The lost art of accomplishment without burnout | Cal Newport for Big Think +

We're increasingly facing burnout. How is it possible to do work that you're proud of and

not feel like your job is encroaching on all parts of your life? Because it's no longer you

just see me in my office looking vaguely busy. You can actually see every email I'm sending and

how active I am in a Slack chat. I could do this on the way to work, on the way home from work,

at home, on the weekends. Enough is enough. We're increasingly exhausted. We have a

faulty definition of productivity that we've been following, and what we need to

do instead is shift our focus onto outcomes. I'm Cal Newport. I'm a computer scientist and

writer. My most recent book is "Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."

So the knowledge sector emerges in the mid-twentieth century. When it emerges,

our best understanding of productivity came from manufacturing. Manufacturing,

this is something that we could measure very precisely. For example, how many Model Ts are

we producing per labor hour going in as input? And we had a number we could look at. Knowledge

work emerges. These type of metrics don't work anymore. Because in knowledge work, we're not

producing one thing. I might be working on seven or eight different things at the same time. This

could be different than the seven or eight things that the person right next to me is working on.

Our solution to this was to introduce a rough heuristic that I call pseudo-productivity that

said we can use visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort. So if I see you doing things,

that's better than you not doing things. Come to an office and we watch you work. If we need to be

more productive, come earlier, stay later. We'll just use activity as our best marker that you're

probably doing something useful. More and more of our time is focused on performing this busyness,

which means less of our time is spent actually doing things that matter.

So what's the solution? Slow productivity is a way of measuring useful effort that is now

much more focused on the quality things you produce over time as opposed to your

visible activity in the moment, and I define it to be built on three main principles. The

first is to do fewer things. Now this idea scares a lot of people when they first hear

it because they interpret do fewer things to mean accomplish fewer things. What I really

mean is do fewer things at once. We know this from neuroscience and organizational

psychology that when you turn the target of your attention from one point to another,

it takes a while for your brain to reorient. The things you're thinking about over here

leaves what's known as attention residue. This is a self-imposed reduction of cognitive capacity,

so you're producing worse work. Even worse, it's a psychological state that is exhausting

and frustrating, so the experience of work itself just becomes subjectively very negative. So what

happens if I'm working on fewer things at once? More of my day can actually be spent trying to

complete commitments, which means I'm going to complete them faster. And probably the quality

level is going to be higher as well because I can give them uninterrupted concentration.

The second principle is to work at a natural pace. One of the defining features of human economic

activity for the last several hundred thousand years is that the seasons really matter. There was

migration seasons when we were hunting. There was planting seasons. We were planting, and harvest

seasons when we're harvesting, and seasons where neither of those activities were going on. We had