Welcome friend! You know I love productivity so it is probably not surprising that I was most excited about Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout in March releases. I am proud to have made time for it during March for an anticipated read and am bringing you my thoughts today. If you haven’t heard of the concept, here is what the book is about:
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
Cal Newport | Goodreads
~ Do Fewer Things. Work at a Natural Pace. Obsess over Quality . ~
From the New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work , a groundbreaking philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload
Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?
Long before the arrival of pinging inboxes and clogged schedules, history’s most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. In this timely and provocative book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of these traditional knowledge workers to radically transform our modern jobs. Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkers – from Galileo and Isaac Newton, to Jane Austen and Georgia O’Keefe – Newport lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,” a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment. Combining cultural criticism with systematic pragmatism, Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for workers to replace them with a slower, more humane alternative.
From the aggressive rethinking of workload management, to introducing seasonal variation, to shifting your performance toward long-term quality, Slow Productivity provides a roadmap for escaping overload and arriving instead at a more timeless approach to pursuing meaningful accomplishment. The world of work is due for a new revolution. Slow productivity is exactly what we need.
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout – Book Review
There are three tents of Slow Productivity: Do Fewer Things. Work at a Natural Pace. Obsess over Quality. The book is divided into two short introduction chapters that give the foundational definitions and how this book came to be, the research question that led to Cal Newport writing this book, followed by a chapter on each of the tenets and a short conclusion.
Cal Newport challenges how we look at productivity. He introduces the concept of pseudo-productivity where we have started to measure productivity by activities that are visible – the number of tasks we complete, the number of meetings we attend… all things that point to being busy, rather than productive. He encourages the reader to look at the bigger picture: how these little things matter in the long run, and find ways to pursue work in a sustainable and meaningful manner.
Foundations
The audience for Slow Productivity is supposed to be anyone in the knowledge sector. This means people whose jobs are cognitive in nature. Work is not something physical that needs to be done and is repetitive but more brain heavy with potentially collaboration with team members. While the term ‘knowledge job’ is mentioned many times in the first two chapters, it doesn’t get defined until chapter three. Through the abstract descriptions in the prior chapters, I wasn’t quite sure that I fell into that category until this formal definition. Take a look and decide if this applies to you:
“The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort”.
Cal Newport in Slow Productivity
The context and research provided by Cal Newport were thought-provoking and centred around the current work environment that many office/desk job people would relate to. I had never thought about how office hours came to be. I enjoyed learning how we evolved from our hunter-gatherer roots to agriculture to factory work to the present with computing technology and how the systems of work that desk jobs have inherited need changing. I learned why so many people seem overworked and overwhelmed. Newport is an academic so it is not surprising that he did thorough research, pulling examples from many industries, sources and times. I particularly enjoyed his research on quiet quitting and what it shows about Slow Productivity.
Do Fewer Things
The first principle of Slow Productivity is to do fewer things. This isn’t to be confused with accomplishing less things. The idea is to “reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare”, hence, spending time identifying what is most meaningful and should get done. By creating pockets of time where we are working on the most important goals, we make continued progress. Newport encourages readers to limit big things, missions, projects and daily goals to the point where they are doable. This is important for getting rid of the overwhelm we feel day to day.
You can probably guess ‘saying no’ is one of the strategies. The book has some sample write ups on how to go about saying no and having hard evidence that supports how the time on our plate is already taken up. In an office setting where a manager assigns the work, this can be challenging. The book offers ways in which we can organize our own work, without changing other people’s habits. There are a few things that managers might want to implement for the betterment of their teams. I liked this chapter and the strategies it offered.
Work at a Natural Pace
Working at a natural pace is also related to overwhelm and busyness. The idea here is to let something take as long as it takes. Giving ourselves the breathing room to meet our goals, to know that there may be periods of energy and lulls as we work on different aspects of a project. This tenet relates to the last one as it emphasizes how we will eventually accomplish what we set out to do with steady progress.
Many books recommend but few tackle the suggestion of creating a five year plan well. Slow Productivity is no different. In the second tenet, Newport suggests creating a five year plan without any examples of how one should go about doing so. A typical interpretation of the five year plan is to have lofty goals but in a setting where work is assigned to the employee by a manager or the leadership in general struggles to come up with comprehensive, concrete and doable five year goals, it is hard to write such plans as a professional on an individual level. Of course, personal development and increasing technical know-how can be on the five year plan list but to be able to get time in one’s work day to achieve these goals is a challenge. Newport did not have any ideas for this aspect. If you want to create a plan, I love the approach that Jon Acuff presents in All It takes Is a Goal.
Obsess over Quality
Slow Productivity is full of examples of people who have embraced the concept. Most of them are scientists, musicians, writers, painters, entrepreneurs… professionals where the worker has autonomy over the work they create. There can definitely be timelines assigned by someone else like the music producer for an artist or stakeholders for a startup, but the work is creative in nature and people pursuing it already have a level of obsession with it.
It was disappointing to see no examples of people in the more common knowledge sector for the third and final tenet of Slow Productivity. I wonder if the idea was to obsess over something outside of work so that work automatically no longer remains the thing we spend the most time doing, hence taking on less (first tenet). To have excitement again for learning new things and pursuing what we want to. Newport cited novelists like Michael Circhton and Jeffery Archer who quit their originally chosen line of work to become full time writers. Some suggestions were to attract an investor, and be okay with reducing the salary. I cannot apply the propositions suggested in this chapter to my professional life.
Conclusion
After finishing Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, I asked myself what was new in this book. While it succeeded in reminding me of ideas that I have thought of implementing before and gave some pointers on how I can make them happen without affecting my co-workers and management to change, it didn’t come together holistically for me. It is a challenging endeavour to present a framework for an individual to embrace. I felt the third tenet in particular fell short. The intention was good but I can’t see myself acting as a whole on all three tenets together.
If you are a knowledge worker, this book might offer some new ways of thinking and strategies to apply at work. I would be curious to hear what you think of the tenets. Do write to me if you give this one a read! Add it to your Goodreads shelf.
Cal Newport mentioned Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman as one of the books that have challenged popular notions of productivity. I picked it up after finishing Slow Productivity. It is fantastic and I will share more about it in the future.
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