Can Slow Productivity Actually Make You Successful?
How to work smarter without working harder.
What makes you successful at your job?
Is it your salary?
Regular promotions?
The ability to come into the office later than everyone else?
It’s actually none of the above. While you might think you’re doing good at your job, you’re probably not as productive as you think.
As more and more companies announce layoffs, it’s clear they’re looking for ways to reduce costs. The name of the game moving forward is productivity and efficiency. For workers that means understanding how your job relates to the bottom line and making yourself more valuable.
Productivity for today’s knowledge workers isn’t as clearly defined as it was for workers during the industrial age. When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line into manufacturing, workers and management could clearly track progress and efficiency. A factory knew how many widgets it produced per hour and management could determine which workers were helping them achieve production goals – and which were not.
Knowledge work is completely different. Most tasks are bespoke and subjective to the needs of individual organizations and clients. The process Nike uses to launch a new product, for example, is different from Google. While you can compare the economic value of companies like Nike and Google you can’t necessarily attribute that value to specific workers within each company.
In the absence of clearly defined metrics, today’s knowledge workforce has adopted what Cal Newport refers to as “pseudo productivity.” This is essentially performative busywork so you look like you’re doing something without actually doing anything at all.
In his latest book, Slow Productivity, Newport dives into how pseudo productivity emerged as the default model of measuring productivity in the knowledge sector. He argues that slow productivity – working at a deliberately slower and more manageable pace – is a better alternative to the hustle culture most workers are used to. By adopting a more sustainable approach to work, individuals can find more meaning leading to better long-term outcomes.
This essay will evaluate some of the key themes from the book. It will provide an overview of what slow productivity is and how knowledge workers can adopt a slower pace of work.
Knowledge work lacks well-defined processes and clearly measurable ways to track outputs. Pseudo productivity has emerged to make workers seem like they’re productive even though they’re not.
If I asked you what the day-to-day operations of your job entailed, could you clearly define the processes you follow? Probably not.
The vast majority of knowledge work isn’t work at all. Instead, it’s pseudo productive work. In his book, A World Without Email, Newport describes the workflow that governs knowledge work as the hyperactive hive mind.
“In a hyperactive hive mind, anyone can ping you on Slack or walk up to your desk to ask you questions that may or may not have any relevance to the task you’re currently focused on. The constant need to monitor your communication channels to look for “urgent” requests that pop up makes it impossible to focus. Your attention is so fractured, that it’s impossible to complete tasks that produce anything of value.” (Productivity Stack)
Rather than completing projects and producing finished work, knowledge workers spend the bulk of their time talking about the work that needs to be done. This includes sending emails, holding status update meetings, and managing overloaded Kanban boards.
What this reveals is that workers don’t actually know what they’re supposed to be doing. They resort to inventing busy work to keep themselves occupied so it looks like they’re working. The goal of this isn’t to accomplish anything – it’s to stay employed.
Processes are a core part of measuring productivity. Your process tells you how something needs to be done and the output of that process tells you whether or not it was done successfully. In economic terms, the greater the output you can achieve with the fewer inputs in your process, the more profitable you are.
Let me use writing as an example of this. As a writer, I have a clear process. I brainstorm ideas, jot them down into Notion, prioritize my ideas, get them on the production calendar, and begin writing. My writing process itself involves researching a topic, outlining what I am going to write about, drafting an outline, editing it, and polishing it up before publishing it online.
There are a couple of different ways I measure productivity. I keep track of my time so I know how long it takes me to write each essay on average. I also measure the total number of articles published. If I stay within my usual pace and I publish enough articles each month – whether that’s on my own publications or for freelance clients – I consider myself productive.
If you don’t have a process like my writing pipeline and clear deliverables that you can measure your performance against, it’s impossible to know whether or not you’re actually being productive. The default you turn to is pseudo productivity.
In the book, Newport defines pseudo productivity as:
“The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.” (22)
Instead of operating as a system – like an assembly line – your personal workflow is more of a vibe. You feel productive by doing “work” without regard to whether or not that work is meaningful or has value in the first place.
The abundance of pseudo productive work is leaving many knowledge workers feeling burnt out and disillusioned with work itself. That’s how I felt when I worked as a defense contractor in Washington, DC. My team never made progress on anything. We had meetings to prepare for meetings and I spent the bulk of my time carefully crafting my emails so that I didn’t accidentally task my government client with work (that was a big no no).
The emergence of the quiet quitting movement in the wake of pandemic-era lockdowns is evidence of this. Realizing they didn’t have a lot of actual work to do, workers started liberating themselves from their oppressive jobs. Some began traveling while others took on additional jobs to fill the time. Others just stopped working altogether, putting forth the bare minimum to meet their employer’s expectations but not a minute more.
Newport’s new work philosophy dubbed “slow productivity” is a result of the collective burnout most knowledge workers are facing today. It’s clear workers aren’t as productive as many probably want to be. The absence of clearly defined processes and measurable outcomes makes it difficult to create and makes the existing system of knowledge work unsustainable.
Slow productivity is an alternative to pseudo productivity. It is defined by three core principles.
Slow productivity is an antidote to pseudo productivity. Rather than doing work for the sake of looking busy, Newport argues we should be more intentional in how we choose our work activities. He writes:
“To embrace slow productivity…is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.” (41)
When many people think of “slow” productivity they immediately assume this is encouraging workers to slack off. What Newport suggests is that workers should liberate themselves from pseudo productive work so that they can do more real work.
The idea of slow productivity isn’t to do less, it’s to produce more higher value work. To use art to illustrate this, as a society we’d be better off with more da Vincis and Michelangelos than generating more cheap art that’s sold at craft fairs and winds up at thrift stores.
Newport offers three guiding principles to understand how slow productivity works.
Principle #1: Do Fewer Things
Contrary to what hustle culture seems to think, doing less is actually key to doing more.
One of the unintended consequences of doing more work is inviting more overhead into your life. Overhead is the administrative and logistical work that comes with every project you take on.
Here’s an example of what this looks like. I just started migrating my Medium content library to Substack. There’s a lot of overhead that comes with that. I had to write copy and design my publications. I had to study tutorials to learn how Substack works. I’m working on developing a monetization strategy and I have to take steps to implement it.
While that might not seem like a lot, moving from one platform to another is a huge undertaking. There are new tools and systems you have to learn and new strategies to test out. Substack, for example, has an in-platform social media function that Medium does not. I have to figure out how that works. Not to mention the administrative task of literally copying, pasting, and reformatting content from one platform to another.
The more projects you work on at a given time, the more administrative tasks you will have as it relates to managing each project. This might include maintaining a schedule in project management software, delegating tasks, or holding meetings to stay on track.
The more you take on, the more likely you’ll find yourself spending the majority of your time navigating pseudo work. Like a credit card, the interest on your work debt will accrue and you’ll find that pseudo work takes away time and mental bandwidth that could be better spent on the projects you’re trying to complete in the first place.
In the book, Newport offers a number of recommendations. He recommends strategies like time blocking to contain pseudo productive work as well as setting as many recurring tasks as you can on autopilot. (I personally do this with household chores. Every Tuesday is laundry day, no questions asked).
By reducing your workload, you reduce the amount of overhead that accompanies it. This doesn’t make you less productive, it actually makes you more productive because it frees up more of your time to bring ongoing projects to completion.
Principle #2: Work at a Natural Pace
The second principle of Slow Productivity is to work at a natural pace. While this might seem obvious, it’s incredibly hard to implement in today’s hustle culture.
Working at a natural pace means you’re not on 24/7. Some hours of the day or days of the week will be more productive than others. This can vary based on your personal work style or the line of work you’re in.
I don’t do well with writing in the afternoons and I’m certainly not a night owl. I’ve tried and it’s really difficult for me to get into a flow. That’s why I prioritize my writing time in the mornings, after my workout. Low value administrative work like checking email or managing my project database in Notion, is relegated to the afternoon when there’s less demand on my attention.
Newport recommends taking a similar approach but across different time scales. You can do what I do by scheduling work based on periods of focus throughout the day, but you can also schedule projects across longer spans of time based on months and years.
Sometime in the next five years, I’m going to publish a book. That’s on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to spend the next six months working at full-speed to bust out a full manuscript.
When you assign projects to longer time horizons, you give yourself more flexibility to work at a pace that makes sense for you. In the book, Newport emphasizes the need to work seasonally. This means taking periods of time off to rest and recharge.
When you work at a natural pace, you give yourself the opportunity to make incremental progress over time. This concept is emphasized in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. For workers, the ability to make small gains over a period of time can help increase productivity. Newport writes:
“Grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time.” (132)
Rome wasn’t built in a night and whatever projects you’re working on right now won’t be finished in a night either. By doing less and slowing down, you create space for achievement to emerge. Continuing to work at a frenetic pace will only induce anxiety, making it difficult to make any progress at all.
Principle #3: Obsess Over Quality
The final principle is obsessing over quality. The goal of slow productivity isn’t necessarily to produce more but to produce better.
One of the natural byproducts of this is raising your standards. As you get better at your craft, your standards change. Someone who has successfully published a book probably isn’t going to tolerate working under tight deadlines to produce clickbait listicles for outlets like Buzzfeed.
When your standards change so too does the way in which you measure productivity and success. Instead of placating your corporate boss and how they measure productivity, you get to define it for yourself.
This enables you to move at a slower pace, making busywork utterly intolerable.
Quality work usually coalesces around one or two core skills. As a writer, my time is better spent writing, publishing, and gathering feedback. Meetings for me have become nonexistent. While they might be necessary on occasion, they distract me from my work and my ability to generate high quality essays. Meetings make me unproductive.
Your ability to hone your skills and deploy them against things that you are good at will help you become more productive. The more things you do that you actually want to do, the more you’ll be able to cross things off your todo list.
As Newport notes:
“If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return.” (181)
Elevating your standards will help you produce higher quality work that you can leverage to access better opportunities. That may entail saying no to some things in the short term in order to open different doors for yourself in the long term.
Don’t just work slower for the sake of working slower. Be more deliberate with how your time is deployed so you can generate quality work. The more quality work you generate, the more you’ll be able to raise your standards and say no to work that isn’t aligned with your goals.
Final takeaway.
Newport closes the book with a prescient observation:
“We’ve tried the fast approach for at least the past seventy years. It isn’t working. The time has come to try something slower.” (219)
It’s clear we’re at a crossroads when it comes to work. New technologies and ways of doing business are rapidly changing what work is and with it, how we live our lives.
Fundamentally, work isn’t just how you get paid; it’s what gives your life meaning. When you’re overloaded with low-value pseudo work, your life becomes devoid of purpose and meaning.
I think this is why so many people are struggling with financial and psychological disorders right now. When I had jobs that made me do too much pseudo productive work, I was at my heaviest weight and my lowest mental state. I don’t think that was an accident. The work I was doing was literally killing me.
While most people fear that AI will replace their jobs, what is actually going to happen is it is going to reveal that the emperor had no clothes to begin with. The job itself was nothing more than the amalgamation of pseudo productive tasks that provided no real meaning or value.
You won’t necessarily lose your job because you’re unproductive, you’ll lose your job because you weren’t doing any real work in the first place.
Slow Productivity is a new model for how we should work. It asks us to do less but at a higher standard. In a world where AI chatbots can write emails, draft presentations, and do sales calls, I think we would be wise to wake up to what this means for the future.
Slow productivity isn’t just a call to engage in higher value work. It’s permission to leave a cognitive labor market that no longer serves human workers.
The book is Slow Productivity. I’ve reviewed most of Cal Newport’s books and he does a great job laying out tactical strategies you can implement alongside his theories around work and productivity. This book is no different. Borrow it from your local library or get it from your favorite book dealer.
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