The Power of "Slow Productivity"

A Q&A with Master-of-Deep-Work Cal Newport

Near the beginning of his brand new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport explains how the rise of the knowledge economy led to a corresponding rise of “pseudo-productivity.”

With increasingly amorphous job roles, but no clear metrics for measuring productivity in knowledge work, companies weren’t sure how best to manage employees. The burgeoning hordes of freelancers and small entrepreneurs, meanwhile, weren’t sure how best to manage themselves.

“It was from this uncertainty,” Newport writes, “that a simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. If you can see me in my office — or, if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly — then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something.”

The frenetic result has often been that we are loaded down with an impossible roster of low-value tasks in the interest of keeping busy, and subsequently forced to rush on high-value tasks.

Slow Productivity is a fantastic blend of stories and practical tips aimed at helping people work in a more sustainable fashion — without compromising their most important projects (which may include personal sanity).

Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University, but readers of this newsletter are far more likely to know him from books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, or from his New Yorker articles. Below is our Q&A on Slow Productivity, which came out yesterday.

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David Epstein: Cal, I want to start in a weird place here. I just told you the other day that your writing style reminded me of one of my favorite novelists, Haruki Murakami, in terms of the sort of mesmeric rhythm. There’s a calmness about your style, and it fits with the book’s cover image — which is unusual for the genre. I’m sensitive to writing rhythm, and I’m wondering if you intentionally try to write with this calm rhythm, or whether that’s just what comes naturally to you. Or perhaps it’s a consequence of your slow productivity practices.

Cal Newport: I’m glad you noticed that because I do think a lot about style in my writing! There’s a tone of breathless contrarianism that’s pretty popular right now in the idea-book space, and I’ve found myself burnt out on it and wanting to try something different. The voice I’m using in Slow Productivity was heavily influenced by work for The New Yorker, whose house style really prioritizes the rhythm and sound of the words. I really wanted this book to sound like a New Yorker article that also included advice.

DE: Before I leave Murakami: a friend just sent me this Instagram post showing some pictures of Murakami at home with his record collection. He seems very intentionally to have slow rituals. He does loads of slow endurance activity, long swims and runs. He obviously listens to records — primarily jazz and classical. He loves baseball (but probably not the new MLB pitch clock). And he famously irons a lot. I think his hypnotic writing rhythm fits in with a life that in general is organized around slowness, and focus. Can you share a few practices of your own that are helpful for slowing down? 

CN: An interesting factoid about Murakami is that his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, was a key influence on my idea of deep work. I just dredged up this 2009 blog post I wrote about the book in which I introduce the term “hard focus,” which later morphed into “deep work.” 

DE: I didn’t love that particular book of his, but any running reference is sacred here at Range Widely…

CN: To help emphasize slowness in my own life, there are both small scale and large scale strategies that I rely on. When it comes to the small scale, I have clear shutdown routines at the end of my workday, so professional efforts don’t seep into the rest of life. I try not to work at all on Saturdays, and if I work on Sundays, it’s only going to be writing, and only for a couple hours. At home, I write on my laptop in a library with a record player and a fireplace instead of in our home office with the big computer monitor and printers. I do a lot of thinking on foot, so I’m constantly walking through the streets of my small town, or, if I have something really hard to figure out, on a nearby walking trail.

At the larger scale, I practice seasonality: I do little else but book writing in the summers, while, during certain academic semesters, I might instead be really busy on classes and university service. I also made the commitment when I started a podcast in 2020 that I would only ever spend one half-day per week on it, and I’ve maintained this constraint ever since, and credit it with preventing this part of my life from spiraling into a major time sink.

All of these strategies, of course, reduce the number of things I’m working on, which in turn reduces accomplishments and opportunities as compared to some theoretical get-after-it maximal version of Cal. But in some sense, who cares? I like what I do, I think it matters, and I’m doing it in a way that’s sustainable. A key slow productivity idea is measuring your work on the scale of decades, not days. At the former scale, I’m satisfied. 

DE: Interesting. The tradeoff between short- and long-term optimization is definitely a recurring theme in my writing. But separately, I thought you did a great job in this book of providing a lexicon so that people can discuss some pretty amorphous topics in concrete ways. I mentioned “pseudo-productivity” above, but another stroke of excellent coinage is the “overhead tax.” I think this is a really important concept. Can you describe it, and why it’s important?

CN: Every commitment that you make brings with it some amount of administrative overhead, such as emails or meetings. I call this the “overhead tax.” The problem with taking on too much work at once is that all of the resulting overhead tax begins to pile up. The more things on your plate, the more of each day is spent servicing these administrative demands, leaving less time for actually executing the underlying work. This reality leads to a paradox: the more things you’re doing at once, the less things you’re actually accomplishing.

DE: You write in the book about working in intervals — a regular Range Widely topic — but at different time scales, which you touched on earlier. Working in intervals during a day, where you alternate deep focus with periods of recovery, but also having stages in the year, some of which are for intense work and some for recovery, or less intense activity. This reminded me of way back when I was working in environmental science on a research vessel, and some of the ship’s crew would work at sea for six or nine months — which is hard work — and then take the rest of the year off. It also reminded me of the fact that I’m on pace to publish a book just once every six years, because, after publication, book writing is dead to me — for a while. So I felt seen. At the same time, ships and book writing probably feel pretty foreign for most people. (Even though, as you note, writers were the original remote workers.) But you write about implementing “small seasonality” as something accessible to everyone. Can you explain that?

CN: It’s first worth underscoring the artificiality of not working seasonally. Throughout all of human pre-history, as well as most of our more formal economic history, we had variations in the intensity of our efforts. This changed with the introduction of mills and factories where, for technological reasons, it made sense to just work as hard as you could, as long as you could, all year long. This was so taxing that we had to invent labor unions and entire new regulatory frameworks to try to make it tolerable. But then when knowledge work arose as a major sector in the mid-twentieth century, we basically said, “let’s do the factory thing!” Which is all to say, knowledge workers would be happier and more effective if they could enjoy more variation in their intensity at various time scales. But we instead adopted the pseudo-productivity mindset that demands you always be visibly working all-out during the work day, with no major variation week to week, month to month.

Small seasonality describes various surreptitious strategies knowledge workers can deploy to inject some of this variation into their professional lives, even without their organization’s approval. Ideas along these lines include, for example, not scheduling meetings on Mondays, choosing one month a year to avoid starting new projects, and disappearing every once in a while to see a movie during the middle of the day.

DE: Related to the question I just asked, I enjoyed that you featured some fairly extreme examples that made for great stories: James Bond-author Ian Fleming demanding two months vacation in his contract; Jewel turning down a million-dollar recording deal, despite having lived in a car (and commuted on horseback before she had a car), so that she wouldn’t be rushed and could focus on quality. But then in the book you’re constantly acknowledging, basically: look, these are extreme examples, but here are ways that many people — especially those who have periods of self-management at work — can take lessons…

CN: I’m actually going to interrupt your question there for a moment to share a related story. The basic approach of the book was to start by studying the lives of “traditional knowledge workers” (authors, scientists, artists, etc), who had large amounts of autonomy to experiment with what works best in producing value using the human brain, and then, as a next step, extract general principles from these workers that I can adapt to modern knowledge work jobs. When we study Ian Fleming retreating to Jamaica each winter to write the first draft of his latest James Bond novel, for example, the concrete lesson for today is not to spend your winters in Jamaica, but instead to embrace seasonality in your work rhythms. And so on. Which is all to say that I was thrilled when I learned, just recently, that a British journalist friend of mine is actually somehow still pulling off Fleming’s schedule in 2024: leaving each winter from London to go off the grid in Jamaica. The dream survives!

DE: Along those lines, one of three principles you focus on in the book, and the one that I would guess feels most difficult for a lot of people today, is: do fewer things. Can you give a tip for how one can possibly manage that in a world of asynchronous communication, in which people are always lumping things on our virtual desks?

CN: One thing that helps is to make a distinction between the small number of commitments you’re actively working on and the queue of things you’re waiting to work on. You might even clearly put both lists in a shared document. When someone asks you to do something new, have them put it on the end of your “waiting to do” queue. By making your workload transparent in this way, their expectations are reset. They know how long to realistically wait before you get to their work and know not to bother you with emails or meetings until they see their project move onto your active list. In the book, I give a lot more detailed strategies for implementing systems like this a little more discreetly and formally, but the basic idea of being open about your workload is critical.

DE: One of your other pillars is: obsess over quality. I smiled at this, because I have a sort of mantra with my five-year-old, where if I need him to do something quickly — say, get his pants on not backward¹ — I’ll ask for “quality work,” and ask him what the key to quality work is. And now he usually responds: “slow down,” or, “take your time.” And I try to explain to him that he’s actually going to finish more quickly if he slows down, because he’ll do it right. Naturally, now when I’m rushing and screw something up, he astutely explains that I wasn’t doing quality work. And he’s totally right, and I too need that reminder. So I really appreciated just having the connection between slowness and quality highlighted in your book in interesting ways, because I find I really need the constant reminder, and examples to think about. Also, two of my favorite writers, Laura Hillenbrand and Susanna Clarke — who I think are two of the best living authors — were both struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome when they produced masterpieces. Obviously, I would never wish that on anyone, but in reading about them it did occur to me that they were really forced to slow down and obsess over quality to a pretty remarkable degree. So I just wanted to share that.

Ok, last question. I want to share one from reader Matt Thomas, who always leaves really thoughtful comments. He’s a reader of yours, and when I asked if he had any questions for you, he shared this: 

What is one moment or decision in your career where you regret not doing a better job following your own advice? I'm curious about a time when you made a mistake and learned from it.

CN: The late Hilary Mantel is another example of an absolutely brilliant writer (winner of two Booker Prizes) who dealt with chronic pain and fatigue, so had no choice but to work slowly and meticulously, creating masterpieces.

To answer Matt’s question, I usually find myself, once every two or three years, having drifted too far from my foundational injunction to not work on too many things. This then leads to periods of aggressive spring cleaning of my professional plate – often to the frustration of all of the various people I collaborate with.

DE: And this isn’t a question, but just an ending. You write that it’s important to try to “match your space to your work,” like Lin-Manuel Miranda when he got permission to work in the house that served as George Washington’s headquarters during the Battle of Harlem, so he could commune with history as he composed Hamilton. Again, that’s extreme, but you point out more pedestrian examples. And since I’m in book-writing mode, I sometimes turn out books on the shelves beyond my desk to give me inspiration. (This presently includes one of my own, as a reminder that I’ve actually finished a book before, because right now it feels impossibly far away.) So I just wanted to finish with a shot of my view at this moment. And you might find yourself in there above Murakami!

Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in more, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout is hot off the presses.

And I’ll be interviewing Cal at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. later this month if you happen to be around. (It’s free!)

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Until next time…

David

1. When his goal is to wear his pants backward (frequently the case) and we aren’t going to a wedding, I’m unfailingly supportive.