Slow Productivity

I like to be a productive person. The way I see it, I wake up each day and attempt to win the war against focus, dodging distraction bullets while pressing onwards through the battlefront, and if I take my eye off the goal for just a second, I'll be shot to bits. Perhaps, then, it's not so much that I like to be a productive person, but that it is the only path to my goals, the only alternative to death on the front lines.

If this is also how you've been thinking lately, then this article is written for you.

What is "productivity"?

I was recently gifted a book called Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport. It aims to question how our society sees productivity, and opens the discussion to a potentially healthier, slower approach. What follows is my own view on the topic of productivity, with a touch of Cal Newport seasoning.

Most of us understand that productivity is supposed to be a rough measure of accomplishment, usually over a specified period of time. The problem is, corporate notions of production have slowly twisted the narrative, to the point where our first thought is more like "widgets assembled per hour." Your value as a worker is measured in emails sent, keystrokes hit, or meetings attended. Your boss thinks of your productivity as your day-to-day accomplishment, with little care for the longer-term progress you need to be making along the way. Forget achieving anything next month, you need to look busy today.

This is easy to disagree with, but I'll ask you, which is more productive: sending thirty emails a day for four years, or earning a bachelor's degree? The half of your brain that echoes societal norms is probably trying to answer "thirty emails a day," but the half that is willing to stop and think about it will always settle on the degree.

I think we don't stop to think about productivity like this enough.

Why "slow"?

Here's a question: do you care how long the author of a book took to write it? You probably do not. Does it matter how much red tape Steve Jobs had to slash through to produce the first iPhone? Nope, it just matters that he finished it. Could we call the decades Martin Luther King Jr. worked before he started making a big impact "unproductive"? Absolutely not: they were oriented towards something more, and it wasn't going to matter how long that took.

Why, then, do we measure productivity by the process, and not the outcome?

Usually it's because the outcome hasn't happened yet. Which sounds pretty damning to the notion of outcome-focussed productivity, but it's really not: we just need to reframe our thinking. If we can look at our biggest goals through a lense that filters out the time they take, then it's easier to stay grounded and trudging towards them day by day. If we can become the creative writer that spends months daydreaming before putting pen to paper, or the activist who focusses on their local community for years before bringing their voice to the public, then the months or years of slow progress begin to feel necessary, not unproductive.

This doesn't quite answer the question "Why slow?", but I hope by now you're starting to connect the dots. If the duration of a task is insignificant compared to the outcome, then it becomes far more valuable to take a few steps back and get a better view than it is to make sure every daily step is aimed at the goal.

You can't win the war if you are only ever focussed on the next battle.

So what's "slow productivity"?

I would say it's the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. Actually, that's what Cal Newport would say, since he said it as the subtitle of his book. It's a good summary, but it seems difficult to apply "accomplishment without burnout" to daily life. Slow productivity's definition should be actionable, so I've rewritten his subtitle accordingly:

Slow productivity is the lost art of ending up in fewer wars instead of getting better at fighting them.

You probably know how it feels to do too many things at once. It's like you're juggling; before you know it, you will have dropped all the balls, so by the end you're holding fewer balls then if you had just picked up two. The problem is that balls are forever tossed your way. You know these distractions delay you, so you try to avoid checking your email when you're deep in a project, and you try to stop changing contexts so much. But you do just that: try. You consider these new balls problematic, but not problematic enough.

If you take one thing from this article, it should be this: those extra balls are infinitely worse for your true productivity — your future accomplishment — than you think. Stop seeing distractions as juggling balls that you could catch if only you could focus a little more.

They're not juggling balls. They're bullets.