I am obsessed with productivity not because I am a workaholic, but precisely because I am not. As utterly passionate as I may be about my PhD, it is just one of many things I am fascinated by, and I must balance the demands of structured research with the equally pressing pursuits of talking to people, looking at things, walking around, and thinking about what it means to be alive. I left my traditional 9–5 desk job because it prioritised time-at-desk over results for a PhD life with project-based research where only the output matters regardless of how long (or short) it takes. Productivity (in theory) thus enables me to achieve more output for less input, gaining an excess of free-time in which to live. Cal Newport — father of 2, dedicated walker, thinker, and yapper — understands this completely.

In his latest book, ‘Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout’, Cal Newport, New York Times Best Selling author on productivity and career happiness, presents his guide to slowing down. Defined as “a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner”, his guide is designed to help us return to the healthier pace of how humans are meant to work; with the thinking that by studying the natural habits of those who lacked defined office hours (i.e., creatives) we can learn the underlying work optima. His idea is then is presented as a set of biographical vignettes looking back on the often unconventional work schedules – or lack thereof – of history’s creative giants to see what harried modernity can learn about what it takes to construct timeless classics.

As much as it was a pleasant and optimistic read, and however much I ultimately agree with the message, unfortunately, the in-text cited evidence failed to make the argument he aimed for, and I found his presentation disappointing. The good parts in this book were mostly rehashings of the pure gold in his others so I will save lengthy discussion of them until their own reviews. For now, a brief summary.

NOTE: I’ve read all of Cal’s books, subscribe to his blog, listen to his podcast, and am systematically converting all my friends to join me as his disciples. Cal is probably as close as I have ever had to an idol… Anything negative I say about this book is not to be confused with my shining opinion of the author himself!

What is Slow Productivity

Cal opens his book by challenging our traditional conceptions of productivity, and questioning whether these may be precisely the root of our problems. Knowledge work is one of the only sectors with no clear definition of what productivity would look like (more output for less input, sure, but what exactly is output, and what is input?) but, in this capitalist age, that is no excuse for not being it… We therefore find ourselves constantly chasing something we aren’t clear on, resulting in what Cal has coined ‘pseudo-productivity’.

“Work” is a vague thing that employees do in an office. More work creates better results than less. It’s a manager’s job to ensure enough work is getting done, because without this pressure, lazy employees will attempt to get away with the bare minimum. The most successful companies have the hardest workers.

Without concrete productivity metrics to measure and well-defined processes to improve, companies weren’t clear how they should manage their employees. And as freelancers and small entrepreneurs in the sector became more prevalent, these individuals, responsible only for themselves, weren’t sure how they should manage themselves. It was from this uncertainty that a simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity.

The solution we seem to have near-unanimously settled on is to be as busy as possible all of the time, and to project that as visibly as possible in what he calls “performative business”. It’s clear to see why this drive to be ever ‘on’, ever available, ever working has led to an epidemic of disaffected burn-out across the knowledge work sector. Cal’s life’s work is to call for an overhaul of the knowledge work sector, replacing pseudo-productivity with something more effective, healthier, and fundamentally ‘slower’ that allows space and time for quality, creativity, and depth.

To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

This book is intended as a guide on how to bring that about.

The Tenets of Slow Productivity

1. Do Fewer Things

Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.

It’s easy to mistake “do fewer things” as a request to “accomplish fewer things.” But this understanding gets things exactly backward. Whether your task list is overflowing or sparse, you’re still working more or less the same number of hours each week. The size of your list affects only how usefully these hours produce results.

If Cal’s philosophy could really be boiled down to a single idea, it would be to take the tenets of essentialism and apply them in the professional context; selecting the few arenas in which you intend to excel, and give these your deep and devoted focus to push through the superficiality and achieve something truly great. Not only does taking on too many tasks prevent us from devoting long stretches of time to the most difficult and meaningful projects, but the quality of thought we are able to apply to each of the individual problems is less than the sum of the parts due to: a) stress, b) task-switching, c) administrative overheads. While the first two of these are quite obvious, it is this third idea, of administrative overhead, that was most interesting to me.

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators.

Particularly in asynchronous work schedules where the vast majority of information is dribbled out over messaging service with long time-lags between updates, we often find ourselves needing to keep half-an-eye on our inbox, perpetually primed for responses and therefore not entirely committing to the next task. While this cost can likely never be eliminated entirely, by minimising the number of tasks we simultaneously work on, the relative burden of overhead remains proportionally less compared to the deep work we are able to achieve.

But, while we may all agree that it would be for the best to work on less, how do we effectively achieve it (as opposed to gut-sense mass task-rejection)? Cal provides a top-down strategy:

He acknowledges however that we can’t all just go around limiting everything without risking our social and employment status, and instead suggests some ideas for how to say no:

These latter two tips will only really be helpful for self-allocated tasks (chapters of my PhD), less so for genuinely time-bound (teaching) or other-allocated (administration) tasks with deadlines (or bosses) that don’t care whether the worker is overloaded or not. Similarly, some of his other ideas I have neglected to list on the grounds that they are only really accessible for sufficiently established and respected workers who have already built up career or financial capital to be able to pull them off and are therefore entirely useless to PhD students, graduates, and assorted underlings.

2. Work At A Natural Pace

I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane.

Who cares, for example, if he rested for a month in 1999, when he ultimately saved the network by 2000? (On the varied pace of work by Anthony Zuiker, screenwriter who wrote CSI).

Cal’s second principle to combat superficial freneticism is to bring back a more natural pace of work. He cites hunter-gatherer communities as having highly varied days that balance intensive work against rest with as much as 50% of their day spent in leisure, as opposed to agriculturalists with a more monotonous pace and less than 30% of their day in leisure. Post-industrial revolution, work has become even more roboticised, all the way up to the modern day where — not limited by physical collapse or daylight hours or weather — knowledge workers invariably spend 8 hours per day in “invisible factories”, increasingly “estrange[d] from our fundamental nature”. While we may not have the freedom to self-elect a 4-day work-week or 6-hr work-day, he urges us to take control of what we can.

While there is good intention behind it, his second proposition, to embrace seasonality, feels a bit too niche to take seriously. His advice (for example to spend several months per year on holiday, blocking out times when you’re not available for taking on new work, taking a random day off once per month) are fantastic for those that have full control over their own schedules but the pool of people this would apply to is more limited than he perhaps acknowledges. Similarly, his third proportion, to ‘Work Poetically’, encourages us to eschew the bleak office and work instead from a more fulfilling location; supplementing our day with time-consuming, elaborate, and demonstrative rituals. Is it surprising that his biographical examples are drawn near exclusively from writers? At this stage I begin to feel that Cal is just carrying on about his personal interests more than anything.

3. Obsess Over Quality

What if after your reputation spread, instead of growing the business, you increased your hourly rate to $100? You could now maintain your same $100,000 a year salary while working only twenty-five weeks a year—creating a working life with a head-turning amount of freedom. (Speaking about the merits of the philosophy of Paul Jarvis, author of ‘Company of One’, who lives in the woods and barely works.)

We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.

This chapter was the weakest for me. Cal seemed to be praising the virtues of Work-Life balance and trading off growth for rest which he suggests that we can achieve by “obsessing over quality”, but I somewhat struggled to follow his thinking. This whole chapter seemed to be essentially a rehashing of Cal’s much better book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, without actually using the critical term ‘Career Capital’ he coined in the original work. Interestingly, despite skirting around it for a full chapter, he fails to actually make the points he thoroughly developed in “So Good”, and without properly laying out Career Capital and how to get it, this iteration feels unhelpful. Nevertheless, he has a few things in here.

Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.

The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities.

Cal then sets out a series of tips for how to prioritise quality. Firstly he encourages us to refine our ability to detect quality but improving our taste, but I honestly think, at this stage, Cal was just having a bit of fun (e.g., a few paragraphs about being a cinephile to say that it’s good to have hobbies and 4 pages on the Beatles creating ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ to make the conclusion that it’s possible to have obsession without perfectionism…?) and am not convinced that any of his information is worth transcribing. In particular, regaling how Cussler (an author) faked his way into being published was probably not the inspiring or informative snippet that Cal intended. Furthermore, this is where the internal inconsistencies begin to really show… but more on that in the next section.

My takeaway from this section actually came as a quote from another author:

“You find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors. You don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that.” ~ Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird

The lesson is that some things really do just take time at the grindstone moving incrementally towards what needs to be achieved and only once you’re there will you realise it was what you were working towards all along.

Complaints: An Excess of Anecdotes and Internal Inconsistencies

‘Slow Productivity’ was a significant departure from the gospel-like quality of Cal’s previous books. Where ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’, ‘Digital Minimalism’, and ‘Deep Work’ appeared to have been motivated by the desire to cleanly and succinctly communicate a well-developed philosophy, ‘Slow Productivity’ feels more motivated by Cal’s desire to waffle on about interesting people he had researched. (Whhhhy was the section on Jewel so long? That had to be at least 10 pages!)

While the fundamental points Cal presented are hard to rebut, the probably apocryphal micro-biographies of famous creatives he used as “evidence” may be interesting, but were largely irrelevant to the experience of any desk-bound knowledge worker. Furthermore, even if they did have bearing, the cherry-picking of survivorship-biased stories of success is a poor argument for encouraging mimicry and the obvious flaw in all anecdotal arguments is the infinite number of possible counter examples… Finally, even were the examples both relevant and more reflective of the common human experience, Cal was too inconsistent to make sense of them anyway.

The first and second principles of ‘Slow Productivity’ (do fewer things, and work at a natural pace) focus on individuals who achieved greatness through stripping away distractions and applying deep focus (e.g., Jane Austen, Georgie O’Keefe). By the end of the book however, in the section ‘Write After The Kids Go To Bed’, Cal conversely describes famous authors scribbling their novels in snatched moments (e.g., Michael Crichton bringing “his portable typewriter with him … including while attending course lectures that failed to keep his attention” and John Grisham working “on the manuscript early in the morning and between meetings and court heatings”). So which is it Cal? Do less, or do it all no matter what the cost?

Thus, while I finished this book feeling renewed enthusiasm and vindication for my calm and simple work schedule, the book itself felt more like an excuse for Cal to write about some of his favourite authors than a compelling argument for his central thesis. Ultimately, he failed to convince me that ‘Slow Productivity’ is any kind of panacea at all. If anything, the book left me thinking that the brilliant works and the knowledge workers behind them weren’t exceptional because of how they worked, but rather that a creative mind will find ways to produce meaningful work under a wide range of circumstances. While I will continue to tune in to most of Cal’s work, I wouldn’t recommend more than the cliff-notes of this particular book. Or, better yet, just go back to the source material and read his other works!