Slowing down—but for what?
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. Portfolio, 2024. 256 pp., $30.00.
Blame Henry Ford. Or email. Or Zoom. Or the Protestant work ethic. Many of us are burdened under what Cal Newport dubs “pseudo-productivity”—the tendency to treat our hours of “visible activity” (now mainly digitally traceable activity) as the measure of our work’s value, while remaining anxious about all we don’t get done.
Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown and a prolific writer and podcaster, is among a chorus of recent critics of the culture of busyness, particularly among “knowledge workers.”
What are “knowledge workers”? Don’t be put off by the inelegant term, which Newport applies broadly to include all whose work is chiefly rooted in extensive cognitive effort. That includes not only “computer programmers, marketers, accountants, [and] executives” but also what he calls “traditional knowledge workers,” such as “philosophers, scientists, musicians, playwrights, and artists.” He looks especially to this last group for insights on slow productivity. These insights are valuable to cubicle-dwellers, college professors, and composers alike.
The book’s first foundational chapter analyzes how “pseudo-productivity” (looking busy and sending a steady stream of electronic communications) became normative, not only for those under the eyes of managers but also for many who work relatively autonomously. The heavily managed will say, “The more activity you see, the more you can assume I’m contributing to the organization’s bottom line.” The more autonomous laborer will say, “The busier I am . . ., the more I can be assured I’m doing all I can to get after it.”
According to Newport, Covid-19 accelerated many aspects of pseudo-productivity, since often the only way to signal productivity to oneself and others was extending one’s digital availability. This is unsustainable, as we see from the viral interest in Jonathan Frostick’s heart-attack-induced proclamation (“I’m not spending all day on Zoom anymore”) and other reactive trends like “quiet quitting.” Nor is our feeling of digital overwhelm merely anecdotal: Quantitative studies confirm massive increases, during the first year of Covid restrictions, in time spent in meetings and in the number of instant messages and emails.
After laying these foundations, Newport offers his tripartite solution: “Do Fewer Things. Work at a Natural Pace. Obsess Over Quality.” For each of these three he includes profiles of traditional knowledge workers as a starting point. He finds, for example, that Jane Austen wrote her novels not (as is often claimed) in the interstices of a heavy social schedule, but rather in a years-long period when she had “fewer things” to do, following her family’s retreat from a quasi-gentry social role. Kerouac, Galileo, Newton, and the Beatles make appearances as well.
Newport worries that such profiles, as well as examples from his own experience, will be dismissed as “privilege.” Few workers have the autonomy of a renaissance scientist, an in-demand professional musician, or even a tenured R1 professor. Nevertheless, flexibility in accepting obligations and using our time can be seen as a spectrum: “If we can get over our frustration that these traditional knowledge workers enjoyed privileges we don’t have access to, we might find in their experience the foundations for a conception of productivity that makes our harder jobs more manageable.”
Newport repeats some strategies found in his podcasting and previous writing (especially bestsellers Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and So Good They Can’t Ignore You). This book can either stand alone or be complemented by his other works. Much is refined or added, and all is placed in a larger vision of escaping the culture of speed and busyness. For each principle, he elaborates many potential implementations. This includes ways to communicate about our workflow with colleagues, clients, and supervisors—without losing our livelihoods.
A key insight is Newport’s attention to different scales. Thus, “Doing Fewer Things” includes forgoing or offloading not only some potential projects and tasks but also some “missions” (large, long-term areas of work responsibility). I also value his ideas about moving from “push” systems (wherein tasks and projects are pushed onto you from the outside) to “pull” systems (wherein you only commit to tasks and projects once you finish others and free up the space to pull them in).
Similarly, we can “Work at a Natural Pace” on different scales: within the day, in relating workdays to one another, in the flow of a multiple-week period, and in shaping one’s year around seasons of heavier and lighter work.
This last enticing proposal, that we “Embrace Seasonality,” is perhaps the one that least jibes with our internalized 24-7-365 mentality. The truth is that we cannot truly maintain peak performance over long periods. If we don’t embrace seasonality systematically, then exhaustion overtakes us, fostering guilt over unfulfilled aspirations. Embracing seasonality is also not just about taking real vacations, as good as that might be. If most of us lack the freedom for extended cessations of work, many of us can structure work more clearly to mitigate multitasking, to designate different types of work for different days and times, and even to pursue “rest projects” after intensive work projects.
Is Newport’s promise of “accomplishment without burnout” too good to be true? Facing potential objections, he offers three “interludes” of “self-reflective commentary and critique.” Of Newport’s three principles, “Obsess Over Quality” most elicits my own skepticism. Fittingly, he follows it with an interlude: “What about Perfectionism?” His response begins with an unhelpful profile of a particular point in the Beatles’ career, but he comes to a stronger conclusion, emphasizing that the “Quality” principle does not stand alone. It is ultimately a call to carve out space to pursue craftsmanship, which can yield great rewards. When combined with the other two principles, it boils down to this: “Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about, but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection.”
Another interlude asks, “What about Overwhelmed Parents?” I often found myself weighing the experience of working mothers I know against Newport’s advice to “Do Fewer Things.” Ha! But Newport’s sympathetic response is a start. Whether working part-time or full-time, for someone else or for yourself, the pseudo-productive measures of work are “implicit and self-reinforced”: “This reality requires parents—and more specifically moms, who often shoulder more of these household burdens than their partners do—to renegotiate for themselves, day after day, the battle between the demands of employment and family. This is a process that unfolds as a thousand cutting decisions and compromises, each of which seemingly disappoints someone, until you find yourself writing at 4:00 a.m. next to a precarious pile of laundry.”
In this interlude, Newport takes on the ultimate question: What is slow productivity for, anyway? Simply to avoid burnout at work? To work a twenty-hour week or to vacation longer? To have a craftsman’s sense of satisfaction? To be recognized for the “quality” of the work over which we “obsessed”? Newport thinks that, if we play our cards right, “Do Fewer Things” won’t always mean “Accomplish Fewer Things.” Rather, if we can stop measuring ourselves by our visible, frenetic activity, we can better shape our work so as to make room for life outside of it. To harried parents specifically, Newport suggests that, challenging as implementation might be, his strategies can facilitate accomplishment while better containing the overhead of tasks, projects, and missions.
This suggests that “slow productivity” is not just about our income-producing work. After all, his podcast is entitled The Deep Life, and he has mentioned a future book with that title. We often identify with our work, but we also struggle to integrate it with our whole life and our higher ends. Whether or not the term “calling” applies to our worldly professions, many of us want to live “vocationally.” The narrative of vocation—in Christian or in secularized terms—promises us a greater sense of meaning. Might a slower but still productive life help us avoid making labor its own end? Could it give us tools for a more ordered dedication to the right “missions”—at work, home, and church?
Newport’s book is more than just a bundle of “life hacks” that might make us happier cogs in the machine. This “philosophy” is “not meant as a reactionary response to our current moment of overload, but instead a game plan for a viable replacement.” Although the book is most immediately helpful to individuals who have significant autonomy in organizing their work, it also aims to spark a “revolution” in collective (especially managerial) approaches to productivity, adaptable to various individuals doing various types of labor.
Whatever the “how” of better labor might be, whether individually or in common, true conversion in our working lives will demand strong attention to the “why.” Newport’s latest gives us many ways to reform how we go about our work and much prompting to explore why we work at all.
Christopher J. Lane is Professor of History at Christendom College (Front Royal, VA) and the author of Callings and Consequences: The Making of Catholic Vocational Culture in Early Modern France.
Image: “Man Suffering from Stress at Work,” Ciphr, Flickr