Who else here is getting tired of the constant and relentless push to be ever more productive? Is it just me? I feel like we are already very productive, but it’s never enough. Every year, businesses are trying to grow, must lower their costs and improve their margins. A business cannot simply be successful, it has to be more successful than their last fiscal year, or it is considered a failure. A worker cannot simply be productive, they have to be more productive than last year.
Meanwhile, as workers we are busier than ever before. So busy, in fact, that we read our emails and answer our Slack messages during back-to-back meetings that use up to sixty percent of our calendars! Most often, this means that we can only tackle meaningful work after hours or on weekends.
This drive to be busy and always responsive is burning people out and was certainly a factor in my own burnout and why I’m taking a gap year. Busyness in itself has also become more valuable than being productive in the eyes of our managers!
It’s with my own dissatisfactions in mind that I discovered and read Cal Newport’s book called Slow Productivity: the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. In the next few sections, I’d like to go over the book’s premise, its main points, and my own critiques of the book.
What is slow productivity?
Cal chose his book title very carefully in order to fit his philosophy of slow productivity into the wider context of the Slow Movement in general. In his book, Cal proposes that being as busy as possible makes us worse workers, lowers the quality of our work, and makes us susceptible to burnout. Indeed, the author argues that American workers are the most stressed out in the world because we add work to our plates until we reach what he calls the point of maximum overhead, leaving no room whatsoever for things that either might go wrong or take longer to achieve.
Instead, we should learn to slow down and focus on what is truly important. To achieve this, the book proposes a three-point plan:
- Do fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Obsess over quality
Let’s examine each one a bit more.
Do fewer things
This seems like an obvious first step to slower productivity, no? Reduce your workload until you can comfortably achieve your work with time to spare. However, here is the very important part of this principle. Use that spare time to fully embrace the very small number of projects that matter the most to you.
Freeing up time to work on your most important projects also gives you some room to breathe, which will alleviate stress. Bit by bit, you use your free time to get closer to your goal. But if at some point your workload increases for any reason, like a work emergency audit that no one saw coming for example, you already have some spare time budget that you can use for that extra, unforeseen work.
As you can see here, the principle of doing fewer things doesn’t mean accomplishing fewer things. You’re just forcing yourself to keep some time buffer that you can use for important work, or unexpected work. Your overall output is the same in the end.
One issue with this principle is that it can be incredibly hard to achieve for most people because of the environment we work in every day. Most of us do not control our own schedules. Tasks are given to us by other people at work who need our help getting things done. And everything usually needs to be done yesterday.
The author is aware of this and offers a few tips and techniques that can be used to get a little bit of wiggle room. Blocking time on your calendar, asking coworkers to do some legwork before requesting something from you, or choosing a time of the year where you voluntarily do not sign up for new or extra work are a few of the tips given in the book.
Work at a natural pace
This principle applies to your big, meaningful project. The previous principle helped you free up some time to work on your big project. This is great! But use that time carefully…
Don’t rush! Work is never a sprint, it’s a marathon. Never mind that in software engineering, most of us call our two-week long work windows “sprints”! Work is a marathon that takes place over a long period of time. If we sprinted this long, we’d burnout before the second kilometer while the slower paced people would finish the race.
Achieving something large, like your project, is the steady accumulation of small accomplishments over a long period of time. Sometimes you will work faster on your project. Some other times, you will work slower. Let the work develop at a natural pace. You’re even allowed to take breaks that can last from a few weeks to a few months! The last thing you want is to get burned off your own meaningful project.
To help you stay focused during this marathon, Cal proposes a few helpful ideas. One idea is to try to work away from home in order to not be distracted by what is familiar, like that basket of laundry that needs to be washed. Another idea is to make your project a seasonal thing and only work on it during certain periods of the year. Finally, someone could take advantages of rituals to get into the habit of working on the project.
Obsess over quality
If you are going to spend a lot of time and effort on a few important projects, you would want to make sure the quality is high and that the result of all that work is something valuable and significant.
For this principle, Cal wants us to obsess over quality at the cost of short-term opportunities. In the case of software engineering, for example, it might be best to delay the release of a major new version until we are able to fix all the important bugs. Otherwise, we might have angry customers and we could incur a lot of re-work, which might take up a lot more time after a release. While the business might miss out on early revenue, the cost of fixing mistakes post release could be greater.
By focusing on quality for your project, you will save time later that you can reinvest in order to gain even more freedom in the future.
But how do we know that something is good quality or not? Here, Cal tells us that we need to develop our taste and work on our ability to achieve it. Taste is our sense of direction for discerning what makes a high-quality product or project. Ability is how we can successfully use our skills to achieve something.
In order to develop our taste, Cal recommends that we surround ourselves with people who share similar professional ambitions. The author here suggests that the collective taste of the group will be superior to your own and will help you develop it. If you regularly “perform” for your group, or show them your work, you will get valuable feedback over time that will both improve your own taste and give you an idea on what skills you might need to hone. Eventually, you will reduce the gap between your taste and your abilities and start producing quality work.
What did I think of the book?
The book is well written and easy to read, and I enjoyed reading it. I already agreed with the premise of the book that we should slow down. I’m incredibly worried that what we do is not sustainable for ourselves or for the planet. I also believe in building quality products. I’d rather pay a bit more to buy something that will never break, or something that I know was carefully crafted. So, because of my bias, I found myself easily agreeing with the author.
Throughout the book, Cal gives us many examples of people that achieved greatness through their slow commitment to a particular project, often a book, a play, or the creation of some sort of theory. Those examples fit Cal’s three principles above very well. They are interesting to read and help us understand the material better.
However, I think that the book’s numerous examples only focus on successes that were achieved by people who had control over their own schedules. While all of us have the possibility to make time for ourselves, we may not have the luxury of moving to a quiet village to pursue our work. We also may not be able to take weeks off from work every year to focus on a project.
Here, I fear that the tips on how to do fewer things wouldn’t have the same sort of impact at all. I can block my calendar to gain a three to eight hours per week. But that’s not going to cut it compared to having my own isolated cabin in the woods.
And this also might me wonder what kind of projects can benefit from slow productivity? All the examples used in the book are of authors and creators. Besides a university professor, everyone was working for themselves. Maybe they had day jobs, but their projects were their own. Is slow productivity achievable in the corporate world, where everything is cut up into quarterly commitments? This is not clear to me from reading the book.
I will say, however, that it will make people dream. Most of us are looking for something meaningful to do in our professional lives. This book will at least make most of us think about achieving something like that.
Who should read this book?
In my opinion, this book is good either for people who work for themselves, or people who want to work on side projects and one day hope to quit their jobs. For the person happy in their normal nine to five job, I afraid that the Slow Productivity principle won’t help achieve a higher productivity because employees cannot work at a natural pace. They also cannot easily make the decision to obsess over quality.
However, if you want to achieve great things or simply work on something that you find meaningful outside of your day job, the book will definitely help you. I strongly believe that the principles elaborated in the book by the author will help you get there, bit by bit, without feeling burned out in the process.
I would rate this book a 7 out of 10.