When the knowledge sector emerged in the mid-20th century, our best understanding of the word “productivity” came from the manufacturing sector, which led us to measure productivity in terms of the quantity produced per hour.
But in intellectual work, we don’t produce just one thing: we work on seven or eight different things at once, and they differ among workers. Our solution was to introduce a crude heuristic that author and professor Cal Newport has called “pseudo-productivity,” which uses visible activity as a rough proxy for useful effort.
We spend more and more time doing these tasks rather than focusing on quality results, leading to burnout. Newport has a solution: an idea called “slow productivity,” which focuses on the quality of items produced over time and is based on three core principles.
CAL NEWPORT: We are increasingly facing burnout. How is it possible to do work that you are proud of and not feel like your work is encroaching on every aspect of your life? Because I don’t just see myself in my office anymore, looking vaguely busy. You can see every email I send and how active I am in a Slack conversation. I could be doing it on the way to work, on the way home from work, at home, on the weekends. Enough is enough. We are increasingly burned out. We have a flawed definition of productivity that we follow, and what we need to do instead is focus on results.
My name is Cal Newport. I am a computer scientist and writer. My most recent book is called “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.”
So the knowledge sector emerges in the mid-20th century. At that time, our best understanding of productivity came from manufacturing. Manufacturing was a sector that we could measure very precisely. For example, how many Model T cars do we produce per hour of labor coming in? And we had a number that we could look at. Knowledge work emerges. Those kinds of measures don’t work anymore. Because in knowledge work, we don’t produce one thing. I can be working on seven or eight different things at the same time. That might be different from the seven or eight things that the person right next to me is working on. Our solution was to introduce a crude heuristic that I call pseudo-productivity, which says that we can use visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort. So if I see you doing things, you’re better off not doing them. Come into an office and we’ll watch you work. If we need to be more productive, come in earlier, stay later. We’ll just use activity as our best indicator that you’re probably doing something useful. We spend more and more time doing these tasks, which means we spend less and less time doing things that actually matter.
So what’s the solution? Slow productivity is a way of measuring useful effort that now focuses much more on the quality things you produce over time rather than your visible activity in the moment, and I define it as being based on three main principles. The first is to do less. This idea scares a lot of people when they first hear it because they interpret doing less as getting less done. What I really mean is doing fewer things at once. We know from neuroscience and organizational psychology that when you shift the focus of your attention from one point to another, it takes your brain a while to reorient itself. The things you’re thinking about here leave what’s called attention residue. This is a self-imposed reduction in cognitive capacity, so you produce lower quality work. Worse yet, it is a psychological state that is exhausting and frustrating, so that the experience of work itself becomes subjectively very negative. So what happens if I work on fewer things at once? More of my day can actually be spent trying to fulfill my commitments, which means I will complete them faster. And the quality level will probably be higher too because I will be able to offer them uninterrupted focus.
The second principle is to work at a natural pace. One of the defining features of human economic activity for several hundred thousand years is that seasons really matter. There were migration seasons when we hunted. There were planting seasons (we planted), harvest seasons (we harvested), and seasons when neither of these activities took place. We had a great deal of variety throughout the year in terms of the intensity of our work. I think that in intellectual work, if some times of the year are more intense than others, that will lead to better and more sustainable results overall. So the principle of working at a natural pace says that it is okay not to do it fifty weeks a year, five days a week. We can have busy days and we can have less busy days. We can have busy seasons and we can have less busy seasons.
The third principle of slow productivity is to be obsessed with quality. That means you have to identify the things that you do in your work that produce the most value and strive to improve. Any quest for obsession with quality has to start with perhaps a fairly thorough investigation of your own work. Then, once you understand that, start giving that activity as much attention as you can. For example, invest in better tools to signal to yourself that you are invested in doing this task. I did this myself as a postdoc. I was at MIT, I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, but I bought a fifty-dollar lab notebook. And my idea was that this was going to make me take the work that I’m doing in that notebook more seriously, and it did. So something about having this more qualitative tool pushed me to think more about quality.
So this idea of wanting to slow down, wanting to do less, wanting to have a more natural rhythm, becomes very natural when you really focus on what you do well. You start to see all those meetings and emails and that overloaded to-do list not as a sign of productivity, but as obstacles to what you’re really trying to do. If you adopt these principles, several things will happen. The rate at which important things get completed will increase. The quality of what you produce will increase, and happiness will also increase. It’s going to become a much more sustainable work environment, and you’re going to do the work that’s going to make you better.