Productivity: How Not To Look Busy

"Slow Productivity

By Cal Newport

Portfolio, 256 pages, $30

'I want to rescue knowledge work," writes Cal Newport, "and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane." In "Slow Productivity," Mr. Newport observes that office workers lack a clear standard for being productive; performative busyness has now become a proxy for good performance. Given the autonomy to manage their own workloads, knowledge workers often fill their days with the lowest-hanging fruit. It's easier "to chime in on email threads," the author notes, "than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy."

He proposes that only a new mindset can counter the "dehumanizing grip of pseudo-productivity." He offers three simple principles: do fewer things; work at a natural pace; and obsess over quality. Many of his strategies will be familiar to readers of his 2016 book, "Deep Work," and the rhetoric here resonates with the growing canon of postpandemic books that extol doing less.

Mr. Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University and the author of seven previous books on productivity, recommends we retain control over our time. Often this necessitates a calculated withdrawal from the demands of others: Preserve meeting-free hours, play hooky and "see a matinee once a month," create a publicly accessible task list so co-workers need not ask for updates.

He also encourages office workers to simulate the "seasonality" enjoyed by tenured professors, covertly scheduling a "rest project" after a larger undertaking. We should allow individual tasks to take longer -- double our estimated project timeline, he suggests -- but also evaluate achievement on a more expansive scale, contextualizing personal development against a five-year plan.

Mr. Newport's self-described "smart self-help" style attempts to elevate the common advice manual. By incorporating narrative episodes from the biographies of some three dozen writers, scientists and musicians, he suggests that there are lessons to be learned from the lives of the author Jane Austen, the singer Jewel, the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman and others. It's an exercise, alas, that often contrives to find lessons where none exist, and seldom amounts to more than trite advice-manual truisms such as "doing less can enable better results."

"Work poetically," Mr. Newport exhorts, and exert ourselves in ways that are "more sublimely natural" and "in settings conducive to brilliance." A high standard, perhaps. Still, his optimism that workers will generate "magic" one No-Meeting Monday at a time is energizing -- even vital.

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Ms. Shang is a former Robert L. Bartley fellow at the Journal." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books -- Short Cuts: Productivity: How Not To Look Busy. Shang, Claire.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 02 Mar 2024: C.12.