Cal Newport's Slow Productivity
Cal Newport's latest book "Slow productivity" introduces a slow-concept1 philosophy asking us to organise our work around three core principles: "Do Fewer Things", "Work at Natural Pace" and "Obsess Over Quality". Newport is a best-selling author in this category already, so it's worth looking at his report and observations of the way we work and create. Over course of the book's three chapters that align with his three principles, Newport encourages us to self-regulate and take control to redefine our relationship with work. Through his advice, he offers ideas how endlessly online and eternally available remote workers can defend their mental well-being and productivity.
To "Do Fewer Things", Newport tells us to be strategic about containing administrative chores and "productivity termites" that take away our time from work that really matters. To avoid thinking about unavoidable reoccurring tasks, he advises to put them on "Autopilot" by working from a specific location or attaching a special ritual to it. It's useful be reminded to "Synchronize" through actual human conversation, "Avoid task engines" that burn precious mental energy by requiring endless coordination, or "Spend money" by outsourcing some of the tasks to software or other people. While Newport uses short "case studies" to make a case that it does, it's rather illustrative than convincing.
In "Work At Natural Pace", Newport recommends taming the timeline (i. e. one hour of calls should add up to one hour of "time for myself") or changing how you look at your life's work (i. e. making a five year plan). I admit. I'm also terrible at "guestimating non-physical demands" and usually set an overly ambitious deadline for myself, but "Taking longer" is not always possible or expected from the top-down. This chapter is full of useful tips how to break from the work cycle, whether that's through simplifying your workday (i. e. reduce the amount of planned tasks for the day) or embracing seasonality (i. e. finish major projects before your simulated off-season escape begins), but most of this advice amounts to good reminders to "Forgive yourself" and get away from it all for while, if you can.
"Obsess Over Quality" is the third and final principle that, according to Newport, is "the glue that holds the practice of slow productivity together". Ultimately, I believe his main goal for this final chapter was to tell us to love our craft, to try to deeply understand the details of our work and, simply, be good professionals. That might all involve investing in quality tools, turning down opportunities that may distract us with wrong incentives, or even "Reducing our salary". This closing act is an invitation to lock in, bet on ourselves (even in front of others), and invest time intentionally where it really matters.
I think Newport's book deserves our support and attention because it has humans at the centre, and is not hyper-focused on agents or endless improvement of task systems. The author creatively captures the silliness in some of the ways how we work and these will be parts for which I might return2. But I can't shake the feeling that Newport's philosophy still feels a bit incomplete which makes it less convincing.
The author uses agriculture metaphors and examples from the industrial revolution to make a case that knowledge workers work differently than farmers and factory labourers and that standard metrics won't work here to measure their productivity. On that point, he might be right, but that's where the book leaves larger issues around market's push for an endless growth in the tech sector unanswered.
"The boundary between slow but steady creative production and procrastination is worrisomely narrow", but it's also possible that different people simply prefer to work in different ways. Is our work so different now? Is it possible that our "factories" have just been virtualized, but we're still on that assembly line? Still, I'm glad that someone is reminding us to slow down and I hope this book is only a first in what could become a series of books on slow productivity philosophy.
Newport mentions the 'slow food' concept as an inspiration.↩
There are many sections that I liked. I don't want to reveal too much, but I particularly liked the following: (1) "A citadel of creative concentration need not be a literal palace. It just need to be free of laundry baskets" (p. 160 to describe trying to work in strange or unfamiliar places to reignite creativity) , (2) "How is it that so many knowledge workers end with workloads calibrated to the exact edge of the overhead tax tipping point?" (p. 61), (3) "If you turn down a Zoom meeting invitation, there's a social-capital cost, as you're causing some mild harm to a colleague and potentially signalling yourself to be uncooperative or a loafer.", (4) "(...) single overwhelming pile of unstructured urgency" (I don't remember the page, but I had it on a sticky-note), (5) "Talking about work versus doing the work" (p. 23), (6) "The boundary between slow but steady creative production and procrastination is worrisomely narrow." (p. 131)., (7) "The introduction of personal computers, followed soon after by electronic communication tools like email, transformed office collaboration into an ongoing, haphazard bazaar of asynchronous, back-and-forth messaging–a colleague asks you to handle something, you reply to clarify what he means, you then write another colleague to gather information, but based on her response, you realize you don't fully understand the task, so you send a new message to the original requester, and so on. Multiply these drawn-out interactions by dozens of concurrent open loops, and soon you're spending most of your time managing conversations, not executing individual tasks." (p. 87-88).↩