Transcript: How to slow down but achieve more, with Cal Newport

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘How to slow down but achieve more, with Cal Newport’

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Cal Newport
The right measure of useful effort is actually finishing things that are valuable and the best way to do that is to slow down, work on fewer things at the same time, do those things really well and you and the people you work for and around you are gonna be very impressed by what you’re actually finishing, not by how quickly you respond to Slack messages, but what you’re actually producing. Slow productivity is possible, and it is better. It’s just a scary first step you have to take to get there.

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick.

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The way we work today asks a lot of our brains. We’re constantly bombarded with emails, instant messages and calendar invites. Just responding to those requests is practically a job in itself, and it can stop us from doing the work we want to do. What if we could slow down our work, doing less but doing it well and at a natural pace? That’s the question my guest today is asking. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of several influential books about modern work. His latest, Slow Productivity, says we can get more done in our careers and stop ourselves from burning out if we take things slow. I spoke to Cal earlier this month. Here’s the interview.

Cal Newport, hello and welcome to Working It.

Cal Newport
Well, thank you for having me.

Isabel Berwick
So what are some of the initial strategies that come to mind when we think about slow productivity? You know, are there any easy wins before we get into some of the more nitty-gritty stuff you write about?

Cal Newport
Well, I mean, I don’t know if it’s easy or not, but you really have two dimensions for slowing down: quantity and pace. So maybe we’ll start with pace since that’s the easiest to get maybe your mind around, but just slowing down even the timelines you come up with for yourself on how long things are gonna take. So a project comes into your world. You say, fine, I’ll work on this. Here’s when I’ll have it done. Just taking your initial instinct for when you think you’re gonna have that done, and adding 25-50 per cent more time. So just giving yourself even a little bit more breathing room, that’s a good entryway into a slower productivity.

Isabel Berwick
I was struck by the fact you say that humans are incredibly bad at knowing how long tasks are gonna take. Is that something that’s sort of hard-wired into us or is it a product of the modern way we work?

Cal Newport
I think we’re good at predicting the types of tasks we would have seen in our evolutionary past. These tend to be more concrete tasks. It would be things like I need to start this fire right here. I am going out into this field to forage this type of food. We’re very good at estimating that time. When we get to abstract, intellectual, cognitive tasks like you would face in a knowledge-work job, we’re not good at that. We weren’t wired for that. And what we tend to do then is come up with best-case scenarios. We fall in love with these ideas of if we could get this done this quickly, wow, that would be great. That would really open up a lot of other things in my schedule. So we fall in love with these unrealistic storylines ‘cause we’re not good at estimating cognitive tasks, so we fall back on what we want to be true.

Isabel Berwick
So let’s say you have accepted that you’re slower than you thought you were. How could you convince your manager or your boss, you know, that it’ll be beneficial for you to do less? Are there any strategies?

Cal Newport
Well, the slowing-down part is the easy part because they don’t know how long things are supposed to take either. (Isabel laughs) So just say, hey, this is how long it’s gonna take. We don’t know. So take advantage of that obfuscation. Doing less, though, is where things do get a little bit more interesting. A big source of exhaustion and burnout among knowledge workers is they have too many things going on at the same time. To have less concurrent work is gonna make your work much more sustainable. It’s also gonna mean in the long run, you’re producing more, because having too many things going on at the same time creates a cognitive logjam, like nothing really gets through. But that’s a trickier move. Convincing your boss that you should be working on less at once, that’s gonna be much harder than just convincing them this is how long this project’s gonna take.

Isabel Berwick
So actually, the burnout argument’s interesting here because, you know, you advocate for fewer tasks done better, essentially. Have you seen any evidence that bosses are taking this up, as you know, because it’s a preventive thing as much as anything, isn’t it? Burnout is very widespread.

Cal Newport
It’s widespread. Bosses don’t have a great sense of where it’s coming from. I don’t think they realise how culpable they are in actually causing this. It’s an unforced error. One of the big vectors I look at for where this burnout is coming from is if you have too many things you’re doing at the same time, what happens is that each of those things brings with it its own administrative overhead — emails, meetings, etc — to sort of organise the work. When you have too many things, that overhead piles up. And the state that I think really causes a lot of burnout is the state where administrative overhead takes over most of your day. So most of your day is spent talking and meeting about work with very little time left over to actually make progress on the work. So the work piles up even bigger. You have to start finding uninterrupted pockets early in the morning or late at night or on the weekends. That’s the state in which burnout really creeps in, is that you have too many things on your plate. That becomes the problem.

Isabel Berwick
That’s interesting because you also talk in the book about, you know, people who are doing performative work. Is that another layer to this sort of admin, because they sort of have to put on Slack what they’re doing all the time rather than doing the actual thing?

Cal Newport
Yeah, I think this is the layer that makes the overload so easy to fall into, is that we have this heuristic in knowledge work that I call “pseudo-productivity”, which says let’s use visible activity as a proxy for doing useful stuff. So like, the more you see me working, the better. This is an old idea; I argue we’ve been doing pseudo-productivity in knowledge work since the arrival of this sector as a major economic force in the mid-20th century. But when you combine that with personal computers and Slack and email, it spins out of control. So if our definition of what productive means is I’m doing stuff that’s visible — and now I have Slack messages and emails that are showing up on the scale of seconds, you know, every 30 seconds there’s something else I can respond to — work quickly devolves into this theatre of constantly showing that you’re busy. So it’s exactly in that context where you’re not gonna say no to new work, because that’s a sign of not doing visible activity. You’re rejecting activity, actually. So we take on way too much work and then we get way too low granularity in the weeds talking about the work. So technology plus pseudo-productivity really set us up for this on a current moment where we have overload and performative work.

Isabel Berwick
So how could we collectively address pseudo-productivity? Does it require a whole team effort or can individuals just start to roll it back a bit?

Cal Newport
Eventually, I would like to see from the managerial level and up a rejection of pseudo-productivity and an explicit alternative put into place. You can start right now as an individual to push back against it. And that’s really the programme of slow productivity, is what can you do right now to try to regain some more actual productivity, some more sustainable pace to your work and the pushback against pseudo-productivity. There’s a lot you can do as an individual in knowledge work, actually a lot more than people really suspect.

Isabel Berwick
So how long did it take you to come to slow productivity as a way of working? Were you engaged in pseudo-productivity ever, ‘cause you’re a professor and you write a lot?

Cal Newport
Well, Slow Productivity is in part written for myself as much as for my audience, right? So it’s a personal book in this way in that I was coming to a point in my career and my life where, you know, I have three kids who all recently entered elementary school age. I was also at the peak of my professional abilities. All of this was happening at the same time. When those kids of mine — they’re all boys — reached elementary school age, they needed basically every dad minute they could get.

And so there was this interesting crisis in my life where I still wanted to produce stuff I was proud of because I felt like I was at the peak of my capabilities, but I couldn’t let work just take over my whole life, because also I had these three young humans that need as much of my time as possible. And so I knew I had to shape up and really understand what did I mean by productivity. What is the definition I am pursuing that’s gonna allow me to produce stuff that’s valuable and good but also is not gonna take over my life? So there was a personal impetus. So I did some of these things. Also, I’ve learned new things working on this book. So it was for me as much as it was for the broader audience.

Isabel Berwick
What was the most surprising thing you learned from writing the book?

Cal Newport
Well, certainly this idea that workload was what was driving a lot of the problems. You know, I had written a book before this that talked about email being a problem. Switching your attention back and forth between an email or a Slack inbox and what you’re working on distracts your brain. It’s a bad way to work. We shouldn’t work this way. Why are we sending so many emails? And I learned, working on this book, the reason why we’re sending so many of these emails and having to check our inboxes so much is because we have too much on our plate. Like, you have to solve that problem. If you’re working on fewer concurrent projects, you have fewer urgent emails being generated. You also have more breathing room that allows you to come up with a better way to collaborate. You have the time and space to say, OK, let’s not just go crazy on Slack for this project. Let’s put a process into place. Let’s have these quick meetings. Let’s use a shared document to keep track of where we are. Let’s have a couple of rules about how things happen. When you fix the overload, so many other things that are afflicting modern knowledge workers get a lot easier. I didn’t realise the degree to which overload was driving so much of the problems until I really started researching this topic for the new book.

Isabel Berwick
If you’re the first person, let’s say at your company, to try slowing down and taking on less work, that seems like quite a risk. How could someone slow down without upsetting their bosses or whoever it is making demands of them?

Cal Newport
Oh, of course, but we have to be careful about it. So we have two different groups trying to do less. We have the entrepreneur, the freelancer, the person with full control over their work. And sure, they can do radical changes. There’s no one to tell them no. All right.

Now we have the people who have a boss. One of the things I argue in the book is doing less concurrently doesn’t necessarily require you to say no more. What it could require instead is that you keep two different statuses for the work that you’ve agreed to do. You say, OK, here’s the projects I am actively working on right now. Here’s the projects I have agreed to do. They’re in this queue and they’re in priority order. And as soon as I finish one of the active projects, I’m pulling the next thing in off of that queue. And I’m gonna make this transparent. I love it, I’m gonna work on this. Here it is. I’ve put this in a shared document. You can see it’s in position four. You can watch it march towards my active. As soon as it gets active I’ll let you know. And we can have meetings and chat about it. I’m gonna get it done and get it done well when it gets there. So I’m not saying no, I’m just changing the structure with which I approach my projects. Something like this. Having an active waiting queue will actually increase the rate at which projects are being completed.

And after a while, people are like, this is great. You know, I can trust you’re gonna get things done. I can see exactly what its status is. Things get done really well when they get to your active queue. The rate at which things are getting done is nice and fast. So when you work for someone else, you’re right. It’s more subtle than just saying, I’m gonna say no unless I really wanna do it. And it becomes more about differentiating between active and non-active and being careful about which projects you’re allowing to generate administrative overhead at any one time and which are not.

Isabel Berwick
Right. And it’s careful communication as well. So managing your manager.

Cal Newport
It all has to be couched as making everyone’s life easier. It doesn’t work if the way you’re introducing something is this is gonna make my life easier, but your life harder as a manager. That doesn’t work well, unfortunately. But if you flip it around, I’m making your life easier. I’m giving you more information. You don’t have to check this, but hey, you can see exactly where the status is. Like, I’ve made your life easier by being more organised. That approach allows you to get away with quite a bit.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. So the thing that really blew my mind in your book is this thing that I had just never thought of before, is that we’ve got no way of measuring productivity in knowledge and creative work, you know, and we’re still working like we did in factories. Had you articulated it in that way before, or do you think just too many of us are working in a kind of void, not really knowing what productivity is?

Cal Newport
You know, what happened is I ran a survey of my newsletter readers and I said, can you explain to me what productivity means in your job? And these are all knowledge workers for the most part. No one really could. A lot of people would end up just explaining their job description, like to produce white papers about marketing that are useful to the world. Like, no, you’re just describing what you do in your job, but how do I know if you’re doing this productive or non-productive? No one really had a good answer.

And so that brought me down this rabbit hole of looking at the history of productivity. And I really think this is a defining reality of our current economic moment, is that when knowledge work emerged as a major sector, the way we were measuring productivity in the factories and on the farm just didn’t apply. We did not have clear output we could count. So we had come out of a 300-year period where measuring productivity with numbers had led to this huge economic growth. And then now we have this new sector where none of that worked. And I don’t think we recognise the degree to which this was a major disruption.

Pseudo-productivity, this idea of like, well, let’s just use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort, that was our response to this crisis, and I don’t think we realised how contingent it was and sort of how ineffective that was. It was just an emergency, temporary solution to not being able to measure productivity anymore.

Isabel Berwick
And I know you wrote, I mean, I’ve read your book on, you know, email overload. Are we still sending way too many emails, or have they been partially replaced by this sort of Slack revolution, or have the emails just got more as well? Have you done any tracking of that?

Cal Newport
It’s the same poison, right? So the way I think about Slack is when email came along, we began this new way of interacting, which I call the hyperactive hive mind — collaboration through on-demand, ad hoc, unscheduled messaging, just messages back and forth as things come to our mind. Hey, what about this client? What do you wanna do about this? What do you think about this? Just these back and forth unscheduled messages.

Slack came along, followed by Teams and other software, and they said, if this is how you’re gonna use email — to have these, like, ongoing conversations with various people — email is the wrong tool for this. Like, this should be in a chat paradigm. We should have transcripts you can save and it should be searchable. It’s more productive. For what I’m trying to do, it does it better, but at the same time, what I’m trying to do is profoundly unproductive, and it becomes this sort of conflicted clash.

And so we don’t know how to feel about it. But all of these tools are implementing the same way of working. That way of working unscheduled messaging back and forth all day long is a real disaster.

Isabel Berwick
And you’ve written also about how unnatural our current working rhythm is. You know, you advocate for making space to slow down, maybe even in certain months. I’ve seen that described as “wintering” elsewhere. But, you know, in a competitive job market, isn’t there a risk that doing that kind of thing means we will lose out to people who don’t pause?

Cal Newport
If you’re gonna put in these variations in intensity — which I think you absolutely should, because it’s what we need as humans — you don’t make a big show about it. We can take three weeks or a month, and we can pull back from what we’re doing in a way that no one will ever really notice, because this happens all the time, right? Other things happen in our lives. There’s a health or medical emergency, or you move, right, or you have a new child or something and you have to drastically change what you’re working on.

And it works. It’s fine. The job doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t cause chaos among your clients. We have a lot more slack in the system than we need, especially because so much of our day is just doing performative activity. So I figure we should lean into that and say, let’s get some more variation, because the flip side is really unsustainable.

Isabel Berwick
Have you looked into how effectively people work during different times of the year? You know, is there any substance to this idea that in winter humans should perhaps do less and retreat?

Cal Newport
That’s an interesting question. Whether it needs to be winter versus summer, I don’t know how important that is. Yeah, there’s a lot of professors like myself or the publishing industry that really slow down in the summer, which is very different than what you would do in agriculture. That seems to be really effective for people. So I tend to think what’s important is the variation. It doesn’t matter exactly where that variation falls.

Isabel Berwick
One idea I really liked in your book was taking yourself off to the cinema every so often. Do you still find time to do that with all your book commitments and work commitments?

Cal Newport
I try to, for sure. Yeah. I like this idea of, you know, once a, call it a season, or once a semester, if we wanna use the academic metaphor, take an afternoon off. Take a day off. You know, it’s a midday matinee, going to see a movie. Or going to a museum or a hike or whatever it is you wanna do, just as a signal to yourself: I am not working factory shifts. I can go see a movie on a Wednesday and the world doesn’t fall apart. It’s a self signal more than anything else. It’s a way of telling yourself that you can have sort of variety and pace and everything is gonna be OK.

I still do this. My tradition is always, because I’m an academic, when the semester ends. So it’s, you know, it’s always a little quieter after the semester ends and the grading comes in; always would be my tradition is to find one of those days and go see an afternoon movie. And I still do that. I still really enjoy that.

Isabel Berwick
Have you had any feedback from people saying that kind of thing is, you know, selfish or bad for the team? I suppose you don’t have to tell anyone you’re going. But, you know, in a conventional teamwork type of scenario, that’s a tricky thing to achieve, isn’t it?

Cal Newport
Yeah. I wouldn’t make an announcement about it.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah.

Cal Newport
I would just do it. I have an appointment. People have appointments all the time. I gotta go to the dentist. I gotta go to the doctor. I messed up my foot playing Frisbee. And now I’m gonna have, you know, I have to go get a surgery, and I’m out for three or four days. People are in and out of work for all sorts of reasons and it’s fine.

We should feel more confidence doing that, right? Slowing down a little bit temporarily — not for an emergency, not because there’s a medical problem, but because it’s gonna be more sustainable for me in the long run to not try to be on, at the peak level every day, day after day, week after week.

Again, we have more flexibility about this than we realise. We tend to assume that everyone, our bosses, our colleagues are just sort of very carefully watching everything we’re doing. But everyone has their own workloads they’re trying to scramble through and get done. There’s no board somewhere in the back room where they’re keeping track of exactly how many things you said yes to and what’s going on with your emails. It’s . . . People are paying attention to their own thing. And if you do good work, they trust you. You get the things done you say you’re gonna get done on time, you do have leeway, and you get a big benefit from taking advantage of that.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, and we’re in this kind of extraordinary moment now, post-pandemic. Do you think that this is the moment to, you know, strike and make these changes?

Cal Newport
I was hoping we would take advantage of the moment during the pandemic itself. You know, I wrote an article in May of 2020. It might have even been April. It was pretty early in the pandemic. And I said this shift in knowledge work to go fully remote is gonna be very disruptive. It’s really gonna highlight a lot of the stuff that doesn’t work well in knowledge work. So maybe this will be the moment we really changed knowledge work. Add new structure, add new ways of thinking about it. Maybe this will fix a lot of knowledge work. And that didn’t end up happening. But we still have chances for a reform.

Like, I proposed recently in an article that if you have a hybrid schedule at your office, some days in the office, some days at home, we should make the days at home no meetings, no email. That would make a really big difference. If we’re gonna have a fully remote office, you have to couple that — I’ve been arguing this for a couple of years now — you have to couple that with a much more structured, systemic workload and collaboration management system. It can’t just be everyone rock and rolls and send emails and Slack and figure things out.

We need to keep track of who’s working on what. How much should you be working on at a time? Let’s keep that reasonable. When and how do we wanna talk about or share information about what you’re working on? Fully remote work needs a lot more structure, but when you have a lot more structure, work becomes a lot more sustainable. So I think there’s a lot of reforms that are hanging low from the tree and ready to be picked, but we’re not quite picking them yet.

Isabel Berwick
No. And I wanted to ask before we go about artificial intelligence. Is that going to fix our productivity problems?

Cal Newport
The biggest place where I think artificial intelligence could help in knowledge work would be taking administrative overhead tasks off our plate. The emails, the meetings that are clogging our schedules — that’s the biggest place where AI could help. Now, a language model alone like ChatGPT or Bard is not gonna be able to do this. It’s gonna have to be language models plus other planning models. We need ensemble models to do this.

But here’s the thing: we could also solve this even without any of those tools by just changing the way we think about work and saying, why don’t we just work on two projects at a time instead of seven? Let’s not just email everyone back and forth; let’s have more structured ways to talk about our work. I mean, the places where AI is promising to make the biggest positive impact on knowledge work are places we could fix tomorrow without having to wait for OpenAI or Google to make three or four more advances in their models. So yes, it could help, but we don’t need to wait for it.

Isabel Berwick
And if there’s one thing you want people to take away from this new vision of productivity, what would that be?

Cal Newport
The right measure of useful effort is actually finishing things that are valuable, and the best way to do that is to slow down. Work on fewer things at the same time, do those things really well, give yourself more than enough time to get them done.

This rejection of busyness can be scary in the moment, but give it a little time and you and the people you work for and around you are gonna be very impressed by what you’re actually finishing. Not by how quickly you respond to Slack messages, but what you’re actually producing. Slow productivity is possible and it is better. It’s just a scary first step you have to take to get there.

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Isabel Berwick
Cal, thank you so much. You’ve given us a lot to think about. I’m gonna go away and slowly digest it.

Cal Newport
Well, thank you. I enjoyed the conversation.

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Isabel Berwick
This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.