SLOW PRODUCTIVITY: The Lost Art of Accomplishing Without Exhaustionby Cal Newport
About halfway through his new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishing Without Exhaustion, Cal Newport presents the example of Galileo, whose summer visits to a villa near Padua gave him a chance to rest and reflect between scientific pursuits. “Once there,” writes Newport, “he took long walks in the hills and enjoyed his sleep in a room cleverly air-conditioned by a series of ducts carried with cool air from a nearby system of caves.”
But this room with “genius air conditioning” also happened to be deadly. As Newport puts it in a footnote: “During one unfortunate evening, noxious gases from the cave system, fed through the ducts, caused Galileo and his two roommates to suffer a severe illness which killed one of them and afflicted Galileo. the rest of his life.”
It’s an interesting detail, although Newport doesn’t do anything about it. He argues that genuine productivity for ‘knowledge workers’ requires not ‘restless busyness’ but ‘deep contemplation’. However, there is strong engagement with the abundance of examples in this book, which include anecdotes about Marie Curie, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alanis Morissette, and the Agta people of the northern Philippines, to name just a few.
The comprehensive footnote on Galileo’s illness points to something deeply connected to Newport’s theme: the tension between contingency and control, and the specter of mortality that looms over our preoccupation with productivity and time. But Newport, who writes that the idea for this book came to him during the pandemic, is not inclined to explore anything so complex. For his purposes, Galileo is just another input — a model like any other.
Slow Productivity is Newport’s eighth book. He’s also a professor of computer science at Georgetown and a contributing writer to The New Yorker — in other words. In his acknowledgments, he thanks his wife for “putting up with all the sacrifices that come with having a partner with an annoying book-writing addiction,” including the best sellers Digital Minimalism (2019) and A World Without Email (2021 ). He began writing advisory guides for students, lifting them out of the cesspool of over-scheduling so they could become “casual superstars” like himself. In “Deep Work” (2016), he gave step-by-step advice on how to reclaim the power of our attention from the clutches of electronic distraction.
The relentless demands of busy work, the temptations of digital vacations, the fragmentation of our attention spans — you’ll likely notice a theme. “Slow Productivity” offers another variation on it, revisiting ideas previously explored by Newport, though this time the context is how our cultural obsession with productivity has been shaped (and consequently distorted) by the Industrial Revolution. Even “knowledge work,” which “lacks useful formal definitions of productivity,” is driven by a vision of “continuous, monotonous work that never changes,” Newport writes, noting how people are often “pulled away from deeper efforts to shallow, more specific tasks that can be easily checked off a to-do list.” He calls this “mood” of frantic activity “pseudo-productivity.”
Newport opens the book with a description of The New Yorker staff writer John McPhee in the summer of 1966, lying on a picnic table in his backyard, staring at the ashes above him as he tried to figure out how to make a article of all. the material he had collected about the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. Newport says there’s a lot we can learn from such “lackluster intent.” He suggests three basic tips, or what he calls “principles”: “Do less,” “Work at a natural pace,” and “Insist on quality.”
These recommendations sound appealing, although the people who most need to hear them may not be the knowledge-burnt workers in the Newport public but the people who control their means of payment. Newport’s “principles” assume a certain constellation of factors, all working in your favor. He knows this and admits that McPhee’s circumstances may not be relatable for many readers, slipping in cautionary warnings about “demanding bosses or clients” and “the reality of 21st-century jobs.” But he insists that “it is often our own worries that play the role of the hardest taskmaster”. At times, he can be defensive. “It is therefore easy to dismiss these case studies with a dismissive nod of privilege,” he writes. “While satisfactory, this is not a useful response given our broader goals.”
These “broader goals” revolve around achieving success in the world as it is today. So Newport advises life hacks (some of which he’s suggested in previous books) like “time-blocking” and limiting your big tasks to one project a day. If people try to bombard you with requests, create a “diversion project” that allows you to gently let them down by making it seem like you’re busier than you really are.
He also recommends “high-quality leisure activities,” such as seeing a matinee movie once a month to “improve your taste” — treating taste as another thing to refine rather than exploring more closely related questions of style and temperament. Newport candidly recounts all the steps he took to “try cinema,” which included reading many books and, in an “advanced twist,” seeking out “detailed discussions of lensing and framing techniques.”
All this cinema, Newport states, has made a difference in his work: “Cinema has nothing to do with my writing career, but studying film has broadened my ambitions as a writer.” However, “Slow Productivity” offers little evidence of such risk in his writing or thought. he continues to return to areas covered by his previous books, repackaging heated ideas as “revelations”.
Watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” Newport realized how much he enjoyed using “means of a lower kind” of self-help while “pursuing higher ends.” That’s a great way to describe his best-selling formula. By sticking to the same concepts over and over again, a writer will undoubtedly realize some productivity gains, only for the reader to realize something else: Maybe none of it is really that deep.
SLOW PRODUCTIVITY: The lost art of achieving without exhaustion | By Cal Newport | Portfolio | 244 pp. | $27