How to Do More by Doing Less (and Doing It Better)

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Over the last decade, Cal Newport has become something of a modern workplace ombudsman. A professor of computer science at Georgetown, his books have addressed the ways in which technology can be a cognitive drain on “knowledge workers,” people whose jobs require them to process information. He tackled distracted multi-tasking in Deep Work, the mindless use of digital devices in Digital Minimalism, and forever trying to dig to the bottom of our inboxes in A World Without Email.

His latest book focuses on our obsession with getting things done. In Slow Productivity, he argues that we’ve come to believe in the wrong type of productivity, one that’s based on looking like we’re getting a lot done, which leads to frenetic activity but less actual production. Newport puts forth a three-step solution—do fewer things; work at a natural pace; obsess over quality—that he believes will not only have us less burnt out, but will lead to us getting more and better work done. Wouldn’t that be nice? GQ called him up to ask if it was actually possible.

GQ: Very early on in Slow Productivity, you write, "Perhaps knowledge workers’ problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition of this term that has taken hold in recent decades.” Can you explain what that faulty definition is?

Cal Newport: I call it pseudo-productivity. This is the thing causing most of the problems we're seeing, in terms of exhaustion and burnout rising in knowledge work.

In the mid-twentieth century, knowledge work was new and emerging as a major sector. We were used to industrial manufacturing and agriculture. We had this very clear Adam Smith notion of productivity, which was all about ratios. How many cars are we producing per paid labor hour input? How many bushels of wheat are we producing per acre of land under cultivation?

You also had clearly defined production systems. Here's how we build cars. Here's how we rotate our crops. If you change something about your production system, you could measure that ratio and say, do they get better or worse? “Oh, it got better when we switched to an assembly line. That's a more productive way to build cars.” That's how we thought about productivity. It created unfathomable economic growth, all of the wealth on which the modern world was built.

It didn't work in knowledge work, because things got a lot more ambiguous. People would work on multiple different things. What I was working on might be different than what you're working on. It’s much less defined by what's being produced. And there's no clear, centralized production system. Everyone organizes their efforts in their own personal way. It's all obfuscated. There's no system to look at and say, “Can we do better than this?”

So we invented pseudo-productivity: Let’s use visible effort as a proxy for useful activity. If I see you doing something, that's better than not seeing you do something. We're all gathering in an office, and we’ll be there for eight hours, and I will see you working and doing stuff. If you want to be more productive, show up earlier, stay later. That's a classic pseudo-productivity notion: Activity is what's valuable.

Isn't part of the problem here just modern workload, though? For people who are actually getting stuff done, even they are overwhelmed by how much work they have to do.

Pseudo-productivity is what led to the overload. A couple of things came together. If visible activity is what matters, the stakes are very high. If someone asks you to do something, saying no is the clearest rejection of visible activity. You’re turning down what you’re being measured on. In that context, it's very hard to say no. Because all of knowledge work is very informal and personalized in how we organize work, there’s no, “What’s your workload? How much should you be working on? Who’s working on what?” We just say, “More is better than less.”

So people have to start saying yes a lot more. The way we began to manage our workloads was that we waited until the stress and anxiety of everything we had to do got higher than the stress and anxiety of saying no to things. This became the informal way that people manage their workloads in the absence of anything more structured: “I have to say yes to things until I'm so overloaded that I have emotional-social cover to say no to some things”. So it keeps everyone with like twenty percent too much to do.

Saying no is obviously easier for someone who has autonomy. Let’s say someone in a low- or mid-level position has to report to a boss and they get stuff piled on them. How do you suggest that they better say no in an environment where it might be difficult to?

One of the big approaches here is transparency in workload. So a lot of these issues come from the obfuscation of workload. I don't know what you're doing. I just see you as a vessel to accomplish things for me that makes my life easier. If I feel like you're not doing anything, it is because, in the pseudo-productivity sense, you're not being useful. If you're not doing this, I’m assuming you're just not doing anything. But when workloads become more transparent, you begin to get much more saner workload management.

For example, imagine you have a list you keep in a shared document. At the top of the list are the three things I'm actively working on right now. I’m going to give those all my attention, to finish as quickly as possible. Below that is an ordered list of the queue of things that I'm waiting to work on. As soon as I finish one of these active projects, I'm gonna pull in a new thing from that inactive list and I'll start working on that actively as well. This scheme is not about directly saying yes or no to things. It's about having two statuses: Actively working on, and waiting to work on.

Now why would this make a difference beyond just semantics? Because everything you're actively working on brings with it administrative overhead. You have to send emails and have meetings about it. The problem is when you have too many things you're actively working on, they’re all generating their own administrative overhead. This takes up more and more of your time and also fragments your schedule more and more. The more things you're actively working on, the more of your schedule gets taken up talking about work, which leaves very little time to actually do the work. You fall farther behind and you have to wake up early and try to finish things on the weekend.

If you divide your work between active and non-active, the active things are generating a stream of overhead. The stuff in the waiting queue, wait until that's active then we'll talk about it. This is going to make your day to day drastically better, because now you're dealing with the administrative overhead of 2 or 3 projects, compared to 10 or 15. Over time, the rate at which you're finishing projects is going to increase. The quality of the project is going to increase.

So now the question is, will you get away with this? We often conjure the idea of the moustache-twirling boss: “You’re my pawn that I'm manipulating.” But, actually, we misattribute the problem we are solving for bosses. We think that the problem we're solving for bosses is doing things for them right away. The actual problem bosses want solved is that something comes into their world that is a source of stress for them. They want you to make that no longer a source of stress. So if you use something like this list method, you're taking the worry away.

One of your solutions is “Obsess over quality.” In there, you discuss the idea of taste and to me that reminded me of an idea from Kyle Chayka’s book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture about how taste is disappearing because the algorithm is largely determining our likes for us. How certain are you that people even care about quality any more? Are market forces pushing us towards engagement and stimulation over quality?

Kyle's ideas are really smart, and I largely agree with him, but this is talking largely in the world of culture and media, in particular. He’s right on that when you move more content production to the cybernetic curation algorithm, it really does lead to a flattening of this notion of what's good and what's bad.

In the context of my book, it is a way more general application of taste, way less sexy. When I talk about quality in the book, it's quality in the thing you do in your job that matters. When I say improve your taste, what it means is we don't spend enough time thinking about what makes the good stuff good. Why is this better than that? If we’re ambitious, we jump right into, “I want to get better.” But we don't always spend the time first to say, well, what is better? I shouldn't really go after my super ambitious movie project as a young director until I've studied a lot of movies. You’ve got to understand what good is before you can really follow the path to becoming better.

So of your three precepts—“do fewer things; work at a more natural pace; obsess over quality”— where is it hardest for you to practice what you preach?

Day to day, “do fewer things” is one you have to keep fighting. If you take on too many missions at a high level, you're going to have too many projects because each mission has to generate projects to stay alive. And if you have too many ongoing projects, it's going to generate too many tasks and you're going to have too much to do. You have to keep pruning.

But the actual hardest thing to do of those three principles, in terms of execution, is the obsession over quality. Continually returning back to, “I'm going to get better at this core thing I do.” That's the hardest activity. It’s really hard to get better.

So, long-term, the big struggle is continuing to come back to trying to get better. Short-term, the fight of overwhelm is always there. You're not going to always get that right. You're going to find yourself like, I went too far in this direction and have to pull back. I'm constantly fighting that.

There’s another part of your book where you write about how we always underestimate how long a project will take us, that we should take our estimate and double it.

My whole theory about planning is that we write a fairy tale that we love. We fall in love with the story of our over-ambitious plan. Because if we could actually execute that plan, it would make our life great. If I finish this in a week, my God, that would be fantastic. If I could finish this book before the semester began, that would be so great. So we write these stories and we fall in love with the stories because we want that story to be true. Of course, they’re completely unrealistic. And we end up worse off because the whole thing falls apart.

When we’ve spoken in the past, you’ve compared the digital hygiene movement to the fitness craze that took place in the wake of the obesity epidemic. How are you thinking about it now?

The way I've been thinking about the—and I don't really like the term—digital wellness space, where we are now, there's three phases in terms of our confrontations with the digital world and networks.

The first phase was the exuberance phase: Steve Jobs keynote iPhone phase. This is awesome. This is a nice leap forward. These tools are really cool. It all felt fresh. We're gonna solve all these problems. We experimented. We gave phones to our 10-year-olds. It was this fun period, like 2007 to 2016.

Then we got to phase two, which is the phase I'm probably most associated with. We start realizing, "Wait a second, there's parts of my life as a human that are important to me that this is encroaching on in a way that is making my life worse.” Phase two was the protectionist retrenchment phase, right? We need to protect this part of our life from these technologies. It’s a lot of putting up barriers. It’s not all just great.

Phase three, that I think we're entering now is, how do we figure out what to avoid, but also what to go big on?

I coined this term in the New Yorker last December, called techno-selectionism. The idea is technological developments have these huge propulsive impacts on the human condition. When these technologies are interacting with social economic systems, it's really hard to figure out what the impacts are going to be. So you have sweeping positive developments. Look back 150 years ago. There are so many things that were worse than they are now because technologies hadn’t developed yet. But they also have these unpredictable and huge negative impacts as well. How do we navigate that reality?

A big part of techno-selectionism is being willing to go back on something. A great example is social media. It was like web 2.0 made more accessible. Kids were using it. And then it was like, you know what, this is rotting kids’ brains. Let's go back on that and say, actually, kids shouldn't use that.

In natural selection, you have a selective function, which is success and reproduction. We have to be the selective function for the technology, and then we can get more positives and blunt some of the negatives.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Originally Appeared on GQ