Book Review by Steven Assarian, Business and Career Librarian
Human beings, by and large, want to produce. And we want to know that we’re producing.
In sectors like manufacturing and agriculture, it’s fairly easy to know that you’re productive. How much grain is grown or how many widgets get made are easy questions to answer.
Knowledge workers - defined as workers that add value by their expertise - constitute a much, much larger proportion of the American workforce. And with these workers, there’s a problem: knowledge work is hard to measure.
Because we’re not sure how to measure knowledge work, we do it poorly. As a result, knowledge workers are burnt out and miserable.
If anyone’s got something interesting to say on this current state of affairs, it’s Cal Newport. A professor and programmer, he’s changed my thinking on work and careers in significant ways. His latest book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, he tries to tackle this problem of modern knowledge work.
His answer to this current state of affairs, where workdays are full of Zoom meetings and desperate inbox management, is a philosophy called Slow Productivity. Like the Mark Bittman’s famous dictum about eating real food, Newport has a pithy slogan about real work: Do fewer things; work at a natural pace; obsess over quality.
Newport doesn’t want us to produce less; he believes that by doing fewer things well, we can actually do more of the work that improves our organizations, and the products, and services they provide. He points out, rightly I think, that the more tasks we’re assigned, the overhead of those tasks - email, meetings, ‘work about work’ etc. - go up exponentially. The real work, then, gets shoved off to the side, forced to the edges of the workday and the workweek.
The problem is that performative-ness is, in a lot of ways, a response to insecurity. Knowledge work was supposed to be more secure than, say, factory work or trade labor, but this just isn’t the case, if it ever was.
Where I think he has his strongest case is the assigning of work. Rather than telling a subordinate or shooting them an email with a new task, Newport calls for a more collective means of assigning work. This would involve the creation of systems meant to assign work, rather than the haphazard way that knowledge workers get their assignments now. Another interesting idea Newport supposes is a ‘deflection project’, where a worker commits to a large, very visible project that they can use to deflect work in a given season.
If there’s a weakness to this book, it would be that the examples Newport uses to explain his ideas are artists like singer-songwriter Alanis Morisette, television writer Anthony Zuiker, and John McPhee, an essayist who wrote for The New Yorker and other prestigious outlets.
The point he’s making with his more famous examples - top performers don’t necessarily appear ‘productive’ but produce amazing work - is a good one, but most people don’t need to write for the New Yorker or sing generation-defining songs. The examples of normal people don’t have the same punch, and the data you would need to make these anecdotes more universal just aren’t there.
Regardless, this book is an excellent solution to the real problems of knowledge work that we face today. Its solutions are useful, and worth reading for any worker or manager who’s trying to do their best work in an age of frantic befuddlement.
