Slow Productivity

And as freelancers and small entrepreneurs in the sector became more prevalent, these individuals, responsible only for themselves, weren’t sure how they should manage themselves. It was from this uncertainty that a simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. (Location 416)

As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work. It’s why we gather in office buildings using the same forty-hour workweeks originally developed for limiting the physical fatigue of factory labor, and why we feel guilty about ignoring our inboxes, or experience internalized pressure to volunteer or “perform busyness” when we see the boss is nearby. (Location 422)

Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy. (Location 426)

This philosophy can be understood as providing a more sustainable path toward these achievements. Few people know, for example, how long it actually took Isaac Newton to develop all the ideas contained in his masterwork, the Principia (over twenty years). They just know that his book, once published, changed science forever. The value of his ideas lives on, while the lazy pace at which they were produced was soon forgotten. Slow productivity supports legacy-building accomplishments but allows them to unfold at a more human speed. (Location 687)

The right balance can be found in using office hours: regularly scheduled sessions for quick discussion that can be used to resolve many different issues. Set aside the same thirty to sixty minutes every afternoon, and advertise this time to your colleagues and clients. Make it clear that you’re always available during this period—your door is open, Zoom activated, Slack channels monitored, phone on (Location 1239)

The insight came all at once. It was the summer of 2021, and I was on vacation in Maine, sitting outside our small rental house on the harbor at York. I was reading John Gribbin’s monumental 2002 history, The Scientists, which presents capsule biographies of the great theorists and experimentalists who created the modern scientific enterprise. What struck me as I read were two contradictory observations that seemed to be true at the same time. These great scientists of times past were clearly “productive” by any reasonable definition of the term. What else can you call it when someone literally changes our understanding of the universe? At the same time, however, the pace at which they toiled on their momentous discoveries seemed, by modern standards, to be uneven, and in some cases almost leisurely. Copernicus’s revolutionary ideas about planetary motion, for example, were sparked by a new commentary on Ptolemy published in 1496, which the young astronomer read when he was twenty-three years old. It wasn’t until 1510, however, that Copernicus got around to writing down his theories in a working draft that he passed around to friends. It then took another three1 decades before he finally published his masterwork, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, for a broader audience. (Location 1513)

true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness. (Location 1568)

numerous quiet quitters report, these little changes can make a big difference on the psychological impact of your workload. This got me thinking. What if we stopped positioning quiet quitting as a general response to the “meaninglessness of work,” and instead saw it as a more specific tactic to achieve seasonality? (Location 1902)

There’s something about entering a movie theater on a weekday afternoon that resets your mind. The context is so novel—“most people are at work right now!”—that it shakes you loose from your standard state of anxious reactivity. This mental transformation is cleansing and something you should seek on a regular basis. My suggestion is to try to put aside an afternoon to escape to the movies once per month, protecting the time on your calendar well in advance so it doesn’t get snagged by a last-minute appointment. In most office jobs, no one is going to notice if once every thirty days or so you’re gone for an afternoon. If someone asks where you were, just say you had a “personal appointment.” Which is true. You should, of course, be reasonable in this planning to make sure that you’re not missing something important. If an emergency comes up, or a week proves unusually filled with urgency, you can reschedule your mini-break for another day. If you feel guilty about this decision, it helps to remember all of the extra hours you’ve spent checking email in the evening or working on your laptop over the weekend. Missing the occasional weekday afternoon only balances this ledger. To receive the benefits of this advice, it’s not necessary that you see a film. Other activities can work as well. In my own experience, for example, I’ve also found similar benefits visiting museums and going on hikes. The key observation here is that even a modest schedule of weekday escapes can be sufficient to diminish the exhaustion of an otherwise metronome-regular routine. (Location 1989)

The software development company Basecamp is known for experimenting with innovative management practices. This is perhaps not surprising given that its cofounder and current CEO, Jason Fried, once published a book titled It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. One of Basecamp’s more striking policies is the consolidation of work into “cycles.” Each such cycle lasts from six to eight weeks. During those weeks, teams focus on clear and urgent goals. Crucially, each cycle is then followed by a two-week “cooldown” period in which employees can recharge while fixing small issues and deciding what to tackle next. (Location 2012)

“Three weeks,” replies Kerouac. “How many?” “Three weeks.” As Kerouac goes on to elaborate, not only did he write his book in a three-week burst of frenzied energy, but he typed the manuscript onto a long continuous scroll of teletype paper, allowing him to compose his words without having to stop to swap fresh pages into his typewriter. As his brother-in-law, John Sampas, later detailed, “So he just rolled it along, almost breathlessly, quickly, fast, because the road is fast, to quote Jack.”29 I mention this well-worn tale of Jack Kerouac’s inspired writing binge because it neatly captures an obvious objection to the second principle of slow productivity: sometimes a natural pace is too slow. Important work, this objection argues, requires sustained high-intensity, perhaps even obsessive, attention. To stretch out timelines and vary effort levels might be fine for making average efforts more tolerable, but it’s not compatible with great work. While it’s undoubtedly true that important projects often require temporary periods of maximum intensity, I reject the idea that it’s common for such projects to be fully (Location 2039)

completed in singular bursts of unwavering energy. Let’s return, for example, to Kerouac. As his brother-in-law clarified in a 2007 NPR interview, when Kerouac told Allen he “wrote” On the Road in three weeks, what he really should have said is that he typed an initial draft of the manuscript in that amount of time. His full effort on the book stretched out over a much longer period: Kerouac worked on the novel in his journals between 1947 and 1949. Then, after his famous typing binge, he spent another six years completing six additional different drafts, trying to find a form that he could persuade a publisher to accept. (Location 2049)