Image credit: Dolce far Niente by John Singer Sargent
This is the fourth in a series of essays I’ve written on time. You can view a list of all of them on the first essay.
This was going to be a somewhat different essay before I read Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity. I read the book the day it came out, interested in seeing how he incorporated the ideas from slow movements into the world of productivity, since in so many ways, productivity is the enemy of slowness. Given what I’d read of his work in the New Yorker, I was skeptical that he would really embrace slowness in his book and I discovered my skepticism was more than justified. I’m going to start by critiquing Newport’s book, but then get into my own vision for what it might take to achieve slow productivity.
In late 2021, Cal Newport began writing about “slow productivity,” largely in response to a tidal wave of published books that questioned our society’s focus on productivity (for productivity pundits, the answer is always productivity). He saw the goal of slow productivity as “keep[ing] an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level” and argued that this will not have a negative impact on organizational productivity because less overloaded workers will be less focused on managing a glut of information. He envisioned systems that will track people’s work and assign new tasks based on when the people with the needed skills have time available. In a world full of unique individuals whose capacities vary day by day and where most tasks are far from mechanistic, I question whether this is possible. Tack on the fact that we have people working at varying levels of precarity plus the fact that our reward systems incentivize overwork and we’re always going to have some people who feel the need to do significantly more to prove themselves. Creating systems that don’t change the underlying realities and inequities in the world of work will not adequately address the issue of overwork and overwhelm.
Strangely, though, his book has no suggestions for how slow productivity could be achieved at the systems level. It’s so individual-focused, that he suggests only taking on projects that don’t require meetings with others (the “overhead tax” on projects he calls it). The idea that meetings with others could make us better at our jobs doesn’t seem to occur to him. His understanding of slow proves to be surface-level at best. The slow movement isn’t just about individuals choosing to step away from fast culture; it’s about changing the culture so that everyone can slow down. Otherwise it just becomes an elitist enterprise where only those with the most privilege can actually access the benefits of slow living.
Mountz, et al. (2015) wrote about slow scholarship, arguing that it “is not just about time, but about structures of power and inequality. This means that slow scholarship cannot just be about making individual lives better, but must also be about re-making the university” (1238). Slow Food advocate, Folco Portinari (the author of the slow food manifesto though I rarely see him credited), wrote “there can be no slow-food without slow-life, meaning that we cannot influence food culture without changing our culture as a whole.” Slow Food isn’t just about buying local and slow scholarship isn’t just about not buying into the productivity expectations of the academy. It’s about collectively working to change the systems themselves.
But, really, Cal Newport is not writing this book for most of us. He’s writing it for white, male (there are plenty of critiques of his previous work on the basis of sexism), affluent, lone geniuses who aren’t accountable to a boss. He waits until the end of the book to explicitly state that his advice is for academics and people who work for themselves, but when he offers advice like go see a movie matinee on a weekday once a month, take month+ long vacations to gain perspective, cut your salary, and only take on projects that require no collaboration with others, we see how unrelatable this is to most knowledge workers.
All you need to know about Newport’s philosophy you can get from page 7 of the book:
Slow productivity [is] a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:
1. Do fewer things
2. Work at a natural pace
3. Obsess over quality
I agree that these are good goals, but his book won’t help you get there. The rest of the book is recycled productivity tips from his previous work (many of which won’t work unless you have total control over your work) punctuated by completely unrelatable stories of famous figures throughout history that don’t connect well to any sort of usable takeaway. I read his story of Jane Austen and how she was only able to really be productive in her writing when her brother inherited an estate, she went to live there, and the family decided not to participate in society anymore. So is the takeaway that I need no children, plenty of servants, and no social engagements to be productive? Cool cool cool.
I will never understand why we trust advice from people who have zero experience working the sort of jobs we have. It would be one thing if his work was research-based, but it isn’t. Early in the book, he writes about how people don’t really understand why people are suddenly so exhausted and burned out by work, but there’s ample research in the sociology, anthropology, business, and psychology literature that addresses this. I know because I’ve read a lot of it! And if we’re trusting his experience, what does a person who went from Ivy League undergraduate work, to graduate work at MIT, to a post-doc, to a tenure-line position at Georgetown in computer science really know about what it’s like to work in a typical knowledge organization with a manager and peers who rely on them? I am in a massively privileged position where I have tenure and summers off and even I found very little that I could apply to my own work. As an instruction librarian, I teach students to look into the author of something they are going to rely on and determine if/why they would trust that particular author’s expertise on that subject. Maybe we should do the same?
If you’re looking for really brilliant and well-researched work relevant to slow productivity, check out Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive, both of Jenny Odell’s books, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, Carl Honoré’s book on the slow movement, and Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig’s Slow Living. They will not offer you concrete tips for being more productive, but, really, there’s no magical list of tips that will work for everyone. They will open your mind to what’s wrong with how we’ve been working and what is possible if we came together to collectively fight for change.
In my next post, I’ll share my own vision of what slow productivity looks like (I decided to break this up into two posts because it was getting a bit long). My tips for slow productivity are quite different from Newport’s in that they’re much more focused on our collectivity. He was right in his piece on “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done” that productivity advice is broken because it is not changing things at the level of the system (though he then produced another book focused on individual productivity, go figure). In organizations, we are often dependent on one another to complete our work. We are also held to the collective norms of the organization around productivity and performing busyness. Therefore, slow productivity must be a team sport.
See you again in a couple of weeks!!!
Burkeman, Oliver. 2023. Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals. First paperback edition. New York: Picador.
Gregg, Melissa. Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy. Durham North Carolina; London, Duke University Press, 2018.
Honoré, Carl. In praise of slow: How a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed. Vintage Canada, 2009.
Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu et al. “For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (2015): 1235-1259.
Newport, Cal. “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” The New Yorker, 17 Nov. 2020, www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done.
Newport, Cal. “It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity.” The New Yorker, 3 Jan. 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/office-space/its-time-to-embrace-slow-productivity.
Newport, Cal. 2024. Slow Productivity : The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. New York: Portfolio/Penguin.
Odell, Jenny. 2019. How to Do Nothing : Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture. Random House, 2023.
Parkins, Wendy and Geoffrey Craig. 2006. Slow Living. Oxford: Berg.
Petrini, Carlo. Slow food: The case for taste. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Thabks for this review, I had heard the new book had come out and was hoping for an improvement. Another issue of working by yourself, as Newport does, is that you are less likely to realise the limits of your own expertise. The other book I’d highly recommend is Johan Hari’s Stolen Focus. He does the research but it’s written by a journalist alist with loads of stories. Ps thanks for the cross link. My post on Newport’s work remains one of my most read!
Too right about how working alone doesn’t as easily show one the limits of their expertise. Working with others definitely helps to build humility! Thank you for your terrific post!! It really got to the heart of a lot of what made me uncomfortable with Newport’s previous work. When he argues that things like care work and collaboration are impediments to “real” deep work it makes me sad that he can’t see the great importance of mutual care and collaboration in organizations to helping us do our best work (and wow is his view the polar opposite of what is argued in all slow movements!). But, of course, he’s a solitary genius and probably has never had the amazing experience of having work with others actually make him and his work better. If you’ve read Deep Work, you’re not going to find much in the way of new takeaways from this work — it’s a lot of rehash or old wine in new bottles.
By the way, I see you’re in Palmerston North. I gave a speech at the NZ Library Associations annual conference in 2012 in Palmerston North and absolutely had the best time!!
I am curious about the justification for saying that Newport is a “solitary genius” who does not believe in collaboration and has “never had the amazing experience of work with others actually make him and his work better.” That is not at all what I get out of his work.
*Almost every one of his many, many academic publications is co-authored. He has talked on his podcast about working with the folks he often co-authors with.
*He recently wrote in the New Yorker about learning to concentrate in the MIT theory group, which was about working with other people.
*He has done a fair amount of administrative and service work. He probably has enough “privilege” to have gotten away with less.
*Ryan Holiday started his recent interview with Newport by telling the story of how he reached out to Newport when they were both starting out as writers of popular books. Newport was generous and open to talking to him. It is clear from the interviews for the new book that he has built friendly relationships with many in the podcasting community.
*Newport has spoken on the podcast/book interview recently about cashing in career capital to transition to focusing on the new Center for Digital Ethics and a new undergraduate program on Computer Science, Ethics, and Society–all of which shows a concern with the social context of things and none of which is solitary work. His reason is spending more time with his three boys.
*The book he is working on is about living a “deep life,” and characterizes work as one facet of life that needs to be balanced with community, contemplation, and constitution (exercise, eating right, etc.).
Newport has selected a focus with respect to the institutional/societal vs. individual level. He does not denigrate the other view (although he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of Marxism and neo-capitalist critiques). He wrote an entire book on the need for systems approaches (A World Without Email). It is not that he is unaware or disagrees with the need for institutional or societal change; it is just that he believes he tried that, and it got little traction. He has mentioned many times on his podcast and interviews for the new book that he is frustrated by that. He is back to writing about what individuals can do because he decided that is where people realistically have the most agency. It is fine to say you take a different view, but I don’t think it is right to say that Newport does not care about larger societal and institutional issues. Everyone has to pick their battles, and he has opted to focus on an individual level in his work.
Finally, on the point that “Cal Newport is not writing this book for most of us. He’s writing it for white, male (there are plenty of critiques of his previous work on the basis of sexism), affluent, lone geniuses who aren’t accountable to a boss.” I don’t think that is true. However, he certainly is open to some degree of critique based on privilege. His podcast has over 7 million downloads. That is a lot. I am a fan; I listen every week. Clearly, a lot of other people see value in his perspective, even if they don’t agree with everything.
In sum, I find value in the literature on slow librarianship and in Newport’s idea of slow productivity, which admittedly incorporates ideas from his earlier work. I don’t think they need to be seen as either/or.
Hi Julie,
I see value in Newport’s work but i do think his expertise is not in the field of care, collective work or social transformation so he misses alot. It is frustrating as someone who works in the field of social transformation to have the decades and decades of research and collective activism ignored and an individual’s personal work habits be glorified. Especially since the titles reference the fields of social transformation but dont engage with them. If he worked with social scientists in the field, he might realise the limits of his expertise and also just tidy the work up a bit, for example with deep work he used almost no examples of women doing deep work. The work could be deeper!
When you refer to work with others as an “overhead tax” to be avoided, you are denigrating collaborative work. I don’t understand how anyone who has had great experiences with collaboration could make that argument. Clearly I don’t follow his work and his life as closely as you do. I’m taking my point of view from what I’ve read in Deep Work and Slow Productivity and I don’t think I should have to go beyond that to form an opinion on slow productivity. I’m happy for you that you found value in his writing and podcasts. You’re as welcome to your opinion as I am to mine.
I’m not sure where you thought I said I thought Newport didn’t care about systemic issues. What he didn’t do is address them and that’s what I take issue with. If you’re going to glom onto the slow movement, your work should at least be in line with the ethos of that movement. Slow food, slow scholarship, slow librarianship, and other slow movements are focused on systemic change so that everyone can reap the benefits of a slower temporality. To call your book slow productivity and then not actually write a book that engages with that work in any real way is disingenuous. What he wrote was not “slow” productivity. It was just more productivity advice for individuals, and a limited group of individuals at that (at the end of his book, he does say that his advice is mainly actionable for academics and people who work for themselves, so that’s not just my opinion). He didn’t have to pretend that his advice had anything to do with slow movements, but he chose to glom onto something that has clearly struck a chord for many in recent years.
Oh, I forgot, I also read Digital Minimalism years ago, but I’d forgotten who had written it.
Thank you for the recommendation of Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive; I hadn’t come across that one yet! I’ve long been a fan of Newport’s work but also found Slow Productivity untenable. The entire time I was reading the book I was thinking to myself “But this advice won’t work because I work with *other people.*” If I ever make the jump into consulting work, this style of task management might be possible but not so long as I work on a team, with committees, in an organization, etc. I’m looking forward to your second half!
100%. In what I’ve read of his previous work, I at least found practical tips that I could conceivably utilize in my work, but in this case, it was just one unrealistic example or suggestion (for those of us who work in organizations) after another.
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