Slow productivity by Cal Newport
I read an article the other day that I found rather annoying: Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too
I’m a huge fan of Darwin and tend to bristle at any criticism of him, but I this case I think my annoyance was justified. The article seems to assert that Darwin was only working when he was sitting at his desk writing books or articles, but not when, for example, he was writing letters and walking, thinking and looking at nature in his garden. But writing letters was enormously important to his work. He wrote to people all over the world — pigeon fanciers, livestock breeders, gardeners, farmers, collectors and explorers, as well as other scientists and naturalists. Writing letters was his process of collecting data, and a necessary one in the time before email. And the walks he went on were work too, that is when he would think and organize his thoughts. By my reckoning, Darwin worked from 8am to 5:30pm with a break for lunch a couple of breaks to rest, a normal or even long working day, especially taking into account he would often have guests in the evening with whom he would talk about the natural world.
Of course the article is a “bait and switch” — it says Darwin was lazy and then goes on to say “[Darwin] and many other creative and productive figures, weren’t accomplished despite their leisure; they were accomplished because of it.” But in doing so the article perpetuates this idea that “work” is only the process of churning out content, and that walking and thinking are leisure. That’s an attitude we need to stop. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport tries to stop it.
I’ve read several other productivity books by Cal Newport and I like them, as they tend to give a different message to many other productivity books — not how to do more, but how to do better by doing less. This book continues that theme, with these three principals:
- Do fewer things.
- Work at a natural pace.
- Obsess over quality.
Of course none of these are particularly original ideas, and in the world of productivity the first has been a key principal for many years. Warren Buffet famously recommended people make a “don’t do” list, and Steve Jobs recommended focusing on just one thing. The advice has been covered many times before, and Newport doesn’t add much to it.
The idea of working seasonally — taking long breaks during the year along with intense work periods — is one that has had less promotion, but it’s still been covered in other works. Probably the best book containing that idea is Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Workweek, although the book has dated now due to it’s focus on technological solutions to productivity.
Obsessing over quality is a difficult productivity idea, and one that needs to be treated carefully. It’s good that Newport focuses on it, because being obsessive about quality has had a bad rap for decades. I recall after university (many years ago!) I spent a lot of time preparing for job interviews. I thought about responses to possible questions, including the (dumb, in my opinion) question “What is your main fault?” My prepared answer was that I tended to be a perfectionist, and I had to make an effort not to obsess about details. I thought that was a good answer, as it gets across that you’re someone who cares about their work but also realized that perfectionism isn’t productive. That idea — that perfectionism isn’t maximally productive and is thus bad — is a common one these days, and many books have been written about it, with titles like The Perfection Trap, Flawed: Why Perfectionism is a Challenge for Management and Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic. These days we are expected to satisfice and quickly create Minimally Viable Products. Perfectionism is bad for performance, disrupts work relationships, and is even a mental health risk.
The thing about perfectionism (or in Newport’s words, obsessing over quality) is that you need to be careful when you apply it. If you do it all the time, and with everything you do, then you’ll waste a lot of time. I’m not going to spend much time editing and improving this review, for example, because that wouldn’t be time well spent. You have to obsess about the right things. And obsessing too early (“premature optimization” in computer programming parlance) is also bad, you should only obsess once you have acquired the skills and experience necessary to make something “good enough”, and doing that actually entails not obsessing about the quality of a single work, but repeated, deliberate practice, starting new works again and again, trying to get a little better each time.
This isn’t as good as Newport’s other books, it doesn’t really say anything new. He says the focus of the book is information workers (like me), but the examples he gives — of famous musicians, film directors, and authors — are not really relevant to most information workers jobs. Creating a song, film or book that can then sell for years and make you a continuous income is a very different dynamic to the type of work that most information workers do. Newport is a tenured professor — a highly privileged and unusual position in that protects its holder from being fired or laid off except under extraordinary circumstances. So he’s not really the best person to give the advice that he gives. The advice is almost embarrassingly naïve in some cases, for example suggesting that you should do “silent quitting” for some months of the year and work harder in other months.
So what do I take away from this book? Perhaps that I could make more productive use of my time by not reading so many productivity books. He does suggest that you should try to make your workplace more interesting — I’ve been meaning to put some interesting artworks in my office for ages. I’ll add that to my to-do list for the coming weeks.