Core Idea: Slow Productivity

[Music] uh the core idea i want to talk about today is the following question is slow productivity the solution to burnout so slow productivity is a emerging topic of thought we've been talking about more and more frequently and i want to get into it with this core idea all right let's give some background to where the concept of slow productivity came from what motivated it we are in a moment right now in which there is a popular and visible pushback against the general notion of productivity and by productivity i mean just the general drive to

try to get more things done now i think the coronavirus pandemic helped amplify this but this movement predates the coronavirus pandemic if we're going to use books as a rough proxy for cultural thinking on this topic we can really look to 2019 february of 2019 when ginny odell published how to do nothing this book probably helped spark more than anything else this modern moment of anti-productivity thinking it was a popular book a new york times bestseller barack obama selected it as one of his best books of the year it opened the floodgates to multiple other

books along these same lines so we got celeste headley's do nothing that came out soon after i actually interviewed celeste for a new yorker piece this fall got a little bit deeper into this we also got devin price had a book called laziness does not exist i blurbed that book it was a good book helen ann peterson had can't even the book length treatment of her viral buzzfeed article about millennial burnout uh more recently we have oliver berkman had four thousand weeks which i blurbed that book as well it's fantastic that book's really been killing

it so there's been this long string of books since 2019 that are all basically making the same point we're burnt out we're doing too much we're tired of doing too much i saw this anti-productivity movement even among you my listeners and readers in 2020 i wrote an essay from my newsletter about this asking is the term productivity over do we need something new and it led to a really heated discussion and two subsequent follow-up posts we had a lot of back and forth discussion on this in the spring of 2020 that made it clear that

there are a lot of you out there that are just exhausted exhausted with activity and work your life outside of work and need something more than just falling back on how do i get more done all right so that is the the modern anti-productivity movement here's the issue the question left unanswered in a lot of this work is what should we do about it we all agree these books are doing well because we all feel exhausted but the question is what should we do about it and my opinion here is that we haven't had a

lot of fully featured answers the typical response that we will get to what we should do about it is basically just do less and be okay about that which is perfectly fine advice but is not in itself i think a fully fledged solution to this issue of burnout now we get this advice from many different angles some of those books i talked about before come at this from an economic materialist standpoint they say well you're doing a lot of things because essentially you're being exploited by the capitalist superstructure and so it's an act of political

resistance to not do something do nothing as a as an act of political resistance some of these books are more cultural just we have a cultural a culture of overproduction maybe it goes back to the protestant work ethic or whatever and we just need to defy that culture as an arbitrary culture we should just do less things nothing wrong with that advice i just don't think it's enough by itself to actually cure what ails us because we do like to do things there's nothing that makes us more consistently miserable as a species than actually doing

nothing for any extended period of time it makes us very uncomfortable it makes us feel non-efficacious it makes us feel rootless and bored and anxious we'd like to do things the problem is not activity the problem is too much activity so we need a more sophisticated solution than simply saying it's okay to not do as many things just do less that maybe is a step in the right direction but we need to take many steps more this is what brings me to my recent thinking on this emerging concept of slow productivity slow productivity is meant

as a response to this question of what should we do in the face of being exhausted by all that we have to do so to look into this topic of slow productivity i started by trying to understand what was productivity for our ancient ancestors in other words as human beings what is natural when it comes to activity there's a basic question but we need an answer to this question of what is natural if we're going to try to get back to something that's more attuned to the human condition and so i went back and did

some work trying to understand the rhythms of activity of our paleolithic ancestors we obviously don't have direct observations about this but i ended up talking to a quantitative anthropologist from oxford university who is one of the world's experts at studying extant hunter-gatherer tribes in the philippines and using robust methods to try to try to measure what their activity levels are like and very carefully try to make some extrapolations from this to other to our hunter-gatherer past that's an extrapolation you have to do carefully but he's sensitive and careful about that and here's basically what you

see our best guess at what activity was like for the bulk of our species existence is you would be doing skilled and important work basically every day mainly focused on food acquisition and preparation as well as child rearing but you would be uh you know these extant tribes they studied if you were gathering herbs you had a huge expert understanding of the various plants and their various uses it's very expert work or if you're hunting hunting was a very skilled activity when you don't have very sophisticated weapons like rifles right so you're doing skilled but

important work at a natural pace this is definitely what they found in their work on these tribes is there's lots of breaks you might be spending all day on a hunt but there's going to be a two-hour part in the middle of the day where you're just resting and maybe you take there's a nap over here there's a natural pace with ups and downs of intensity and never too many things at the same time there's no notion of i have 18 things i'm trying to get done as a paleolithic hunter-gatherer and i'm trying to go

through this list it's like we're doing this today and then that right that's basically what we did throughout most of our history now compare that to where we are today where we are today and let's focus mainly on the world of work just to keep this more precise where we are today is maintaining lists of things that we need to do obligations and commitment some of them explicit some of them implicit that are massive massive list of obligations and commitments in the world of work these just come flying at us through emails they come flying

at us through quick requests during zoom meetings hey cal can you take care of this or can you jump on this flying at us in informal conversations in the hallway where a boss grabs you and says look into this can you get this done for me and we have these very large list of things that are on our plate i call this state chronic overload because we have more things on our plate than we can easily imagine how we're going to get them done and this is a state that is persistent we constantly have this

overloaded list of things that we have to do this causes three problems three problems that we're not faced by our paleolithic ancestors one is just the simple short circuiting of the center of our brain that is dedicated to making long-term plans goal completion humans have a center in their brain that does this very well even our close primate relatives do not have anything that's quite as powerful as our ability to plan and go after goals this is tapped into our motivational systems we feel good when we make a plan we feel even better when we

execute the plan we feel bad if we don't this system gets completely overloaded when you have 700 unread messages in your inbox and 75 different projects tasks and ongoing commitments that you're trying to juggle it is too many things for that part of your brain to imagine how it's going to accomplish and it short circuits that planning that planning center of our brain that makes us anxious that makes us miserable again our paleolithic ancestors never had 700 unread emails each of which representing a commitment that we can't wrap our mind around how we ever gonna

satisfy all these commitments two when you have way more things on your plate than you can easily imagine handling you suffer from what i think is one of the more insidious tortures of modern office work which is the overhead spiral so if you give me something to do here's a project i want you to work with these two people and get it done there is a fixed amount of overhead that comes with this project because we have to kind of coordinate so there's going to be i don't know some notion of number of meetings we

have to do to talk things through and make a plan there'll be some non-trivial number of emails we have to send back and forth to get questions answered or to move the project forward in isolation that's all fine if i'm working on something yeah let's meet about it once a week and send some emails in between that's fine that's just the overhead cost of working with people to accomplish something no problem the issue is what if we have 25 of these ongoing at the same time each of them has the same fixed amount of overhead

each one needs that weekly meeting each one needs a couple dozen emails sent each week and it adds and adds and ads until your schedule becomes overloaded with this fixed overhead and now you are spending almost all of your time talking about the work you need to do with no time left to actually execute the work again i think this is the knowledge worker equivalent of chinese water torture it is maddening it is deranging we saw this really clearly amplified during the first half year of the chronovirus pandemic where office workers had to suddenly work

remote shifting operations remote meant that there was a lot of new work that got generated right because we have to figure out how do we do our work if we're remote so suddenly everyone's obligation list got bigger each of these things brought with it a meeting and some emails what happened i heard report after report from knowledge workers saying i am spending eight straight hours per day in zoom i would get complaints from people that said my biggest issue is i don't know when to use the bathroom during the day i'm on zoom that often

in zoom doing email while in zoomed the entire day this is a parody of work life where all you're doing is talking about work not just i have too many meetings all you were doing was meetings that's overhead spiral personified right there so again you have too many things on your plate that you've committed to the overhead itself takes over your whole schedule and finally the last issue with chronic overload is we it's relentless in its pace there is never any time where you get to relax there's never any time you get to downshift remember

our paleolithic ancestors if they're doing an all-day hunt might have hours in there where they're just sitting around yeah it's the heat of the day let's sit in the shade of a tree and just like nap and chat or we hunted the last two days it's kind of rainy today not great conditions we're not going to hunt today at all in a system of modern work with chronic overload where you always have way more on your plate than you ever can get around the handling there is a constant pressure on execution because there's always things

that need to get it done and you're always behind so every day you fill it relentless work every minute you have available probably have to do some evenings probably have to do some weekends as well to get around the overhead spirals we're not wired for this relentless pace of work where you never have any relief and it's pegged at this 10 on the scale of 1 to 10 of how much how hard you're working day after day after day after day this i think is the more detailed socio-physiological explanation for what all of those anti-productivity

books were commenting on this is why we're so miserable chronic overload creates those three problems those three problems alienate us from the the rhythms of work for which we're wired as people and that is why we're not happy that is then what we need to solve how do we get rid of chronic overload how do we get rid of those issues that come from chronic overload just saying i'm going to do less isn't going to cut it hey boss i've decided i don't want to be a part of the exploitative capitalist engine so i'm not

going to work today good luck not going to solve it we need we need a more detailed sophisticated uh solution here it's not going to work to say hey client i do not want to be a stooge in a a protestant work ethic culture established during the pre-colonial period uh in the early days of migration to the united states so um i'm not going to answer your email that's not a solution we need something more sophisticated all right slow productivity is that answer slow productivity is that answer let me give you three quick ideas for

what slow productivity might mean three elements to it this is going to evolve but let's try to get something pinned down here so to me there's three big things i care about with a slow productivity philosophy doing fewer things doing those things at a natural pace obsessing over the quality of the things you do that definition of productivity a productivity that prioritizes those three things i think can get us back towards the rhythms of work for which we are wired while also fulfilling us doing interesting work letting our companies grow helping our team succeed getting

promotion still getting the autonomy that comes from getting good at things that are rare and valuable that is compatible with that so let me just touch on those three things real quickly do fewer things i think your workload and ideal world would be below that level of chronic overload you have few enough things that you are committed to doing on your plate that you are not suffering from the short circuiting of your planning circuit you're not suffering from overhead spirals and you do not feel like you have no no option but to have a relentless

pace for your feeling every minute of your day we need to do many fewer things and if you work for yourself if you're a freelancer run your own company aggressively titrate how many things you take on at the same time you are not a computer processor where you want your pipeline of instructions to execute to be full so you never miss a particular tick you're a human you're not wired to do that we need to do many fewer things what if you work for someone else well i think we need to completely rethink how work

is assigned in the workplace this should be transparent how much work is this person doing what's on their plate so we can all see it and then we can have very clear understandings of what is reasonable and if i see you know jesse has a fair number of things on his plate i can't put something else on it it's on me to figure out something pops up it needs to get done at some point i can't just say jesse handle this i have to figure out where does this go until someone has room for it

it can't just go on their plate the answer here is probably going to be external systems things that need to get done go into external systems where they bring with them the information they need to be accomplished and have clear statuses and priorities and then individuals pull pull work out of the system as new slots open this might sound like it's a pain i don't care if it's a pain it's what we're wired to do keep my load reasonable and i'll pull in new stuff when i'm done with what's on my plate don't just give

it all to me and say figure it out you're going to short circuit my brain you're going to make me miserable all right second piece of slow productivity work at a natural pace we cannot just peg our efforts at a 10 for eight to nine hours a day day after day week after week week after week this is not natural for humans we need seasonality in our work first of all seasonality meaning hard times balanced by easier times and i think we should have this at all scales so this week some days are harder than

others i'm going to pull back on friday and come into the weekend maybe a little bit more relaxed but monday i'm pegging it we should have certain months perhaps that are more intense than others this is an intense month we're kind of getting after it but you know what in june things really get quiet around here and i'm pulling back and i'm going to have very light days right so uh seasonality at different levels maybe even seasons like professors do winter i'm getting after it summer i'm pulled back far rest recovery up down up down

at all scales i think we absolutely need this the other thing we have to do to get a more natural pace to our work is adjust the time scale at which we care about accomplishment instead of caring about how much do i get done on the scale of days and weeks you say i worry about what i get done on the scale of months and years completely changes your relationship to the current moment when you want to produce a good number of very high quality things over the next three years it really changes how you

feel about tuesday now it's not so important that every minute of tuesday you're getting after it in fact you might say i need to take a couple weeks off here so that i can really have a high quality push for the weeks that follow it completely changes your relationship to work when you say i don't care about how many things i check off a list this week what i care about is what is on my cv that i produce over the last five years that's much more compatible with seasonality ups and downs the final point

here the final part of slow productivity i mentioned was obsessed about quality if you're going to do less you need to pair that with doing what you do better this will make the work more fulfilling because you're building and applying craft remember our example of our paleolithic ancestors skilled important activity we get motivation for that we don't get motivation for adjusting the fonts in a powerpoint deck for fundraising for some company idea we probably shouldn't be doing in the first place just because we're bored but crafting the computer program that's going to run and do

something really cool and you can see it producing the book the brilliant new marketing campaign so we want to focus on doing smaller number things but doing those things much better is going to feel more fulfilling it is also what is going to give you both the ability and the courage to say no to other things when your main metric becomes how do i do what i do better now it's easy to say i'm not going to do this mid lean thing i'm not going to do this distraction i'm not going to jump on this

call i'm not going to learn this new plugin that maybe will bring me some new email subscribers for my news list because that's not going to help me get better at what i'm trying to do it is much much easier to be minimalist in your scheduling when you're focused relentlessly on a small number of things getting better and better at it it also earns you the right to be more autonomous the better you get at what you do best the more leeway you have to say i'm not coming onto that committee i am not going

to do this client contract it's barely overlaps what i like to do it's going to be incredibly time consuming i'm not going to have to do 25 social media posts a day in some quixotic quest to build up an influencer audience it gives you the autonomy you need to take control over what you spend your time on and what you don't so that is my answer that is my answer to the anti-productivity movement yes we are overloaded it's a problem why because of chronic overload causes all these issues that alienates us from our human wiring

what's the solution not to discard productivity and say do less and let's celebrate that but to get more specific and say let's redefine productivity we'll call it slow productivity and we're going to build this very intentionally from the ground up to get our work lives back aligned with our ancient wiring do fewer things do this work at a natural pace obsess over quality that i believe is the proper response to our current rightly pointed out as problematic state of overload that is how we take back control of activity in our life and keep it fulfilling

keep it meaningful keep options open but also get away from all of the issues we're currently facing in our world of chronic overload all right so that's what i have on slow productivity that's a new thought guys so i'm sure it's going to evolve uh jesse you've heard me talk about this a few times now did you just you've heard i just listened to you talk about on the ferris interview yesterday that's right yeah so the day before the day before this came out or a couple days before my interview with the tim ferriss came

out and slow productivity was one of the topics that we got into i've also written about slow productivity in for the new yorker so my my last of my office based columns for them which came out in early january was on slow productivity uh and i may or may not be working on a book proposal on the topic so you might be wondering why i'm talking about it uh i mean ironically for a book on slow productivity it can't come out fast i think that's the problem i was like guys i stayed up every night

for two months and got this book done by just relentlessly working as fast as possible i think that's not gonna work yeah you talked about this in the past too in previous podcast episodes where you said you were going to kind of walk us through the process of writing the book and stuff so i'm looking forward to that it's actually already started yeah so maybe there's some breaking news here so in in past podcast episodes we were talking about a book i'm working on a proposal on for the deep life this would be a second

book so i might be i'm working on potentially the deep life and slow productivity in some order might be the next two books all right none of that is inked you know none of that's actually written down or signed or none of it's official uh but that's that's what i'm currently thinking is those might be the next two books i write and that's what you did before the last two books right you worked on them simultaneously yeah i like doing that um because i want to just work i want to think deeply and write and

so i sold digital minimalism in a world without email i sold those at the same time and then that allowed me to just not worry about selling books for four or five years i could just write when i was done with one book i knew what i was working on i mean i'm gonna put my head down and right type of guy that makes me happy having to go out and talk about the books you know okay that's harder for me i like the part where it's just me me and the idea i guess me

and the idea and jesse and tens of thousands of podcast listeners but but that's it just our small circle talking about these things um so i like that i like to sell multiple books at a time if i can because i don't want to spend it's a pain to sell books man and it's it's it's stressful and it's complicated and there's a ton of fiddling overhead on it too i mean these proposals are 50 pages long it just takes a long time to write but it's not fun writing it's not oh i'm writing about ideas

it's you know you're writing about your marketing plan and stuff like that so yeah i try not to do it more than i need to one thing you mentioned the ferris interview was he asked you started off with your relationship or your steve martin he was asking about him and then you were talking about his autobiography i listened to the auto audio book recently and at the end he was he had the the quote where he was in i think it was in the jerk when he was like leaving the house i was like i

just need this and i need this one thing and he needed all those things that kind of reminded me of what you just instead this and then just this and just a little bit of that and then just this and yeah good book born standing up yeah i recommend it you