Slow Productivity – A Thoughtful Critique
Newport's Philosophy of Knowledge Work Through the Lens of Fractal Productivity
This essay is part of a slow series where I review productivity systems and try to highlight their strengths and weaknesses.
I favor the wisdom of well-aged books, but Cal Newport's Slow Productivity waved at me from the shelf. It just seemed to resonate so deeply with what I write about here.
Newport’s central thesis is that traditional productivity metrics are inadequate for knowledge work1, which led to a widespread misconception that visible activity and busyness signify productivity. He calls this pseudo-productivity.
For this reason, Newport argues that a slower approach founded on three "principles" more accurately reflects the essence of knowledge work:
focusing on fewer but essential work items,
maintaining a natural pace of work, and
prioritizing quality over quantity.
This overall narrative deeply resonated with me and sometimes even felt serendipitous as it closely mirrors my contemplations for the book I am writing. The similarity in our work is vivid in the two goals Newport set himself for the book:
Liberating knowledge workers from pseudo-productivity. This correlates with what I explored in the end of GTD and the novel concept of productiveness.
Redefining what productivity means for knowledge work, which, according to Newport, is still the Wild West and very similar to what I explored in my discussions on the revival of the term “personal productivity.”
So, given all that, who is this book written for?
I am not so sure. Newport states he targets “knowledge workers with significant autonomy" who struggle with the relentless pace and overwhelming demands of modern work (think writers, professors, freelancers, small business owners, …). As a software engineer working entirely remotely, I enjoy considerable autonomy. However, I won’t count myself in this target audience, as I usually don’t get overwhelmed by the demands of my work and rarely feel the urge to signal busyness (probably because I am well-versed in productivity methods).
I suspected upfront that I wouldn’t learn much from the book. However, I picked it up anyway because it could potentially validate my ideas, and I was eager to critically engage with contemporary and test his thoughts against my own. The result of these musings is this essay. I’ll judge the book, the philosophy, and the implied productivity system and, in the end, give a reading recommendation. Spoiler: skip it!
The Book & Philosophy
Slow Productivity packs its thesis into just over 200 pages. Newport's writing is straightforward and accessible, though sometimes it feels like he's stretching the material with anecdotes and stories.2
In the book, Newport practices some solid fractaling around personal accomplishment. He advocates for effectiveness over efficiency and, at the same time, includes a vertical spectrum of work, from high-level "missions" down to projects and tasks. This at least slightly touches on what I've been calling productiveness. What’s more, at one point, he writes:
When it comes to our understanding of productivity, timescale matters. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the efforts of historic thinkers like Copernicus and Newton can seem uneven and delayed. When instead viewed at the slow scale of years, their efforts suddenly seem undeniably and impressively fruitful. Her 1896 countryside vacation was far from her mind when Marie Curie took the stage in Stockholm seven years later to receive her first of two Nobel Prizes. … In contemporary work, it became clear, our bias is toward evaluating our efforts at the fast scale.
This is a similar train of thought to when I introduced my monthly accomplishment scores a few years back and, more recently, extended this practice to my daily backward scoring approach.3
Overall, I'm all in with what Newport's trying to do. The ambiguous definition of productivity among knowledge workers and the prevalent culture of urgency are issues I've also observed and discussed. Drawing again from my experience as a software engineer, I've noticed that my code quality is much worse whenever there is a rush with deadlines.4 The process is also much less enjoyable and drains me out more. I may achieve some results much faster but at the price of usually spending much longer on quality assurance afterward.5 If, instead, I approach my task at a slower pace from the get-go, it often takes a little bit longer overall, but the result is of higher quality and may lend itself a lot more to future revisions (which, in software, are very common). This is especially true the more complex the problem is.
So, going slow would probably be the right decision in general if no economic considerations (money) were involved. Unfortunately, that's not how the world works for the most part.6 Despite recognizing knowledge work as an economic activity, Newport's discussion largely omits such considerations. He focuses on reducing stress and promoting high-quality, long-term output for the individual—laudable objectives but simply not always economically viable.
But for the sake of the argument, let's assume that in many cases, we would find ourselves in Newport's envisioned environment and look now at the three foundational “principles"7 he posits.
1| Do Fewer Things
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.
I believe this to be the most important of his three guidelines, as it partially addresses one of the flawed assumptions of modern productivity systems, namely that all discovered work needs to be completed.
With Do Fewer Things, Newport acknowledges that most people have too much input and too little capacity to complete it. Just like Forster with his Do It Tomorrow productivity system, Newport’s solution to this dilemma is to reduce the number of one’s commitments. The argument goes like this: commitments generate work. So, by making fewer commitments, you end up with fewer things on your plate. Newport also makes concrete recommendations to limit yourself to 2-3 missions on the high level, three active projects at the medium level, and tasks associated with one main project per day.8 So, he essentially advocates setting WIP limits.
The theory behind all this seems promising: you can avoid unnecessary work by clarifying what matters. However, there are several problems with this.
For one, tasks do not only stem from commitments. One-off tasks can spawn instantaneously without having a commitment backing them. A recent example from my personal life: I discovered mold behind a cupboard in my home. While I had never made an explicit commitment to keep my home free from mold, there I was, investing several hours over several days removing it and replacing the tapestry it affected. It is such sudden sand in one’s shoes that wears one out, not necessarily the big, important work projects. Yet it is precisely this most essential level of productivity - the atomic level of the task - that Newport so conveniently skips over. Instead, he primarily resides on a project level, which is related to my following critique:
Newport uses a similar definition of “project” to Tiago Forte, where he defines a project based on the need for two or more “sessions” to complete. As I said elsewhere, I don’t think this is a helpful definition, and none is much help with work scoping as it can include everything from “clean the garage” to “write a book.” By skipping tasks and defining projects in such a way, Newport avoids addressing many of the fundamental productivity problems. Problems resulting from task management dynamics and the fact that tasks (and projects) are merely mental constructs that don’t persist across time but are highly volatile.
My biggest critique, thus, is that given his overall theme of "slowness," it would nicely fit into the picture to advise for discernment over blind commitment on the lower levels. While, as outlined above, he does advocate for cut-offs at various levels, he doesn't even mention the dynamics at the task level. Tasks that become obsolete, tasks that solve themselves, and tasks that are discovered not to be done. His philosophy, like so many other productivity solutions, misses the null-alternative
Lastly, I also find it ridiculous if an author recommends zero-sum games as he does by suggesting to reduce one’s workload pushed onto you by requiring other people to do more work when requesting something from you. If something wouldn’t work even theoretically if everyone were to implement it, I usually discard it immediately as it’s not a general interdependent and sustainable solution to the problem.
2| Work At A Natural Pace
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 conductive to brilliance.
This is an interesting one, as it is the only one that intuitively sounds right. Do Fewer Things could lead you to assume that by doing less, you accomplish fewer things, and Obsess over Quality quickly conjures things like perfectionism in your head (can obsession ever be a good thing?).
But Work At A Natural Pace? That seems to be genuine advice. Maybe this is because it’s the vaguest of his recommendations. It’s a headline for a potpourri of practical advice that essentially boils down to three broad categories:
Expectation management – if you get clear and realistic about your expectations, you won’t end up rushing them. For this, he recommends creating a long-term plan (to guide you and, I think, to fight forgetfulness), doubling estimates, reducing daily plans by 25-50%, timeboxing, and forgiving oneself for derailments and missed deadlines.
Intentional rejuvenation initiatives – if you don’t schedule for rest and downtime, chances are that you won’t get enough of it. So he recommends scheduling periods where you work less, scheduling one “rest project” for every work project, taking annual mini-sabbaticals, taking two random weekdays off per month, setting up rules like "no-meeting Mondays".
Habit and environment design – if you don’t also design the surroundings around your most important work, you may unknowingly lead yourself into haste. But by designing and practicing calm rituals and working from a favorable environment, you, too, can reduce the pull of pseudo-productivity.
Again, economics aside, this could play out nicely. But I think that it’s not viable in the real world. Most knowledge workers today can neither cut their responsibilities in half, work from a coffee shop, or regularly sneak out of the office to see a movie (his actual recommendation!). And the few (like me) who could rely on his advice most likely don’t need it.
3| Obsess Over Quality
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.
The last one is probably the most controversial, as it immediately conjures connotations like “Won’t this paralyze me?" But if you look at what he recommends in this part of the book, it doesn’t advocate going crazy about quality. Rather, it proposes ways to ensure that you begin to value quality over time and cost. He wants you first to “improve your taste”, then “bet on yourself” and go all in.
Caveat: This part of the book is by far the worst. It is scattered and somehow confused about what it is trying to do, as Newport suddenly, in a very self-centric way, seems to imply that a knowledge worker should reduce his main knowledge work to do any creative work on the side as he does with his books.
Here are his most important “practical” recommendations:
Learn from and with others—he recommends exploring what experts do in novel domains to gain inspiration, joining a mastermind group in your own domain, and investing in professional tools to leverage the frozen experience.
Constrain yourself to avoid perfectionism—give yourself enough time to produce something worthwhile for your intended audience, but don't allow unlimited time to create a master plan (temporary). At the same time, announce your goals publicly to create a social lock-in effect or attract “investors” for your idea. This will push you to the finish line.
Sacrifice something else in favor of your goal—reduce other important things—like your salary—to invest more quality in what you are trying to do. For example, “Write after the kids go to bed.”
Again, he somehow lost me here (and many other readers, according to book reviews on Goodreads). I guess his time ran out, and he had to finish the book, violating his own rule of obsessing over quality.
Newports’s three core tenets – Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality – are simple, but that doesn’t make them necessarily easy to implement. That’s why practical advice is highly needed. Newport does try to mix theory with practical tips across his three big ideas, which, on paper, sounds good, but for me, it's a bit of déjà vu since my day-to-day already looks a lot like what he's recommending. If I had read the book for its practical advice, I would say that a big part isn't new. If you count Newport's essays over the last few years, there is probably nearly no new insight. Moreover, he tries to describe his philosophy without visuals and purely in prose, leaving many open questions.
While initially setting very honorable goals for himself, he did nothing but a decent job of clustering his personal work style and practices into three simple, easy-to-remember directives. But by limiting his target audience so extremely (knowledge workers with a very high level of autonomy, only in their professional life, and all economics aside) and then skipping the fundamental level of how task management relates to all of this, he may have ended painting too broad strokes and saying not much at all.
The Resulting Productivity System
Newport doesn't provide a fully-fledged productivity system but rather a philosophy coupled with practical suggestions. But if you were to find your personal system based on his principles and proposals, it would most likely result in a (very) niche, narrow, (very) lossy, unit-based solution in my classification system.
The book and the essays it is based on appeared within the last few years, and the whole philosophy is targeted at a small subset of knowledge workers with great autonomy in their jobs. A "slow productivity system" is thus a (very) niche solution.
A slow productivity system would be narrow (instead of wide or holistic) as it does not have an opinion about many details and how to handle the specifics of personal productivity, namely task management.
Your system would likely be a very lossy solution as it only concerns one's professional life and nothing else.
Lastly, slow productivity is a unit-based approach that attempts to break work down from life missions to projects and provides some suggestions for working on personal projects.
Such a system would also share many of the flawed assumptions of modern productivity systems outlined in my essay on the end of GTD.
It views productivity as a narrow concept: Newport limited his discussions on knowledge work within one’s professional life, and by doing this, he compartmentalizes productivity to one narrow slice of life. So, his solution excludes the myriad tasks outside of work (those that often actually need finer-grained management). Slow Productivity therefore won't do anything for overall life management.9 Newport further assumes that everyone has the same goal: to produce high-quality work within the professional realm. While tolerable in a book that needs firm boundaries, this view of productivity is highly incomplete. It disregards the full productiveness spectrum. And while in all other regards, he did a very good job of limiting the scope of where his philosophy is applicable, he did not challenge the assumption that people have different goals in life.
It doesn't challenge the “Work Is to Be Completed” mantra enough. I already discussed this one above, so no further explanation is needed.
It deems “work unit scoping” a trivial problem: This is a hard one to get right (it is part of why Fractal Productivity exists and what I personally want to solve down the line), so it is not surprising that he has almost nothing to say about work scoping. He only touches on the point when he advocates setting a WIP limit on active projects. Once a project is complete, one can pull in new work, he says, then for this one has to pick the next “reasonable-sized” project. His example is pulling in the project "write next book chapter" from a backlog item "write book".” While this example highlights an act of scoping, he calls both "write next book chapter" and "write book" projects and gives no advice whatsoever on how actually to go about splitting and breaking down work. So, his philosophy and practical advice are ill-suited for people who struggle with scoping-related issues, aka everyone.
It treats work as a physical artifact: As far as we can tell, Newport doesn't realize that tasks have no physical presence and are mental constructs. There is no distinguishing between the task and the task artifact at all. There is no mention of work mapping. This is unsurprising since he has little to say about tasks and artifacts. Most of his discussions are located at the project level. However, since a project, in the fractal view of productivity, is essentially nothing but a big task, the same principle applies here: projects are nothing but concepts and need to be handled accordingly. But there is no discussion of this in the book.
In summary, while his book and philosophy read nicely, and you might even find yourself nodding along in a shallow pass, his directives and propositions don’t hold ground. The resulting productivity system based upon them would not do well in my classification.10
Conclusion – Read it, or not?
Newport is certainly well-read, but I didn’t see any innovation in this work except for using different terms for what has been said many times before. With "deep work," he has popularized an important term in the personal productivity jargon. I use it a lot. However, trying to do the same with "slow productivity,” I feel he went down the wrong path. "Slow Productivity" is an oxymoron and doesn't make sense as a term in general.11 What he explored was more akin to "Slow Output" or "Slow Production," or the concept of "Essentialism". Whether this was his intention or a marketing trick, I don’t know.
Newport's demand for quality was to generate something "good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about" while relieving himself from the need to "forge a masterpiece". Slow Productivity is not a particularly important book and certainly not a masterpiece.12 But I am unsure if the book is good enough even to convince his target audience, which, again, I am not.13
In conclusion, I give Slow Productivity a mere 6/10 on my personal book rating scale, which roughly translates into "OK; the average read. Tangible weaknesses, but recommended with some reservations". This is because, except for a few practical tips, you won't take much more from the book than his three main (paraphrased and improved) directives:
Do only the essential things.
Work with slow burns instead of heavy lifts.
Value the quality of your work over its time and cost.
This might be good enough for readers who are completely new to his work and are indeed worn out by pseudo-productivity. If you count yourself in this group, pick it up and read it over a long weekend. But for readers familiar with many of his essays in recent years, who don't have autonomy in their jobs or are generally not stressed out, I would say they most likely can skip it.
Slow Productivity is certainly a step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough and doesn’t paint a whole picture. Its applicability is too limited. If you are an avid reader and are interested in the general new trend of “anti-productivity” advice, read Burkman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals instead. It will better pull you out of any pseudo-productivity you have subscribed to, doesn’t have as many anecdotal or boring filler stories, and is overall a better book.14
That's all. I hope you enjoyed this review. Let me know your thoughts and if you'd like me to do more book and productivity system reviews on the Substack.
Knowledge work defies traditional uses and metrics of personal productivity for various reasons. Newport lists the following:
Variability of effort – no single and clear "task" can often be tracked exactly in knowledge work. There are many and varying tasks in parallel. In this setting, there's no clear single output to track.
Uncontrollable impact of unrelated obligations — there's no easy way to control the impact of unrelated obligations on each individual's ability to produce.
» I might have published more academic papers than you last year, but this might have been, in part, due to a time-consuming but important committee that chaired. In this scenario, am I really a more productive employee. «
work organization and execution are left to the individual — decisions about organizing and executing work are largely left up to individuals to figure out independently. Companies might standardize their employees' software, but systems for assigning, managing, organizing, collaborating on, and executing tasks are typically left up to each individual.
I have further identified that both a knowledge worker’s input and output are hard to measure. In cognitive work, not every hour of input is equal in terms of its potency. As for output, we also rarely do the same thing twice. Moreover, knowledge work is often a form of accretion, whereby previously completed and collected work artifacts may greatly impact the quality and speed of subsequent artifacts. This makes it hard even to compare people’s starting points.
Maybe to meet publishers’ ends?
I think this is somehow related to what Daniel Kahneman found regarding happiness. We value things differently at any moment than when we look back afterward.
Both externally imposed and those I sometimes unwillingly imposed on myself.
In my job, quality assurance means. I recently saw an interesting LinkedIn post about using ChatGPT as a software engineer, which has the same idea baked in:
If you use ChatGPT to write 1,000 lines of code, it will take you 1 hour but you will spend 100 hours debugging it as you have 0 idea how it works.
If you use your brain to write 1,000 lines of code, it will take you 10 hours but you will spend just 1 hour debugging it as you understand it fully.
Maybe excluding the academic ivory tower from which Newport presumably writes.
As a side note, I think his tenants are more accurately described as rules or directives rather than principles, as he himself suggests they can be adapted or even disregarded under certain circumstances. So, labeling them as true principles implies a permanence and universality that Newport's later discussions do not support. A framing as rules/directives might better reflect their intended flexibility and applicability, acknowledging that they are not immutable while they guide.
Limiting oneself to one “project” per day is very harsh and unsuitable for many. One counter-example I personally have in place is my golden morning ritual (I spend one hour every morning before work investing in a certain important project). It allows me to easily fit in a second focus project daily and slowly progress towards it. I bet Newport would respond to this by saying that my golden morning project is no project but what he calls an “auto-pilot schedule,” a regularly repeating ritual. However, since he defined projects as anything that takes multiple work sessions, they are indeed projects according to his definition.
I don't know if this means that he personally does not manage areas like his family life or his filming hobby with similar rigor if he thinks that these areas don't need management, or if he wanted to make the challenge of writing the book smaller.
In Newport’s defense, he acknowledges that his work is incomplete, and his long-term wish is that his book kicks off many others to create different concepts of productivity, "each of which might apply to different types of workers or sensibilities.” I intend to bring “his ideas” further, even though he did not influence my thoughts, as I don’t usually consume his content.
In my writings, I have mentioned a few times now that it would be better to coin a new term and concept – such as productiveness – to distinguish a slower form of knowledge work output from classical productivity.
The topics it addresses, however, are!
As of writing this essay, Slow Productivity has the lowest ratings of all his books on Goodreads, coming in at around 3,9/5 (1000 ratings), while his most popular work, Deep Work, scores 4,2/5 (150.000 ratings). While it might look like a small difference, the platform has a bizarre distribution of almost only three to five-star ratings. That is why most books typically fall within the range of 3,5-4,5 and why a 0.3-point difference, especially passing the 4-start mark, tells a lot.
This is not only my personal opinion. Goodreads is my witness, as it rates at 4,23 based on 80.000 ratings.