Most technical communicators have worked for employers that mistook activity for productivity and have tried to teach our bosses the difference between churning out words and crafting useful information. In Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport proposes that slowing down what we’re doing improves our work quality. He notes that Henry Ford’s assembly-line principle of defining productivity as maximizing output (things) per unit input (time) fits the knowledge age poorly, as quality is more important than quantity for most of our work.
Estimating productivity based solely on visible activity (pseudo-productivity) is, as Shakespeare noted, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Knowledge work is hard to quantify, and Newport doesn’t solve that problem. Instead, he focuses on improving work quality through slow productivity: organizing knowledge work so it’s more sustainable and meaningful. He proposes that we do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality.
Newport explains these principles through tales of personal discovery, supported by anecdotes that introduce or support key points. Although anecdotes are a good tool for clarifying principles and making them memorable, they’re problematic: the “moral” may be plausible, but without a body of supporting evidence, we can’t know how generalizable it is to other situations. Scores of initially exciting anecdote-based management books have vanished without a trace when their advice proved problematic. Anecdotal evidence isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s always context-dependent.
Many suggestions seem questionable. For example, doubling a project’s scheduled time to provide breathing room isn’t plausible in most workplaces. His example of a laboratory with an analytical bottleneck seems best solved by adding capacity rather than the author’s proposed “pull-based” process (p. 101). His comparison of industrial agriculture with hunter–gatherer cultures, which feed people efficiently and well, depends heavily on context; hunter–gatherers can’t support extremely large populations because they harvest insufficient food per unit area. These examples reveal a consistent problem with Newport’s solutions: most bosses and clients don’t let us set our own priorities or decline boring tasks. Most jobs require a certain output quantity, even if quality suffers. Although Newport mentions the need to avoid distractions, he doesn’t support this by discussing Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “flow” (a state of highly productive hyperfocus on a task).Newport clearly explains the difference between productivity based on activity or on results. As a desideratum, Slow Productivity describes how to make the knowledge workplace more humane and quality-focused. But his suggestions fail to balance the competing needs for quantity and quality, and several suggestions are suspect. Nonetheless, if you consider his advice with appropriate skepticism, you’ll likely find several ways to improve your productivity.
Slow Productivity. The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
Cal Newport. 2024. Portfolio/Penguin. [ISBN 978-0-593-54485-3. 244 pages, including index. US$30.00 (hardcover).]
