Positively Legal: The Art of Slow Productivity

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The World Health Organization called burnout an “occupational phenomenon,” a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

Author and rest advocate, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less says: “Exhausted workers can’t give their best, take less initiative, and are more cynical.”

I have previously written about burnout in the ACC Docket (How Positive Practices Help Reduce Burnout, Using Travel and Nature to Support Burnout) and identified the six causes of burnout (overwork, lack of control, lack of reward, isolation, unfairness, and mismatch of values) in my guest blog for Better Ipsum. These articles identified the signs of burnout and suggested ways we can try to prevent it or recover from it. 

This month, I focus in-depth on changing our perspective. I look at the "slow productivity” movement coming from professor and author Cal Newport’s recent book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, in which he advocates for slowing down smartly, and his earlier works on the value of “deep work” and the importance of digital minimalism. 

In addition, I look at the importance of “essentialism,” through Geoff McKeown’s book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. By changing our perspectives away from the frenetic work, and embracing these practices, we can learn to “do less but better” making our “highest possible contribution” as well as embracing “the lost art of accomplishment without burnout.”

What is productivity?

Productivity makes sense in an agricultural or supply chain when farmers and assembly line workers can be assessed on what they produce, says Newport in Slow Productivity.

While the same cannot be said for “knowledge workers,” like lawyers, the same measure of productivity has endured and become what Newport calls pseudo-productivity, “the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive work.”

Tools like email and the Slack platform that “make it possible to visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort,” says Newport, have exacerbated the pseudo-productivity behavior and “inevitably led to more and more of the average knowledge worker’s day being dedicated to talking about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through incessant electronic messaging.”

High levels of electronic communicating all day lead to burnout. A recent McKinsey and Lean In survey of more than 65,000 American employees primarily from knowledge sector jobs “found a significant increase in those describing themselves as feeling burned out “often” or “almost always,” Newport points out.

Is there a solution to a treadmill of pseudo-productivity which appears to be “producing” less than ideal outputs and is burning people out in the process? Newport thinks the solution may lie in the “slowness revolution.” Taking the idea from the “slow food,” “slow cities,” etc., movements, Newport applied the philosophy to a new suggested way to work – slow productivity. 

The slow productivity revolution

To slow productivity, change mindset and embrace three central principles, says Newport. Apply this approach to legal work in general, operations projects, and other work and projects outside of day-to-day jobs:

1. Do fewer things: “Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily manage accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most,” says Newport.
   
   This requires a change to the meaning of what it means to be “productive.” His suggested ways to do fewer things:
   

2. Work at a natural pace: “Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it to, instead, unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance,” says Newport. In addition to not rushing your most important work, Newport suggests:

3. Obsess over quality. Once you do the first two steps, the final is to “obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term,” says Newport.

To embrace the slow productivity movement, we have to first value what it produces: high-quality deep work. 

The value of deep work

Deep work is an approach that allows you to turn off as much as you can of the outside world and submerse yourself in what you are doing. Newport’s slow productivity built on his earlier deep work model that advocates for “professional activities performed in distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to the limit. 

“These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate,” Newport says. Newport unsurprisingly blamed network tools (email, texts, social media sites and infotainment sites like Reddit) for fragmenting our attention and keeping many of us concentrating on “shallow work” – “non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create new value in the world and are easy to replicate”. 

We need to change our perception of what is important – it is not the quantity of tasks we are used to producing. We need to reframe and recognize the importance of “deep work,” not only for the quality output it creates, but because we need to keep mastering “the art of quickly learning complicated things” to “remain valuable” as employees, Newport says. Mastering deep work will help our careers because it is “increasingly rare and increasingly valuable” and, therefore, mastering the skill will help your career longevity. It should also help reduce burnout as it reduces the stressors and core elements of burnout. 

We need to recognize that the culture of connectivity has made it easier to reply and receive answers quickly but has produced a false sense of productivity as we run our lives out of our inboxes. 

We can improve our focus, reduce our pseudo-productivity, and move toward appreciating deep work, per Newport, using these techniques:

• Recharge properly to ensure you have the energy to do deep work – Attention Resoration Theory (ART) claims that spending time in nature helps your ability to concentrate. ART promotes that you can restore your ability to direct your attention by giving it an active rest (for more on ART see my earlier article How Nature Can Reduce Mental Fatigue).

• Slow down at the end of the day – Any work that evening downtime replaces should be relaxing. Have a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday – for every task or goal that is not completed, you should either have a plan for its completion or capture it somewhere where it will be revisited when the time is right. These rituals take time to become automatic but should become a permanent fixture in a few weeks. 

• Break from focusing – Try to schedule in time when you can “give in to distraction,” such as scheduling when you can use the internet. And stick to it. Keep a notepad by your desk identifying when you can next use the internet and “until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed – no matter how tempting,” says Newport. This works even if your job requires a lot of internet or email use, notes Newport. You can even block more frequent use of internet and email: “The total number or duration of your internet blocks doesn’t matter nearly as much as making sure that the integrity of your offline blocks remains intact.” This strategy could also be used in spare time or over weekends to reduce overall device use. 

• Productively meditate – Block out a period of time when you are occupied physically but not mentally (walking, jogging, driving, showering) where you focus your attention on a single well-defined professional challenge. Bring your attention back to the problem if it wanders. Try this approach two to three times per week. This is similar to activating your default mode network which I have written about in The Power of Unfocus.

• Detox from the digital world – In Newport’s Digital Minimalism, he suggests:
  • Take a 30-day digital detox and declutter from all optional technologies.
  • During the 30 days, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors you find satisfying and meaningful that don’t involve computers.
  • At the end of the 30 days, reintroduce optional technologies starting from a blank slate. For each technology you re-introduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it to maximize its value.

Embracing essentialism

Finally, as we move towards a shift away from low value pseudo-productivity to higher value deep work and slow productivity, we can embrace essentialism. McKewon’s work on essentialism suggests that non-essentialism is everywhere for three main reasons:

In contrast, the essentialism ideology advises to:

As we move forward in a world of clutter and noise, where we work on our legal responsibilities, and we commit to additional work both in and out of our jobs, if we can go back to the art of essentialism and simplicity, par back our choices and commit to fewer things, we can move towards doing high-quality deep work and improve our deliverables, enjoy the projects we choose, and reduce the risk of burnout.