Why “slow productivity” is the key to great work and happy teams

The dangers of overwork are well-known. Cognitively overloaded employees are prone to make mistakes and are less efficient in completing tasks. Burnout decreases employees’ motivation and sense of engagement — not just at work but across many aspects of their lives — and the constant rush of stress is hardly great for anyone’s mental and physical health. 

Yet, while many managers recognize these dangers, they are simultaneously being tasked with increasing workloads and productivity demands that require them to ask more of their teams. More projects. More emails. More meetings. More objects to meet and results to hit. The only thing your team doesn’t seem to get more of is time, resources, and people.

How is it possible to get the work done, be proud of the result, and not feel like you’re risking the health and well-being of your people? Cal Newport, computer scientist and author, has an answer to this question. We need to set aside old, faulty understandings of productivity, in which quantity is the metric of value, and replace it with something new: slow productivity. By slowing down and focusing on certain vital tasks, Newport argues, your team can accomplish more than if it tried to do everything all at once. But to understand why, it’s first necessary to consider what slow productivity entails exactly.

Three slow-and-steady principles

Newport defines slow productivity as “a way of measuring useful effort that is focused on the quality of things you produce over time as opposed to visible activity in the moment.” For him, that means adhering to three key principles when considering assignments, workflow, and where your team finds value in their work.

The first of these principles is to do less. Limit how many assignments you will pursue so your team can focus on the ones that will generate the most important outcomes. You’ll also want to find ways to reduce “overhead” tasks, such as emails, meetings, and that never-ending (but ever-growing) list of administrative upkeep.

“This idea that you want to slow down, do fewer things, [and] focused on doing what you do well,” Newport says. “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.”

The next principle is to work at a natural pace. You don’t want your people to be rushing to complete projects or pushing themselves to maintain their intense focus for the entire workday. That’s how mistakes are made, and those can prove more costly to repair than not making them initially. Instead, ensure they have the time to complete the project at a high level. You’ll also need to account for the daily ebbs and flows that people experience in their focus and energy.

Newport’s handy rule of thumb: When asking how much time a task will require, take your first instinct and double it.

The final principle is to obsess over quality. From AI or instant coffee, quantity is no longer a favorable differentiator. The true mark of excellence will be the quality of the work your team puts out. As a bonus, when your people feel that quality and their well-being are your top priorities, it allows them to take pride in their work and the place they perform it.

Strategies for slow productivity

These three principles can be adopted at the individual contributor level and up to that of an entire organization. That said, it can be difficult to implement slow-productivity norms into team dynamics. Thankfully, Newport has some strategies to get you started.

Synchronizing workloads is a great place to start. The true scope of a team’s workload is often hidden across a sprawl of apps, spreadsheets, and to-do lists. Making matters worse, these documents may be accessible to just one person, and even if they are widely available, there can be so many that piecing together a coherent picture is like trying to solve the world’s most frustrating jigsaw puzzle.

Instead, create a centralized master list of tasks and one sublist for each team member. The master list is where you will track every task your team wants to accomplish; meanwhile, the sublists will house each task a team member is working on right now. When a team member finishes a task, they pull a new one from the master list and add it to their sublist.

These lists could be a virtual board, a shared spreadsheet, or a management app. The technology and techniques can be molded to fit your team’s needs. The pivotal part is finding one place where everyone can see what is being worked on, when, and by whom, so they recognize what tasks are vital to the team mission and direct their efforts toward those tasks.

“These types of workload management systems are going to prevent overload, prevent overhead tax from piling up, make people much happier, and get work accomplished much quicker,” Newport says.

Teams should have more structured communication norms, as well. Rather than directly messaging each other on a whim — and potentially interrupting important, focused work — each team member will schedule official “office hours” once a day or every other day. These are the times when they are available to talk about anything. At all other times, they will be working on their sublist tasks.

Another strategy Newport recommends is the “docket-clearing meeting.” In lieu of a team-wide message whenever any incident arises, you have team members log any questions, concerns, or problems. Then hold regular meetings — say, twice weekly — where the team reviews the document, discusses each item, and clears the docket.

“Taking that same idea and shooting it off as an email right away generates a response email. Then you have to see that and respond to it, and now that one idea is creating message after message — and inbox checks; and cognitive context switches; and attention residue,” Newport says. But with the docket-clearing meetings, he adds, “you eliminate all of that.”

Slow productivity begins with you

Of course, the best intentions will be for nothing if your people don’t recognize the value of slow productivity. Without that, they’ll keep falling back on those old, faulty understandings of productivity.

As a team manager, that cultural shift starts with you. Through your habits and messaging, you need to exhibit slow, thoughtful work. You need to direct your focus toward what’s necessary rather than flitting between every minor task that seems necessary at the moment. And you need to set the work-life boundaries that support your own health and well-being.

If you do, you’ll find that not only will your team accomplish more in better health. You will too.

“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 of your employees is also going to go up,” Newport says. “This is going to become a much more sustainable work environment, and you’re going to feel that both subjectively and in terms of hard metrics like turnover.”