Do Fewer Things
Quiet Quitting. The 4-Day Week. Slow Productivity.
Can we make work sustainable?
If you’ve been following my posts, you may know that I am obsessed with how people relate to their work. While I write specifically to social sector leaders, I’m really speaking to myself and anyone else who struggles to balance their passion for mission-driven work with taking good care of themselves.
To learn ways to avoid the misery of burnout again, I listen to audiobooks and podcasts on the latest trends and strategies. I just finished listening to Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, by best-selling author Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University and founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics.
Newport has been pondering and talking about our relationship to work in articles, podcasts and two prior books -- Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. In Slow Productivity, he rails against the plague of "pseudoproductivity" -- busyness as a harmful indicator of productivity -- among “knowledge workers.”
This term refers those of us who spend much of our work lives in front of computers: academics, accountants, architects, consultants, engineers, executives, fundraisers, many teachers and trainers, nonprofit program staff, software developers, website designers, writers and other occupations too numerous to mention.
As an alternative to pseudoproductivity, Slow Productivity advocates three simple -- but not easy -- strategies: 1) do fewer things, 2) work at a natural pace, and 3) obsess over quality. To illustrate the value of this philosophy, Newport shares the work habits of Georgia O’Keefe, Galileo, Isaac Newton and contemporaries Lin-Manual Miranda, John McFee, John Grisham and Alanis Morissette. In colorful stories, the book describes how each of these high achievers, in their own way, followed (or follow) principles of Slow Productivity to create the important contributions they’re known for.
Newport argues that we should, to the extent possible, select only three to four mission imperatives to focus on in any time period. Then we want to advance them at a natural pace -- for example, seasonally. In the last section, he says, we’d be well advised to best approach our key projects with the goal of creating extraordinary results--while avoiding the paralysis of perfectionism.
It’s probably obvious that Newport’s recommendations are most feasible for those with a lot of control over their work habits and schedules, such as entrepreneurs and those at the top of an organization’s org chart. For knowledge workers with fewer options to redesign their work lives, he offers hacks to limit the strain of being regularly bombarded with new tasks -- in ways your boss or co-workers likely won’t notice. They’re not quiet quitting but rather subtle strategies to reduce tedious, time-consuming “overhead taxes” (described in the book’s second section).
Deeply inspired by this book, I have already made strides in slashing my own overhead to save time and energy coordinating seven co-instructors for my online Sonoma State course. I’m also decluttering my office to reduce distractions while I perform top-priority work.
Until we’re all working only four days a week (more on that next time), this book offers hope and practical tips to make work more sustainable.