Slow Productivity: A (Scathing) Review

In April, I received an email from Amazon that my order of Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity was running late. That was, looking back, my first sign of the irony to come.

My second sign was that I was reading Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout on a Saturday. I had to finish it on Saturday so that I could write the blog post on Sunday for the coming week. I had planned to start earlier, but tasks had piled up, and I knew there would be just as many tasks greeting me as I began the week.

The third sign of irony came on page 97 when, while reading a section titled “Interlude: What About Overwhelmed Parents?” I had to set the book aside and make slime with my son.

Newport’s book, much like his previous title A World Without Email, describes a very real problem most workers are facing. Then it goes on to suggest very unrealistic solutions.

THE STRUGGLE IS REAL

Why did I go back to Newport after being skeptical of his previous suggestions? After all, I reviewed A World Without Email and had similar criticisms. My husband recently heard Cal Newport on a podcast explaining that, in knowledge work, whenever you agree to a new commitment, you need to take into account the administrative overhead. Yes! It made so much sense. It’s usually not the project itself that sucks all your time, but the emails and meetings and coordination that the project demands. We were both intrigued, and I never pass up the opportunity to buy a book.

Newport’s core idea is that it’s not so much that today’s knowledge workers are being pushed to be more and more productive, but that they have adopted a faulty definition of productivity. When someone works in an Amazon warehouse, their productivity can be measured by scan rate or dock-to-stock cycle time. But how do knowledge workers measure productivity? Newport says that because of the uncertainty around what we should be measuring, people began using visible activity as a “crude proxy” for productivity.

Newport posits that it’s this pseudo-productivity plus the emergence of easy communication, first via email and then on platforms like Slack, that have led to the constantly growing activity cycle we see today. He cites studies that show an increase in the number of workers feeling burned out, as well as those showing that American workers are among the most stressed.

The solution to this problem, according to Newport, is slow productivity. He goes on to define it as, “A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles: 1. Do fewer things, 2. Work at a natural pace, and 3. Obsess over quality.”

THE SOLUTION IS NOT REAL

When I began reading how Newport suggests applying this philosophy, I immediately assumed I didn’t correctly understand what he meant by “knowledge worker.” Newport defines knowledge work as, “the economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.” It’s a bit of a vague definition, and I’m someone who likes examples, so I went digging.

According to the Corporate Finance Institute, professionals falling under the heading of knowledge worker include programmers, web designers, researchers, accountants, engineers, architects, lawyers, and physicians. I had misunderstood the term, but instead of it being more specific than I assumed, it was much broader. Now I found Newport’s suggestions even more puzzling.

Newport presents his friend, Jenny Blake, whose consulting business expanded until she was supporting more than 10 different income sources. She knew she needed to simplify her life, so she cut income streams, trimmed her staff to only three part-time employees, and now works 20 hours a week with two months free a year. While that sounds great, most of us can’t work only 20 hours a week and still make $500K a year. She also let go of employees (ostensibly other knowledge workers). I’m not saying what she did was wrong in any way, but I don’t see how it’s a model for the majority of knowledge workers.

Another suggestion that baffled me was Newport’s advice on how to screen new projects. He says we should assess our options based on the number of weekly requests, questions, and small chores they will generate. He gives the example of a sales director deciding between writing a detailed report vs. organizing a one-day client conference. Who is making these choices?! This is not an either/or situation. Most engineers, analysts, and tech developers are not afforded the choice of which project to work on. It’s another example of a suggestion most people reading this book can’t adopt.

THEN IT GOT TOTALLY RIDICULOUS

In order to prove his point that it’s better to work at a slower pace, Newport points to some of the greatest thinkers in history. Galileo timed swinging chandeliers in the Cathedral of Pisa in 1584, but he didn’t follow up on these experiments and identify the laws of pendulum motion until 1602. I get it. New ideas and breakthrough methods and great works of art take a long time, but Newport promised actionable ideas that could be immediately implemented. I’m having trouble seeing it. Here’s how I imagine it would go.

Will: It’s Wednesday, why isn’t the blog up?

Me: You can’t rush important work.

Will: When will it be done?

Me: (Quoting Newport’s book) “In the 16^th century, Galileo’s professional life was more leisurely and less intense than that of the average 21^st-century knowledge worker. Yet he still managed to change the course of human intellectual history.”

Will: Are you Galileo in this scenario? I’m confused. Please just write the &$#@ing blog!

As the book goes on, the proof Newport provides to support his theory, as well as his suggestions, get more and more unrealistic. In chapter five, for example, as he teaches us to obsess over quality, he relies on two well-known knowledge workers, Jewel and Alanis Morissette. I’m pretty sure they don’t consider themselves to be knowledge workers. Do you see how absurd this is getting?

I agree that constant burnout is not sustainable. I even appreciate when Newport explains that because we evolved as hunter-gatherers, our brains are used to work interspersed with leisure. We’ve been farming for the last 12,000 years, which means less leisure, but even then there was at least seasonality. That resonates with me. But he follows that up with, “What if we stopped positioning quiet quitting as a general response to the ‘meaninglessness of work,’ and instead saw it as a more specific tactic to achieve seasonality?” That’s when he loses me again.

Will, the blog isn’t done, and it’s not because I’m slacking. No, I’m celebrating the seasonality of my Neolithic roots. I’m going to try that. We’ll see how it goes.

In the end, Slow Productivity was, for me, unproductive. In the words of my fellow knowledge worker, Alanis Morissette, “Isn’t it ironic?”

This is Rachel’s last blog as she has been fired for taking two months off in the name of seasonality but please reach out to the rest of us at mastery@maestrogroup.co for information on workshops, self-paced training, and coaching.