When the Knowledge Sector emerged in the mid 20th century, our best understanding of the word ‘productivity’ came from manufacturing, which led to us measuring productivity based on quantity produced per hour. 

But in knowledge work, we’re not producing just one thing: We’re working on 7-8 different things at one time, that differ per worker. Our solution to this was to introduce a rough heuristic that author and professor Cal Newport has dubbed “pseudo productivity,” which uses visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort. 

More and more of our time is focused on performing this busyness rather than focusing on high-quality outputs, leading to burnout. Newport has a solution: An idea called ‘slow productivity,’ which is focused on the quality of items produced over time and based on three main principles.

CAL NEWPORT: 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-twentieth century. When it emerges, our best understanding of productivity came from manufacturing. 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 is spent 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're thinking about over here leaves what's known as attention residue. This is a self-imposed reduction of cognitive capacity, so you're producing worse work. Even worse, it's 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. We were planting, and harvest seasons when we're 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 okay to not redline it fifty 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 fifty-dollar 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.