Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In 1959, Jack Kerouac was asked how long it took him to write On the Road. “Three weeks,” replied the voice of the Beat Generation.
This does not seem an obvious example of a man taking his time. Yet Kerouac is cited in Slow Productivity, the latest book by productivity guru Cal Newport, because his work highlights the reality beneath the self-mythology. Kerouac may have written his first draft in a burst of activity, but he then spent another six years on it.
This redrafting and polishing is key to Newport’s argument that knowledge workers — a loose band of creatives and lawyers — need to slow down. His philosophy is based on three principles: do fewer things; work at a natural pace; and obsess over quality.
Newport, an associate professor in computer science at Georgetown University in Washington DC, has built a following through his Study Hacks blog, books (including Deep Work and A World Without Email) and a podcast. His ideas are not of the self-optimising wake-up-before-you-go-to-bed life-hack brigade but rather to encourage deep focus, away from the noise of social media and performative busyness.
His new book comes at a time of “untenable freneticism”, he argues, and proposes a new standard: “accomplishment without burnout”. We’ve been here before, of course, notably Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slowness from 2004. There are advocates for slow cities, media, even running. Newport cites the slow food movement in Italy in the 1980s, a reaction to fast food coined by activist and journalist Carlo Petrini.
Slow productivity is a response to the howl of pain Newport heard from workers, at the start of the pandemic and beyond, who were “losing more or less their entire day to back-to-back-to-back virtual meetings, with nearly every moment of downtime in between filled with hyperactive Slack chatter”.
The pandemic spurred interest in new work patterns. Despite return-to-office mandates, hybrid working seems here to stay. Trials of the four-day week have been held globally, where workers receive full pay in return for 100 per cent of output in 80 per cent of the time.
Yet Newport says these ideas seem “insufficient”. Some of his suggestions, he admits, are a run-through of his past greatest hits. He urges people to be realistic about their timelines and cut down the task-list by 25-50 per cent. He suggests scheduling slow seasons, like a forager. “A boss might notice if you’re always deflecting projects,” he writes, but not “a month or two of a relatively slower pace”. Other tweaks include no-meeting Mondays, scheduling rest and making time for yourself.
His call to take a weekday afternoon off for the cinema made me worry about slacking, until he wrote of all the times we tend to work at the weekend, or evenings. This underlined his view that sometimes the problem comes not from bosses but ourselves.
Newport’s case studies are drawn from artists, academics and freelancers. One of the best is Edith Wharton’s protected morning writing routine, which involved dropping pages to the floor to be later typed up by a secretary. Still, I would have liked examples of junior lawyers pushing back against client demands or software engineers grappling with unrealistic deadlines.
Newport acknowledges, without really addressing it, the difficulty of juggling workloads with caring responsibilities. Time is, after all, a feminist issue. This was underlined by Katrine Marçal’s 2016 book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, which made the case that the economist was able to devote time to his work because he didn’t have to think about domestic chores.
It is difficult to know how seriously to take the call to slowness from Newport, a 41-year-old academic with published books and a regular gig at The New Yorker magazine. No doubt he would argue that prioritisation and focus allowed his rapid trajectory.
The most interesting part of Slow Productivity is his discussion of pseudo-productivity, which has flourished, he writes, because we are hopeless at measuring knowledge work — unlike manufacturing where it is easy to count the number of widgets made in a given time. In lieu of concrete metrics, Newport says, people use “visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. If you can see me in my office — or . . . see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly — then at the very least, you know I’m doing something.”
Such performative busyness, Newport argues, stops us from doing the most meaningful work. He hopes his book will spur better ideas about “what we mean by ‘productivity’ in the knowledge sector”. His thoughts on this were tantalising — and, ultimately, frustrating. It underlined the effort that changing work patterns requires. A slow working life might be tempting, but it’s not for slackers.
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport Penguin Business/Portfolio, £16.99/$30, 256 pages
Emma Jacobs writes on work and careers for the FT
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here