The lost art of accomplishment without burnout

We're increasingly facing burnout

How is it possible to do work that you're proud of and not feel like your job is encroaching on all parts of your life

Because it's no longer you just see me in my office looking vaguely busy

You can actually see every email I'm sending and how active I am in a Slack chat

I could do this on the way to work, on the way home from work, at home, on the weekends

Enough is enough. We're increasingly exhausted. We have a faulty definition of productivity that we've been following

And what we need to do instead is shift our focus onto outcomes

I'm Cal Newport. I'm a computer scientist and writer. My most recent book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

So the knowledge sector emerges in the mid-20th century. When it emerges, our best understanding of productivity came from manufacturing

In manufacturing, this is something that we could measure very precisely. For example, how many Model Ts are we producing per labor hour going in as input

And we had a number we could look at. Knowledge work emerges. These type of metrics don't work anymore

Because in knowledge work, we're not producing one thing. I might be working on seven or eight different things at the same time

This could be different than the seven or eight things that the person right next to me is working on Our solution to this was to introduce a rough heuristic that I call pseudo productivity that said we can use visible activity

as a crude proxy for useful effort. So if I see you doing things

that's better than you not doing things. Come to an office and we watch you work

If we need to be more productive, come earlier, stay later. We'll just use activity as our best marker

that you're probably doing something useful. More and more of our time is focused on performing this busyness, which means less of our time has been actually doing things that matter

So what's the solution? Slow productivity is a way of measuring useful effort that is now much more focused on the quality things you produce over time, as opposed to your visible activity in the moment

And I define it to be built on three main principles. The first is to do fewer things

Now, this idea scares a lot of people when they first hear it because they interpret

do fewer things to mean accomplish fewer things. What I really mean is do fewer things at once

We know this from neuroscience and organizational psychology, that when you turn the target

of your attention from one point to another, it takes a while for your brain to reorient

The things you are thinking about over here leaves what's known as attention residue

This is a self reduction of cognitive capacity So you producing worse work Even worse it a psychological state that is exhausting and frustrating So the experience of work itself just becomes subjectively very negative

So what happens if I'm working on fewer things at once? More of my day can actually be spent

trying to complete commitments, which means I'm going to complete them faster. And probably the

quality level is going to be higher as well because I can give them uninterrupted concentration

The second principle is to work at a natural pace. One of the defining features of human economic activity for the last several hundred thousand years is that the seasons really matter

There was migration seasons when we were hunting. There was planting seasons when we were planting and harvest seasons when we were harvesting

And seasons where neither of those activities were going on. We had a lot of variety throughout the year in terms of how hard we were working

I think in knowledge work, if certain times of year are more intense than others, this will lead to overall better and more sustainable outcomes

So the principle of working at a natural pace says it's OK to not redline it 50 weeks a year, five days a week

We can have busy days and less busy days. We can have busy seasons and less busy seasons

The third principle of slow productivity is to obsess over quality. And what this means is you should identify the things you do in your work that produce

the most value and really care about getting better at that Any quest towards obsessing over quality has to start with a perhaps pretty thorough investigation of your own job And then once you figure that out

start giving that activity as much attention as you can. For example, invest in better tools

so that you can signal to yourself that you're invested in doing this thing well

I did this myself as a postdoc. I was at MIT. Didn't have a ton of money at that time

but I bought a $50 lab notebook. And my idea was, this is going to make me take the work I'm doing in this notebook more seriously

And it did. So something about having this more quality tool pushed me towards more quality thinking

So this idea that you want to slow down, that you want to do fewer things

that you want to have a more natural pace, this becomes very natural when you're really focused on doing what you do well

You begin to see all of those meetings and the email and the overstuffed task list, not as a mark of productivity, but obstacles to what you're really trying to do

If you are embracing these principles, a few things are going to happen. The pace at which important things are finished is going to go up

The quality of what you're producing is going to go up. And the happiness is also going to go up

This is going to become a much more sustainable work environment, and you're going to be doing the work that's going to make you better

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