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 a lot of variety throughout the year in terms of  how hard we were working.

I think in knowledge work, if certain times of year are more intense  than others, this will lead to overall better and more sustainable outcomes. So the principle  of working at a natural pace says it's okay to not redline it fifty weeks a year, five days a  week. We can have busy days and less busy days.

We can have busy seasons and less busy seasons. The third principle of slow productivity is to obsess over quality. And what this means is  you should identify the things you do in your work that produce the most value and really  care about getting better at that.

Any quest towards obsessing over quality has to start with  a perhaps pretty thorough investigation of your own job. And then once you figure that out,  start giving that activity as much attention as you can. For example, invest in better  tools so that you can signal to yourself that you're invested in doing this thing well. 

I did this myself as a postdoc. I was at MIT, didn't have a ton of money at that time, but I  bought a fifty-dollar lab notebook. And my idea was this is going to make me take the work I'm  doing in this notebook more seriously, and it did.

So something about having this more quality  tool pushed me towards more quality thinking. So this idea that you want to slow down, that you  want to do fewer things, that you want to have a more natural pace, this becomes very natural  when you're really focused on doing what you do well. You begin to see all of those meetings  and the email and the overstuffed task list not as a mark of productivity, but obstacles to what  you're really trying to do.

If you are embracing these principles, a few things are going to  happen. The pace at which important things are finished is going to go up. The quality  of what you're producing is going to go up, and the happiness is also going to go up.

This  is going to become a much more sustainable work environment, and you're going to be doing  the work that's going to make you better.