Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout
Newport, Cal. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2024. Pp. 256. $30.00.
Readers of this journal are doubtless familiar with the work of Cal Newport, MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University since 2011. His early popular volumes, How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less (2006) and How to Win at College: Surprising Secrets for Success from the Country’s Top Students (2005) are part of the contemporary instructional canon for students in secondary education, college, and university.
Although he has a CV as long as one’s arm, the title of his newest work may seem ironic; it’s not, though. It’s illuminating. How can someone do Deep Work (another of his titles) and still be productive? Slowly, or so Newport argues.
Every technology promises greater productivity—the ability to do more, faster. Whether it’s an ancient technology like a shovel or a cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence, the promise is the same. Technology leverages speed and power, that is, efficiency, and efficiency results in productivity. But the focus on efficiency is deceptive, may lead to shoddy work, and all too often to burnout, especially for those Newport targets in his book, knowledge workers.
Knowledge work is “that economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort” (p. 39). The knowledge sector includes philosophers, educators, scientists, musicians, and other artists. And by contemporary standards the sector includes marketers, accountants, computer programmers, corporate executives, and a growing number of other cognitive workers who don’t manufacture widgets on an assembly line but turn ideas into marketable images, sounds, data collections, or strategies.
Newport analyzes productivity in the knowledge sector empirically with nearly seven hundred knowledge workers participating in his study. Among other questions, he asked, “In your particular professional field, how would most people define ‘productivity’ or ‘being productive’?” Newport was surprised not so much by what his respondents said but by what they didn’t say. They told him what they did, the jobs they performed—they “produced content,” “wrote sermons,” or “wrote peer-reviewed articles.” What they did not offer were specific productivity goals or metrics that could distinguish between doing a job well and doing it poorly. When I read this observation, I was reminded of the old quip, “we aimed at nothing and hit it with deadly accuracy.” By what measure does a knowledge worker—or her boss—determine that she is working productively?
The problem, maintains Newport, is pseudo-productivity—“the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort” (p. 22). In other words, for knowledge workers productivity is the sum of the hours spent working at a laptop, in focus-groups, or gathering data points. “If you can see me in my office—or if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly—then, at the very least, you know I am doing something. The more activity you see, the more you can assume that I’m contributing to the organization’s bottom line” (p. 21).
No wonder, then, that the result of pseudo-productivity is burnout. If the measure of the productivity of knowledge workers is merely activity, then the more keystrokes, numbers crunched, or brain-storming of ideas, the more productive. But is that really what we mean—or should mean—by productivity?
Two-thirds of Slow Productivity is Newport’s proposal for a new philosophy for sustainable, meaningful knowledge-work. Slow productivity involves (1) doing fewer things, (2) at a natural pace, (3) with an obsession over quality rather than amount of activity. His exposition of these principles is suffused with historical, contemporary, and practical examples from Jane Austen to Peter Drucker, from algorithms to the Zoom apocalypse. Newport writes not as a mere theorist, but as a practitioner. Some of his ideas are golden.
The goals for the book are basically two-fold. First, he aims to help as many people as possible to free themselves from “the dehumanizing grip of pseudo-productivity” (p. 216) and the exhaustion of chronic overload. Second, he hopes to encourage more intentional thinking about “what we mean by ‘productivity’ in the knowledge sector” (p. 217). I think he succeeds in many ways in achieving his first goal. His second is more ambitious and future oriented. Hopefully, some in the knowledge sector will take up the gauntlet.
Many of those whose vocations are in higher education will welcome Slow Productivity, especially in a “publish or perish” culture. Even though peer review may sometimes ensure the quality of one’s research and writing, the pressure to “produce” remains high. And rather than doing fewer things at a natural pace, with reduced faculty, more students, greater course loads, additional administrative responsibilities, and twelve-month contracts colleges and universities can be just as complicit in embracing pseudo-productivity as other arenas of knowledge-work.
Teacher burnout is a serious issue that affects every area of the academy. Slow Productivity is a call to rethink our metrics and enhance our quality to ensure sustainability over a long career in education. Even though, as someone has said, it may be better to burn out than rust out, those don’t have to be the only options. Newport offers a better way.
C. BEN MITCHELL
Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy (retired)
Union University