hand, then come back to the project.
“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.”
“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.”
Again, he offers lots of specific, practical techniques to implement this, such as “no meeting Mondays,” mid-day breaks, “rest projects,” creating work rituals, and matching your space to your work.
Principle #3: Obsess over quality:
“Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.”
“The third and final principle of slow productivity asks that you obsess over the quality of the core activities in your professional life. . . . You should be focused on the quality of what you produce because quality turns out to be connected in unexpected ways to our desire to escape pseudo-productivity and embrace something slower.”
“The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities.”
What I think he’s saying here is be the best at what you’re doing–provide high-quality results–and you will be so valuable you’ll be able to exert more control over how and when and how often you do it. This requires intentional choice, though, because “We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.”
As with the other 2 principles, here he offers numerous techniques for implementing it.
“Slowing down isn’t about protesting work. It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.”
His two goals in writing this book, as expressed in the conclusion:
- “The first is focused: to help as many people as possible free themselves from the dehumanizing grip of pseudo-productivity.”
- The second “applies more broadly. Slow productivity is just one response among many to a much bigger problem: The world of cognitive work lacks coherent ideas about how our efforts should be organized and measured. . . . There’s a reason why it’s now so common to encounter critics who promote an exhausted nihilism in which overload and misery are an inescapable fate. The way we’re working no longer works. What’s needed is more intentional thinking about what we mean by ‘productivity’ in the knowledge sector–seeking ideas that start from the premises that these efforts must be sustainable and engaging for the actual humans doing the work.”
The book’s key message
“Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind. It’s not that these efforts are arbitrary: our anxious days include tasks and appointments that really need to get done. . . . A slower approach to work is not only feasible, but is likely superior to the ad hoc pseudo-productivity that dictates the professional lives of so many today. . . . This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.”
Some final thoughts
There’s so much more to this book than what I’ve mentioned here. What I like about it best is the mix of scientific statistics, individual case studies, thoughtful concepts, and practical suggestions for implementation. If you, like me, have struggled with the stress of an overloaded work life, this book offers a way out of the grind. This is a book that I will read again.
What do you think?
Have you read Slow Productivity or Newport’s other books, Deep Work or Digital Minimalism? If so, what did you think? Share your takeaway with us. If you haven’t yet read it, what’s a productivity-related book you’ve read recently that you’d recommend? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below or in The Productive Woman Community Facebook group, or send me an email
Resources and Links
Cal Newport’s books:
Other episodes in the Productive Reading Series:
- Gary Keller’s The ONE Thing (episode 133)
- The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg (episode 147)
- 3 books written by Brené Brown (episode 166)
- Soulful Simplicity, by Courtney Carver (episode 182)
- The Free-Time Formula by Jeff Sanders (episode 211)
- James Clear’s wonderful Atomic Habits (episode 230)
- Free to Focus, by Michael Hyatt (episode 250)
- Attention Management, by Maura Nevel Thomas (episode 271)
- The Minimalist Home, by Joshua Becker (episode 324)
- Effortless, by Greg McKeown (episode 349)
- Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (episode 366)
- Life Makeover, by Dominique Sachse (episode 403)
- Laura Vanderkam’s Tranquility by Tuesday (episode 420)
- Nir Eyal’s Indistractable (episode 454)
- Dopamine Nation, by Dr. Anna Lembke (episode 474)
- Switch Craft, by Elaine Fox, PhD – episode 486
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Great show, with a wonderful bibliography of your other shows, a keeper. I am also a lawyer, but in PR, and have been following you for the past two years. Keep up the good work 💕🙏