How Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity Can Transform Your Life and Work

Slow Productivity was first recommended to me by Sean Sanford, my coach at Harvard Business School. Over the last seven months, he has gotten to know me well and thought I might find this book helpful. He was right.

I have been a fan of Cal Newport for years through his blog and articles, though I’ve never read any of his books until now. He has done more for me than anyone else to highlight the importance of “deep work” and the necessity of time blocking for the purpose of deep work. Additionally, his commitment to “digital minimalism” is something I have aspired to for years precisely because of my convictions regarding deep work.

For those unfamiliar with Newport, he is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Though he is only slightly older than me, has published eight books (in addition to a PhD from MIT) that have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. His last several books, including Slow Productivity, have focused on the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture (A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work).

Overview of Slow Productivity

Slow Productivity is a quick read that I worked through in about four sittings (219 pages with plenty of white space). I would have read it faster except so many of his points led me into reflection and jotting down ideas, which for me is the sign of a great book.

In the introduction, he tells the compelling story of John McPhee’s process for writing a long-form article for The New Yorker back in 1966. A significant part of that process involved McPhee lying on his back on a picnic table under an ash tree for nearly two weeks, staring up into the branches, thinking. In today’s hurried world focused on productivity, it’s difficult to imagine someone taking so much time to simply ponder a problem. It seems so unproductive. But Newport’s point is that McPhee was incredibly productive as a writer, even though nothing about his work habits were frantic, busy, or overwhelming. It turns out that the relentless overload many knowledge workers face today is premised on the idea that good work requires increasing busyness. In Slow Productivity, he disabuses us of this unproved notion and sets forth a slower—and more productive—path.

Defining Slow Productivity

Newport defines Slow Productivity 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

3. Obsess over quality.

The Challenge of Measuring Knowledge Work

For years now, management experts have struggled to measure the productivity of knowledge workers. As a pastor, I would put myself in that category. The lack of a clear metric has resulted in falling back on a more industrial-era type of measurement of productivity: “using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity” (p.20). The effect is that knowledge workers gravitate away from deeper efforts that take more time to accomplish and drift toward easier tasks that we can check off the to-do list. In short, it’s easier to knock out a few emails talking about work than to barricade yourself against distraction in order to dream up a bold new strategy. Yet, which activity will make the most difference for the company or organization? Clearly the latter.

The Trap of Pseudo-Productivity

In order to start being truly productive (rather than simply busy), we need to expose pseudo-productivity for what it is: “The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort” (p.22). In one of the most insightful passages in the book, Newport writes: “In a setting where activity provides a proxy for productivity, the introduction of tools like email (and, later, Slack) that make it possible to visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort inevitably led to more and more of the average knowledge worker’s day being dedicated to talking about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through incessant electronic messaging” (p.23). This would include knowledge workers checking their email an average of once every six minutes. In my own experience, I have found that doing this does not lead to meaningful or thoughtful production of any sort whatsoever. But through our constant connectedness through phone and laptop, this pseudo-productivity now spreads to our children’s sporting events, our bedrooms in the evening, and our vacations. No wonder people are feeling burned out. The rest of the book is filled with examples and practical ideas to forge a better way forward via Slow Productivity.

The Three Principles of Slow Productivity

1. Do Fewer Things

The first principle of Slow Productivity is to do fewer things. He defines the principle this way: “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” (p.53). It’s a beautiful principle on paper, but I found myself wondering two things: 1) How do you do that practically, and 2) What are the small number of projects that matter most?

The Overhead Tax

With regard to the first principle of doing fewer things, he gives multiple examples of people reducing their obligations in various lines of work, along with some suggested approaches to try. But the most insightful piece of this section for me was his description of the overhead tax (p.56). Essentially, every time we agree to a new commitment (large or small), it brings with it a certain amount of administrative overhead such as emails, meetings, and phone calls. With enough of this administrative overhead, we end up spending all our working hours paying the overhead tax leaving ourselves little to no time to do the actual work. Consequently, when we want to get the real work done, we are forced to do it in the early mornings, evenings or on the weekend. We feel as busy as we have ever been, but we hardly ever feel like we are getting anything done. This not only leads us to burnout, but it also tends to produce lower quality output. He gives several good ideas for how to reduce the number of things that we are doing so that we can do the most important things better.

Accomplishing More by Doing Less

It’s important to understand that when Newport advocates for doing fewer things, he is not advocating for “accomplish fewer things.” Rather, by narrowing our focus to the things that matter most and doing them better, we will accomplish more. It is precisely here that we have failed to make the shift from “factory work thinking” to “knowledge work thinking” about productivity. In a factory, simply pushing employees to work longer shifts making widgets will positively impact the bottom-line. In knowledge work, pushing employees into larger workloads will likely reduce both the quantity and quality of their work (p.62).

Identifying Key Projects

The second major question I had when reading his definition of the first principle was, “what are the small number of projects that matter most?” Most knowledge workers can probably figure this out with a minimal amount of reflection. In my case, as the primary preaching pastor in a church with multiple pastors and staff, the most important task for me each week is the Sunday sermon and the life of prayer that must accompany it. After that, it is helping provide directional leadership to our elders and staff as we carry out our ministry. I have to be ruthless in keeping other things from crowding into my calendar that keep me from giving my best in these two essential areas. Each of us must figure out what those key areas are.

Trading Money for Time

One of the other key insights from this chapter for me was the importance of trading money for time to do more meaningful projects. I think this is a difficult lesson for people like me to learn. After college, my wife and I spent a year on the mission field with very few financial resources. From there we spent four years in seminary where we continued to have very few financial resources and learned to stretch dollars to new levels. Then we spent a year in an internship position with slightly more financial resource, but not much. So, from college until the time I received my first full-time call to ministry, we had spent 10 years learning to how to live on a dime. It would still be quite a few years into my ministry before we started to feel anything resembling financial comfort. The habits of frugality learned during those years are not easily set aside, even when they’re now working against more important priorities. But I am at a point in my career now where I have some disposal income that could be leveraged to give me time to focus on more important things. While we want to remain appropriately frugal for the Kingdom’s sake, we need to learn how to use money in ways that give us time for other things that matter more than money.

Putting Tasks on Autopilot

Another key takeaway from this chapter is the importance of putting tasks on autopilot. Basically, assign regularly occurring tasks or activities to particular days, times, and locations. The point is to reduce the amount of overhead required to accomplish these necessary tasks. I developed a couple of interesting ideas for how to handle my email after reflecting on this section.

2. Work at a Natural Pace

The second principle in the book is to work at a natural pace. He defines the principle as follows: “Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance” (p.116). Newport argues that we suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads because we’re uncomfortable ever stepping back from our jittery busyness (p.115). But this is not how work has always been.

Historical Perspective on Work Rhythms

For many years, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. That type of work was not easy, but it had clearly defined periods of work and rest. After that, our ancestors were farmers. No one would argue that farming is easy work, but there was a clear rhythm of work and rest that varied throughout the year depending on the weather and season. Then the industrial revolution changed all that. The powered mill and the factory made every day a harvest day (p.123). Of course, this resulted in legislation and trade unions to help protect workers from being exploited endlessly. On the heels of that came the rise of knowledge work.

As we saw earlier, not knowing how to measure the productivity of the knowledge worker, managers fell back on visible activity as a proxy for usefulness. But whereas workers in a factory had legislation to protect them from working all day every day without any seasonal change, in the invisible factory of knowledge work, there were no such protections. Newport writes, “Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence: colonizing as much of our time, from evenings to weekends to vacations, as we could bear, and leaving little recourse beyond burnout or demotion or quitting when it became too much” (pp.123-124). Rather than this approach, slow productivity recognizes that a more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation for true productivity in the long term (p.125). He fills the rest of the chapter with very practical ideas and examples of how to change the pace of your work. If I began to interact with all of his suggestions, this blog post would become a book.

3. Obsess Over Quality

The third principle of slow productivity is to obsess over quality. (He tells a fascinating story about the early career of the singer-songwriter Jewell that I had never heard before to make his point.) He defines the third principle this way: “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” (p.173). On the whole, I found this principle to be the least impactful for me in producing new ideas. However, it’s important to see how the third principle ties all three principles together. He writes, “The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane nor pragmatic approach to organizing your work. This third principle’s focus on quality, however, transforms professional simplicity from an option to an imperative. Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable. In other words, this third principle helps you stick with the first” (p.177).

Rethinking Rewards

One of the most thought-provoking lines in the book came in this section. Newport writes, “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” (p.182). Obviously accepting increased responsibilities (and the remuneration that typically goes with it) is often the right move as we grow into our vocations. But there may come a point where we realize the additional responsibilities and income are not significant enough to warrant the negative effects on our well-being. We may be more effective servants of our organizations if we intentionally turn down some opportunities in order to sustain our service for the long-haul.

Conclusion

I believe Cal Newport has done a great service to knowledge workers with this book. Those will benefit most who read it thoughtfully, intentionally writing out how to put the principles in practice in their own workplaces. I highly recommend the book and I hope my own work and ministry will begin to bear the fruit of its wisdom.