Cal Newport's Slow Productivity
We are busy and distracted. E-mail, Slack, "urgent" calls. It can all be very exhausting, and often times unproductive. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport lays out an ambitious new philosophy that he calls slow productivity. Inspired by slow-approach concepts from food, fashion, media or other industries, he wants us to "Do Fewer Things", "Work at Natural Pace" and "Obsess Over Quality."
To "Do Fewer Things" Newport suggests that we limit what we work on, up from our core missions and down to the daily tasks. If we're unable to avoid task engines entirely, his advice is to contain productivity termites that take away our time by putting tasks on autopilot.
"Work At Natural Pace" means taming the timeline (limiting call hours), changing how we look at our life's work (making long term career plans), simplifying our workday (consciously reducing the amount of tasks planned for the day), or embracing seasonality (finishing major projects before our simulated off-season escapes begin).
"Obsess Over Quality" is all about loving our craft, deeply understanding its details, and betting on ourself to become good professionals. That might involve investing in quality tools, turning down opportunities that may distract us with wrong incentives, or even reducing our salary. It's an invitation to lock in, bet on ourselves, even in front of others, and invest our time intentionally where it really matters.
Some of Newport's principles and propositions are obvious, but that's not a reason to avoid the book. Stress and busyness make us forget what matters. We tend to forget the obvious.
For example, consider the following paragraph:
"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).
Newport is good at capturing the ridiculousness of remote work and silliness of pseudo-productivity. These are parts of the book for which I will return, just to remind myself.1
Reading these "obvious truths" could strike you at the right moment, allow you to see things in a new light, and spark change in your life. The world is changing, and with it also the way how we work. Occasionally, we will switch jobs, and with those also our bosses.
In the Foundations chapter, Newport looks back to history to find origins of productivity. Using metaphors from the agricultural and industrial revolutions, he makes a convincing case that productivity as a metric won't work in cognitive industries because there's too much variation in work. Not everyone has the same size shovel. If there's no useful metric to measure tech worker productivity, it's every man for himself. Corporate perception management. If I'm sending all of these e-mails and Slack messages out, I must be doing something, right?2
Is our work so different now? Is it possible that our factories have just been virtualized, and we're still on that assembly line? Either way, I think Newport's book deserves our support and attention. It's focused on human work and not some never ending improvement of task systems. As an endlessly online and eternally available remote worker, Newport's advice and strategies for defending my mental well-being and productivity are not completely lost on me. There's nothing wrong with having someone remind you to slow down.
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).↩
It's also possible that after a certain point no one knows what they're doing. Jennifer Szalai ended her New York Times review of this book with: "Maybe none of it is really that deep." Maybe that's really it. That different people like to work in different ways. Some like to get on camera to discuss live, others prefer async communication and to pace different speeds and intensities.↩