He wrote several bestsellers on productivity. Eight years later he denies it: “Our definition is broken”

Cal Newport He has been obsessed with productivity for decades. And yes, ‘obsessed’ is the word: a Georgetown computer science professor does not publish three books in less than five years if he does not have an almost unhealthy fixation with the subject.

In a very short time, he became one of the most recognized ‘gurus’ in the field and his works (‘Deep Work‘, ‘Digital Minimalism‘ either ‘A world without email‘) could be found in airports around the world.

Then one day, suddenly, saw the light.

What if it’s all a huge joke? Newport doesn’t say it exactly like that, of course. But, as you will see immediately, It’s in the subtext of everything he says. in recent times. Because under the idea that it is only moving from ‘individual advice’ to ‘structural diagnosis’, there is something else: a basic problem.

What really is productivity? As Newport explainsin the factory or in the field, productivity was measurable and easily comparable. Henry Ford, to give the most obvious example for an American, was able to justify the enormous investments that his continuous assembly lines required because they had figures and data.

The problem is that the world doesn’t work like that anymore. In the mid-20th century, knowledge workers began to become the most powerful workforce and measuring their productivity is much more elusive. And, to solve it, organizations resorted to a shortcut: If I see you working, I assume you are being productive.

Or, to use Newport’s wordswe have used a definition of productivity that is no longer “the use of visible activity as a rough approximation to useful effort.”

And then the pandemic arrived. For our expert, COVID was the turning point. life anxiety, the exhausted workerschained zoom calls, silent resignation…the world had been focused on ‘perform being busy‘ and suddenly there was no one looking at you. Suddenly, nothing we did made sense.

But as behavioral psychology has taught us, when something we usually do stops working, our first reaction is not to stop doing it. It means doing it harder, more often, with more insistence. These six years have shown us that it was a dead end.

And what do we do? For Newport, the answer is clear and is based on three principles: do less things, work at a more natural pace and obsess over quality, value and excellence.

If what we do has become a malicious proxy that only ends up burning us, we have to stop doing it. Newport calls it ‘slow productivity’ because, as he said, he is obsessed with productivity; but also because, deep down, it is still in the same scheme.

Because, after all, who can decide to work less? As Vivian Song denounced“Newport barely holds those who design the culture of overwhelm accountable.” EITHER, in the words of Joshua Kim“‘slow productivity’ is less a work strategy than a marker of privilege.”

The interesting thing about all this is the diagnosis, the recognition (from the very heart of the management publishing industry) that what we do does not work. Now we have to take the problem seriously and find a solution that really works for everyone.

Image | Andreas Klassen

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