Slow Productivity

Slow Productivity: Summary

In the summer of 1966, a man lay on his back for two full weeks on a picnic table in his backyard, staring up at the leaves of an ash tree. He wasn't sleeping. He wasn't resting. He was working. John McPhee, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wanted to tackle the most ambitious article of his life, and he didn't know where to begin. He had spent eight months gathering material: tramping through the remote forest country of New Jersey with a sleeping bag, reading every book, talking to every person. And now he lay there, paralyzed, unable to write the first sentence.

If you had seen him then, you would have said this man is wasting his life. His boss certainly would have said so. And yet McPhee has gone on to write twenty-nine books, win a Pulitzer Prize, and mentor writers who make up half the American literary elite. Those two weeks on the picnic table were not laziness. They were exactly the kind of work that most of us have forgotten even exists.

Cal Newport's book, Slow Productivity, is about that forgetting. It chases three big questions. Why do we work from morning to night and still feel that we produce nothing meaningful? Where did this whole burnout-inducing hustle come from? And what do we do about it if we still want to show up for work tomorrow morning without breaking down? Newport doesn't tell you to work less. He tells you that productivity means something entirely different from what we've believed for the past seventy years.

The fake diligence we all walked into

Let's start with where this whole thing comes from. To understand why we got lost, we have to go back a little.