Slowing It Down
“Are you a control freak?” Author Cal Newport paused after reading the inquiry from a listener during an episode of his podcast, Deep Questions. The subtle smackdown that ensued hinted at a history of receiving similar criticisms, and Newport did not hesitate to diplomatically slay the listener’s attachment to chaos. “Well, Mollie,” he began, “I think what we all probably agree on is that having no organization is stressful. So if I’m entirely reactive — if I entirely exist from moment to moment,” he explained deliberately, “this is not a great way to live.” In the “complicated productivity landscape that the modern human exists in,” he concluded, having “no structure is never going to be the right answer.”
Mollie’s question was not completely unprovoked. Newport has developed a reputation in recent years as a purveyor of work wisdom, advocating for everything from forgoing social media entirely to adopting pre-determined periods of digital abstinence. His 2016 book Deep Work hit a nerve and brought a downright ascetic vision of focus to a screen-addled generation of scroll-addicts and “like”-whores. An MIT alum and computer science professor, he combines cultural criticism with what corporate-heads call “actionable” advice: self-help for the thinking man, or pro-tips for self-directed strivers. The author calls this elevated form of how-to literature “pragmatic nonfiction,” and he excels at providing highbrow versions of a lowbrow thing — the reader’s equivalent of haute comfort food.
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout is Newport’s latest offering. It comes in the form of a concise, beautiful hardcover with an enticing photograph of a cabin perched on an alpine ledge. In part a response to the pandemic-era consensus that the culture of elite knowledge work is broken, Slow Productivity examines the phenomenon Newport calls “pseudo-productivity:” the sticky web of superfluous meetings, messages and ostentatious frenzy that white-collar workers fall into. Even pre-plague, many people were turning their backs on what they called “grind culture,” alleging that the American ethic of hard work had mutated into something monstrous. Titles appeared like How to Do Nothing and Can’t Even. A woman in Georgia appointed herself the “Nap Bishop” and wrote a book called Rest is Resistance. Lest you fear that Newport’s book is another faux-radical tome exhorting you to forsake your ambitions and join the other justice warriors on the couch, potato chip crumbs encrusted in their loins, be comforted. It is, gladly, a blueprint for delving even more maniacally into your seething desires for achievement, if you have them, and for this it should be generously lauded.
In 2006, traditionalist right-winger Rod Dreher wrote Crunchy Cons, an influential manifesto about the nascent conservative movement of back-to-the-landers, free-range Evangelicals, and gun-toting gardeners who split from more market-oriented Republicans in search of life at a natural pace. In a chapter on all things culinary, Dreher describes Slow Food: the phenomenon started by an Italian named Carlo Petrini, who worried that the traditions of his culture were “disappearing in a rapidly industrializing world.” Petrini cultivated a passion for handmade, local elements in food preparation, and many gourmands followed his lead. Although he had a Marxist background, the hedonistic Italian was no dour activist. He and his comrades eschewed “moralistic revolutionaries” or “anyone who doesn’t laugh,” according to a history of the organization.
Newport, too, takes inspiration from Slow Food in Slow Productivity, citing it as an example of how to “build a reform movement in response to the excesses of modernity.” Petrini advised in a provocative document that recipes should be consumed with “slow and prolonged enjoyment.” Could the working life, particularly that of freelancers, entrepreneurs, or academics, be approached in a similar fashion? Newport’s intuition that many of the problems of modernity can be solved not by newfangled utopian radicalism but by the innovative adoption of traditional principles is correct. To make productivity more “sustainable” and “meaningful,” he proposes the following framework: 1. Do fewer things. 2. Work at a natural pace. 3. Obsess over quality.
The book’s structure is satisfyingly simple and elegant. A brief foundational section in which Newport outlines current problems in professional culture and his imagined alternative is followed by deep examination of each of his three principles. In addition to practical suggestions on how to minimize time-stealing tasks and escape monotony, he looks at the lives of various creative people and how they organized their output. In the midst of a peripatetic youth, famed painter Georgia O’Keeffe took long breaks from art — even up to four years — before finally landing on a rural property in upstate New York, where she was able to produce hundreds of pieces to later exhibit in the city. Newport uses her trajectory, as well as those of scientists Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, to illustrate the concept of “embracing seasonality.” A working life that echoed the rhythms of the earth was once “deeply integrated into the human experience,” he argues. This mode of productivity was “intertwined with agriculture,” completely unlike the way in which professionals now “toil at computer screens” for “twelve months out of the year with little variation in their intensity.”
One of the elements of Slow Productivity that I found most delicious is the subtle hint of misanthropy that pervades the book. Cal Newport seems like an exceedingly gracious person, but he is correct to emphasize that one of the biggest impediments to deep or innovative work of any kind is the constant intrusion of others with their pestering demands. A potential remedy: “to adopt the persona of someone who is eccentric and unresponsive,” although he admits this is a “crude approach.” He quotes the Nobel-Prize-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, who in order to concentrate solely on physics for “absolute solid lengths of time,” stated that he had “invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everybody I don’t do anything.” The author frets that “this veneer of antisociality is demanding,” and that “a plan to simply become too unpleasant to be bothered, it seems, isn’t sustainable.” Elsewhere, despite his desire to be the nice guy, he can’t hold himself back from unleashing against colleagues who “effortlessly lob requests in your direction like hand grenades, leaving you to clean up the mess generated by their productivity-shredding shrapnel.” Go off, Newport. Let yourself be disagreeable. As someone who never had any hope of maintaining a free-and-easy facade, I can report that being people-repellent works gloriously.
The book is written in an intentional and deliberate style, if at times it leans a little too heavily on the dialect I’ll call LinkedIn-ese. Verbs like “implement” and “execute” are interspersed with concepts like “email protocols” and “task management systems.” Toward the end, the word “leverage” is particularly overused. It’s odd that Newport would favor such industrial language in a book that is about guiding the realm of work into the idiosyncratic.
Slow Productivity is an important project in that it echoes a shift in values that is pervading American culture. There is a move away from emphasis on the market and towards what I’ll call meaning. Newport mentions a friend of his, a successful businessperson whose “goal is not to maximize money, but instead to maximize the quality of her life.” He shows respect for the rhythms of orthodox religion and the “transformative effect” of rituals. Although he is diligent about planning his workday and urges others to do the same, he is attentive to the “messier and more human side” of life and acknowledges that a “psychologically untenable relationship” with work is “downright inhumane.” One might call his vision, in a word, paleo-labor: it aims not only to replicate the healthier cycles of agrarian life but those of an even earlier era — that of the hunters and gatherers. Modern work culture is often referred to as the antithesis of farming, but in fact it emerged from it. The monotony of land cultivation led to the Industrial Age, while people in pre-agricultural societies likely spent only twenty hours a week procuring food. The rest of their time was for other chores and, happily, leisure.
Slow Productivity correlates with “slow” efforts in other fields, like fashion (designer Vivienne Westwood’s mantra “buy less, choose well, make it last” comes to mind). One could say that recent feminist critiques of dating culture represent a “Slow Sexuality” movement; contemporary economic thinking on the Right, which emphasizes family and community over expediency, might be termed “Slow Capitalism.” Newport is admirably neither reactionary nor progressive; instead, he is simultaneously traditional and forward-thinking. “Slowing down isn’t about protesting work,” he explains. “It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.” His instincts are in line with those of his contemporaries who sense a need to safeguard and protect the things that truly matter. Ambition is one of those things.
It’s no longer cool to be a striver. Being a striver is associated with the rightfully-reviled laptop class, or with being a goody two-shoes. But structure, of the kind Newport delineates, is important for creative people because what we have inside is often combustible.
The writer Wesley Yang once spoke of a “volatile element that I feel is the thing I have to offer,” and how he sought to “marry it” to the task of being “an expositor that is friendly to the reader.” Self-governance is good. Obsession is good. The highest praise I have for Slow Productivity is that it genuinely helped me, because it gave me permission to reaffirm what I already believe.
Emma Collins is a writer based in Washington, D.C. You can find her at emmaecollins.substack.com and on Twitter at @emmacollinsfile.
