From Busy to Fulfilled: The Slow Productivity Revolution

Every once in a while, in our digitally-addled age, it feels both necessary and worthwhile to dip into a Cal Newport book or article. As an MIT-trained scientist who also teaches the subject at Georgetown University, Newport has always been paradoxically involved with guarding our minds from machined distractions. Earlier in  Deep Work, he had suggested ways to fortify ourselves from the constant barrage of WhatsApp or Insta-fuelled shallows.

In his latest work,  Slow Productivity, he suggests that the core ideas that prop up productivity in the knowledge sector ought to be dismantled. After all, if you’re a coder or lawyer or writer, widgets-per-hour hardly makes sense. An anachronic clinging to industrial measures leads to something Newport terms “pseudo-productivity” – a sense of feeling  frantically busy, without the fulfillment that accompanies any high-quality, original output.

Embracing Inaction for Creative Clarity

To draw our attention to other possible ways of working, he recounts the methods of John McPhee, an associate editor at  Time  and a long-form writer for  The New Yorker. In 1966, while working on a complex article on the “Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey,” for which he had accumulated eight months of research material, McPhee did something counterintuitive.

Having to pull everything into a tightly-knitted whole, he lay on a picnic table in his backyard for two weeks. Doing nothing. Staring at an ash tree, or at birds or at a cloudless sky. Two weeks of blank staring gave rise to an insight on how he needed to structure the article. Post that A-ha, McPhee took another year to complete his piece.

Such understandably human bids to do less have grown louder after the pandemic. In  Do Nothing, Celeste Headlee writes: “We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher.” Reflecting on McPhee’s story, Newport realized that there had been a time “when those who made a living with their minds were actually given the time and space needed to craft impressive things.”

When Less is More

But this is the thing. McPhee was productive. He published 29 books, among them, a Pulitzer winner, with two nominated for the National Book Awards. The problem, as Newport observes, in our current era, productivity is conflated with relentless busyness. Instead, we need to adopt what he calls the tenets of Slow Productivity. Which are:

1.     Do fewer things

2.     Work at a natural pace

3.     Obsess over quality

From Factories to Minds: Measuring the Immeasurable

When Newport surveyed 700 knowledge workers, he realized that definitions of “productivity” were varied and vague. It’s not just the workers, says Newport. Even academics are fuzzy on this. In an article titled, “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge”, Peter Drucker has many suggestions on how people  might  bolster their productivity, but he doesn’t tell you how to measure it or detail specific processes to improve it.

Similarly Newport interviewed Tom Davenport, who wrote a 2005 book, Thinking for a Living: How to get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers.  Davenport says that measuring productivity is tough when it comes to knowledge workers. For instance, is an academic who has published many mediocre papers or books better than one who has published one outstanding work?

Productivity is easy to measure in farms and factories. In knowledge work, people simultaneously handle nebulous tasks. Like producing a client proposal, while also organizing a welcome party, and conducting performance appraisals. In his 1967 book, The Efficient Executive, Drucker wrote: “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped…”

Visibility Overtakes Real Work

Knowledge workers typically have to manage themselves. But they don’t know how to best do so. This becomes more complicated, when you’re also managing freelancers and other autonomous contributors. In this scenario, Newport observes, visibility often trumps productivity. Or is seen as a reflection of the latter. If you’re  seen  sending more emails, or responding promptly to messages – you might be seen as more productive. Newport calls this the “visible-activity heuristic.”

Slowness In Other Realms

When McDonald’s wanted to open a branch in Rome near the Spanish steps, there were lots of local protests. Around then Carlo Petrini launched “Slow Food.” Slow Food chapters started opening up around Italy. “The group promoted slow meals, eaten communally, made from local and seasonal ingredients.” Now there are Slow Food chapters in 160 countries. Two ideas drew Newport to Slow Food.

1.     The offer of “appealing alternatives.” If you’re critiquing the mainstream, can you offer a substitute? Slow Food does that.

2.      It draws from tradition, rather than creating something too radical or new.

Taking off from this, Carl Honore writes about other Slow movements in his book, “In Praise of Slowness” (2004). For instance, Slow Cities are pedestrian centric, promote local businesses and are more neighborly.

Slow Medicine fosters holistic healing. Slow Schooling frees kids from competitive exams and ranks. Slow Media avoids the digital clickbait traps. Slow Cinema features “realistic, largely non-narrative movies that reward extended attention.” All these Slow Movements offer an alternative to “modern busyness”. 

From Heart Attack to Life Hack

In 2021, Jonathan Frostick of HSBC suffered a heart attack. And then put out a LinkedIn post about how he planned to change his life. The post went viral, gathering 300,000 comments. His first resolution was: “I’m not spending all day on Zoom anymore.” After the pandemic, workers found themselves in more meetings, responding to more emails and messages.

Besides the core work that you are responsible for, scheduling meetings and other activities often have an “overhead tax”. Then you try to catch up on actual work on off-work hours – on weekends or early mornings or late nights. You find yourself working longer hours and still falling behind.

Since all tasks have an associated “overhead tax”, it’s best to do fewer things. You have to reduce not just professional and personal obligations, but also social ones.

Undisturbed: The Power of Solitude

Newport narrates the story of Andrew Wiles, a mathematics professor at Princeton. Since the age of 10, Wiles had been obsessed with the idea of solving Fermat’s theorem. When another theorist suggested the proof was connected in some manner to the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, Wiles felt he needed to hole himself up to fulfill his ambition. Over the next 8 years, he devoted large chunks of his time to Fermat’s theorem, announcing the solution at a conference in Cambridge.

Even Benjamin Franklin, famously known for doing so much, relished spending his time on tasks that felt truly fulfilling. Ian Rankin, the Scottish crime writer, used to retreat to a distant house on the coast of Scotland, to write inside a cold, upstairs room. Edith Wharton used to write in long hand, in bed, till 11 am. No one could disturb her with household trivialities till then.

The Leisure of Legends

We need to allow our work to unfold at a natural pace, with understandable highs and lows in energy and intensity.

When Newport read  The Scientists  by John Gribbin, he found that many of the great scientists worked at a shockingly languid pace to complete world-changing works. Some took decades after being struck by their ideas, to put pen to paper and have their thoughts published in the wider world. Folks like Copernicus, Galileo and Isaac Newton spent many years just “living” between their thinking and doing.

After Marie Curie felt that pitchblende contained elements not yet identified, she scooted off on a leisurely vacation with her family – roaming hills and bathing in rivers. Some like Galileo also had rich private lives: “He studied literature and poetry, attended the theatre regularly and continued to play the lute to a high standard.”

Of course, there are times when creators have worked with an astonishing and even enviable intensity. Jack Kerouac famously typed up  On the Road  in a frenzied three weeks. But those three weeks of typing were preceded by journal entries recorded between 1947 and 1949. And he rewrote many drafts of the typed manuscript over the next six years.

Craft with Care

“Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term.” Getting better requires time and focus. So it also means forgoing deals or offers that would eat into your time or rush your pace to a level that would provoke discomfort.

But we also have to avoid obsessing so much about quality, that we don’t produce or release anything at all. As Newport puts it, “Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time.”

References

Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Penguin Random House UK, 2024