At a library conference earlier this year a roundtable discussion, Management in the Age of Anti-Productivity: Anti-Perfectionism and Sustainable Workloads, was facilitated by Jon Jeffryes, Associate Dean of Curriculum, Research, and User Services at Grand Valley State University Libraries in Michigan and his colleague Hazel McClure. Jon, an iSchool graduate and a one-time research intern at Wendt Library at UW–Madison, recommended reading Cal Newport’s book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, which was published in 2024.
In the book, Newport argues that our contemporary ideas about work productivity are flawed, fashioned as they were after the manufacturing sector’s expectations around the production of material goods. Without a more meaningful way to measure knowledge production, we fall back on outward signs of busyness (e.g., responding to emails, attending Zoom meetings) to prove our value. Newport’s advice to subvert this pseudo-productivity mindset is to restructure our work life by following three principles. Doing so, he posits, will make your work better, more meaningful, and aligned with the priorities that matter the most–to both you and your employer.
Principle #1: Do Fewer Things. Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most. (53)
Citing several examples (including Jane Austen’s creative output), Newport believes that “focusing intensely on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish each before bringing on something new, is objectively a much better way to use our brains to produce valuable output.” (60) His recommendation is simple–“work on at most one project per day.” Newport clarifies this by noting, “I don’t intend for this single daily project to be your only work for the day. You’ll likely also have meetings to attend, emails to answer, and administrative nonsense to subdue … but when it comes to expending effort on important, bigger initiatives, stay focused on one target per day.” (75) He goes on to offer a number of “containment strategies” for our ever-increasing task lists including time-blocking, autopilot scheduling, and replacing asynchronous communication with real-time conversation.
Principle #2: Work at a Natural Pace. Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance. (116)
One of Newport’s foundational claims is that the managerial class doesn’t know how to handle the autonomy and variety of jobs in this new sector of knowledge work. He believes that the “stopgap response was pseudo-productivity, which used visible action as a proxy for usefulness.” (123) Unfortunately, the invisible factory we’ve constructed doesn’t have legislation or unions to fight for limits. As a result, knowledge work is “free to totalize our existence, colonizing as much of our time, from evenings to weekends to vacations, as we could bear, and leaving little recourse beyond burnout or demotion or quitting when it becomes too much.” (124) He again provides a list of strategies to create a better work-life balance, one of which is to embrace seasonality. Newport argues, “The seasonal approach to work, in which you vary the intensity and focus of your efforts throughout the year, resonates with many who encounter it.” (138)
Principle #3: Obsess Over Quality. Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.” (173)
According to Newport, “once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable.” (177) He acknowledges that for some, however, a focus on quality can spiral into an obsession with perfectionism and the inability to complete anything. Instead, he encourages knowledge workers to, “give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time.” (199)
Newport concludes his volume by insisting that slow productivity is not “a reactionary response to our current moment of overload, but instead a game plan for a viable replacement.” (215) Those interested in learning more about Newport’s philosophy can find copies of Slow Productivity in the UW–Madison Libraries in both print and as an ebook, as an ebook in Spanish, and as an audio book.
The other book discussed during the roundtable session was: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, an artist and instructor at Stanford University. Odell argues that in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, doing nothing is a key form of resistance. What began as a keynote talk at EYEO, an art and technology conference in Minneapolis in 2017, became for Odell a “guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy.” (xi) She goes on to say,
The fact that the “nothing” that I propose is only nothing from the point of view of capitalist productivity explains the irony that a book called How to Do Nothing is in
some ways also a plan of action. (xi)
Odell’s work is in many ways more philosophical than Newport’s — less a self-help-at-work book than a how-to-be-human book — and as a result is much more challenging to summarize. As an author, she recognizes that it is “tempting to conclude the book with a single recommendation about how to live,” but refuses to do so. Readers will need to commit to following Odell as she explores the “effects of the attention economy” and the “ways in which these effects play put across other fields of inequity.” (199)
You can also find Odell’s How to Do Nothing in the UW-Madison Libraries as both an ebook and a print volume and as an audio book.
If you are interested in exploring this topic further, consider some of the related titles listed below.
Recommended Reading
Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee
A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes
Other Resources
The Campus Supervisors’ Network List of Recommended Reads (aka the Book Barn)