In the spring of 1886, people died in Chicago over the length of a workday. Police opened fire near the McCormick Reaper Works and killed at least two, and a rally the following evening ended when someone threw a bomb into the crowd. Eight men, most of whom weren’t directly involved, were tried for conspiracy leading to murder, and four of them were hanged. The movement they were part of was fighting for the eight-hour workday.
We still feel that fight. We feel it when we look at an overstuffed calendar, or when we brace for the after-hours email, or when we tally our billable hours and dread the conversation we can’t escape. You would think that after a century and a half we’d have settled the question, and yet we keep getting it wrong. I’ve come to believe it’s because we’ve been arguing about the hours when the real problem is how much we try to carry inside them.
Cal Newport calls the alternative slow productivity, and the heart of it fits in one sentence: work on fewer things at once so that you can accomplish more things over time. That sounds like bad advice to anyone who is already behind. But Cal is clear about what he wants for you. “I want you to accomplish more things. I want to be higher quality. I want you to make more money.” The way there runs through doing less.
Part oneThe factory is still in the building.
Cal starts with where our model came from. The idea that we should work all out, eight hours a day, all year round, was borrowed from the factory, and it was so intolerable there that we had to invent labor unions and regulatory frameworks just to make it survivable. Human beings aren’t built for it. “We’re meant to have way more variation in intensity on all sorts of different timescales,” Cal says, with busy parts of the day and less busy parts, busy weeks and less busy weeks, busy seasons and less busy seasons.
Then knowledge work arrived, and managers had a problem. In a factory you can count Model T’s, and on a farm you can count bushels of wheat, but what do you count when people are doing lots of different things and it’s unclear who is working on what? The answer they landed on is what Cal calls pseudo productivity.
1.The heuristic that visible activity can be a useful proxy for useful effort. Seeing you do something is better than seeing you do nothing.
2.The unspoken rule most workplaces still use to measure productivity.
It was a crude rule of thumb, and it was tolerable for a while. Then came the late nineties and early two thousands, with computers, networks, email, laptops, and smartphones, and the rule of thumb became, in Cal’s words, “an engine for increasingly intolerable overload.” When visible activity is what gets rewarded, saying yes feels safe and saying no feels dangerous, because you might signal to someone that you aren’t useful.
The trouble is that every yes carries a cost that never shows up on the calendar.
The hidden tax
Every yes adds work to the work.
Picture two people on a project. There’s one line of communication to keep track of, and it’s easy. Add a third person because many hands make light work, and suddenly there are three.
Every line brings its own emails, Slack messages, meetings, and one on ones.
Notice what happened there. Tripling the team multiplied the lines of communication by twelve, and every line demands its own upkeep. Cal argues the same thing happens when we take on more projects. The person juggling six isn’t carrying twice the load of the person juggling three, because the second person absorbs far more hidden work. Six projects, once you count the overhead, can feel like twelve or more. Eventually the schedule clogs, most of the day becomes meetings about the work and messages about the meetings, and the rate at which useful work gets finished can, as Cal puts it, “reduce to a trickle.”
There’s a second cost, and it’s written into our biology. Management borrowed another idea from the machine age: a microprocessor should never sit idle, so a person shouldn’t either. But a processor executes one instruction after another every time the clock ticks, and it doesn’t care what they are. A human brain takes 15 to 20 minutes to shift out of one context and into another, which means you can’t bounce between projects 30 times in a day and expect anything to get done. “You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Cal says. “It just doesn’t work.”
So why do we keep agreeing to more? I think it’s because we pour our energy into the wrong management problem.
Most of us manage our time. Very few of us manage our load.
Most knowledge workers handle workload implicitly. I agreed to this, we emailed about it, and I’m kind of working on it. Cal’s remedy is to be explicit and to make transparent what you’re working on and its status. When your plate is invisible, everyone assumes you have unlimited room. When it’s on the table, the conversation changes, and we’ll get to how in a few minutes.
Part twoThe man who gave up half.
The obvious objection is that the most accomplished people in history seemed to have a lot going on. Ben Franklin is the standard example, one of the most industrious and influential figures in American history, and he looks like the opposite of “do fewer things.” But Cal’s telling of his life has a turn in the middle that I hadn’t noticed before.
Franklin was a printer, and a good one. He built a successful practice and then opened print shops in other cities, and he was making good money. But he had a restless mind and wanted to pursue things that were more complicated intellectually, and running the shops was busy, detail-oriented work. So he made a move. He had hired an assistant from England, David Hall, to start a print franchise in the Carolinas, and he changed his mind. Hall would take over the day to day of Franklin’s business, and in return Hall could take half the profits.
Cal points out that this cost Franklin at least half of the money coming in, and more than that, because the business could have kept growing under his hand. He gave it up anyway.
The trade
Franklin weighed it, and time won.
He gave up at least half the income, plus the growth he might have built. Cal says Franklin wrote letters at the time saying his time was finally his own.
Here is what he did with the breathing room. He established the major rules of electricity, working out negative and positive charges. He coined the term battery, figured out that lightning is an electrical discharge, and invented the lightning rod, which made him the most famous scientist in the world. He started the American Philosophical Association, which Cal says laid the foundation for American intellectual life, and then he got involved in politics. “And, of course, we know how that ends up.”
“I could do anything, but I can’t do everything.”Cal Newport, on the Franklin insight
That is the whole Franklin insight, as Cal tells it. He couldn’t do great things until he took a great amount of work off his plate. I find that both comforting and uncomfortable. It’s comforting because it suggests the capacity for great work may already be in you, waiting for room. It’s uncomfortable because the room comes from a trade, and the price is real.
Part threeSacrifice needs a runway.
Cal’s word for the price is sacrifice. The word I reach for is runway, which is how Ryan Holiday put it when I talked with him about Perennial Seller: “If you’re going to get this plane off the ground, you’ve got to have runway.”
Ryan learned this the hard way. When his first book started to work, he figured that writers live in New York, so he moved there. He paid through the nose for a not that nice place, felt busy all the time, and found that even a run took longer because he had to get to the park and stop at stoplights. Opportunities were everywhere, too. Each one felt like something he’d be an idiot to say no to, and each one came with the same quiet logic: “Oh, it’s just down the street. Maybe I’ll go.”
Today he lives with his family on a ranch outside Austin, Texas, and the change is plain in how he talks about it. “Being in Austin, I don’t feel bad about saying no to those things because it would be silly to get on a plane and fly there to go to some drinks meeting.” What struck me most was what the lower cost of living bought him. For The Obstacle Is the Way, he took much less money, knowing he would make it up on the back end, and he didn’t care that his publisher didn’t see the potential he saw. “If my living expenses were two or three x, I would have let them convince me that that wasn’t the right next move.”
Most of us don’t have a print franchise to hand off, but we do have our own version of that New York apartment. It might be a status symbol, or a lifestyle we’re unwilling to give up, or a city we feel we have to live in. So we create just to keep the lights on, and then we have no margin to do the work we actually want to be doing.
You’ve probably heard the old saying about fast, cheap, and good: pick two. When we take on too much at once, we want to do good work but can’t get it done fast, so we end up pricing ourselves on the cheap side. Cal’s argument turns that around. Do less at one time, and you get faster and better together. Once the word gets around that you’re both fast and good, you no longer have to be cheap.
The hardest part is the very beginning. Doing less once you can already command premium rates balances the books, but you can’t do that from day one, because you haven’t earned the right yet. There is a stretch where you do less and make less, and that stretch is the price of admission. Franklin paid it, and so did Ryan. Not everyone is willing to, and I’d rather you decide on purpose than find out by accident.
Part fourSlow doesn’t mean unfinished.
A reasonable worry at this point is that slow productivity sounds like moseying through the workday. Marc Zao Sanders, author of Time Boxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time, offers a useful check on that. Notice that he said boxing, not blocking. His definition comes in four parts.
Time blocking covers the first three. You choose the right thing, you pick a time, and you protect it. The fourth part is what makes time boxing outcome focused. Marc’s example is a 500-word blog. If you block nine to ten for it, you’ll have made some good progress relative to being distracted, but you won’t necessarily have the 500 words. If you box it, you’re charging yourself to finish. The words won’t be perfect, because no set of 500 words is, but you’ll have something to share with someone for a further edit.
He adds a halfway check that I like. At the 30-minute mark, if you’ve written 400 words, you’re ahead of schedule and can focus more on quality. If you’ve written 200, you need to speed up and sacrifice a little quality. Either way, you get something done in the time, and you pass the baton to a colleague, a client, or a friend.
I’d add that a time block can quietly fall prey to pseudo productivity, because it’s often nothing more than busyness with a little bit of planning. A box asks for a finish.
Speed is the result of a series of consecutive completions.
If you want to improve the quality of your output, finish fast, because you can always revise. Working on fewer projects gives you the focus to refine what you’ve finished until it’s good enough. Then people marvel at how you made something so good so fast, and work like that can’t be cheap.
Make it practical
Four moves for this week.
None of these requires permission to start. Each one makes the load visible, or lighter, or finishable.
Once, then keep it current
Make the plate visible
Cal’s advice is to be explicit about what you’re working on and its status. A public list makes the conversation with your boss easy, because it isn’t defensive. It’s a request to help you prioritize.
Do thisWrite down every active project with its status, and put the list where your manager can see it.
Every new request
Ask the swap question
A friend of mine, a global creative chief, used this when his manager brought him an impossible workload. It helped everyone understand what was really being asked.
Do thisSay, “I love that idea. Which of these other things that we’re currently working on would you like me to put on the back burner so that we can take that on?”
Halfway through the box
Box one finish
Marc’s four parts (what, when, one, enough) turn a protected hour into a completed piece of work.
Do thisPick one task, set a start and end time, define “enough,” and check your progress at the halfway mark.
One honest look
Price your runway
Ryan’s move to Texas bought him the freedom to say no and to take bigger creative risks.
Do thisName one expense or status symbol that forces you to take work you don’t want, and decide whether it’s worth what it costs.
Any one of these will feel small, and that’s fine. Franklin’s trade was a single conversation with David Hall. If you’d like these moves on one page, the free Action Guide for this episode is at toddhenry.com/start, because it’s not what you know but what you do that matters.
Choose one
Which move will you make first?
Tap the one you’ll try this week.
I started in Chicago, in the spring of 1886, with people who fought and died over the length of a workday. I understand why. Hours are countable, and a fight needs something you can count. But the eight hours, once won, turned out to be a container, and we’ve been stuffing it with more than any person can hold ever since, using a factory’s logic on work that doesn’t run on cranks and clocks.
The next fight is smaller than the one they waged. It happens quietly, at your desk, in the moment someone hands you one more thing and you feel the pull to prove you’re useful by saying yes. Franklin faced it with a print shop, and Ryan faced it with an apartment in New York. You’ll face it with whatever is on your calendar tomorrow.
The question
What will you take off your plate so the work that matters can finally leave the ground?
You can’t do everything, but you can do something remarkable if you give it room.
People once fought for the eight hours. The work now is deciding what deserves them.
Hear the full episode. Daily Creative, episode 14: Slow Productivity.
Listen to the episode
Todd Henry
Todd teaches leaders and teams how to be brave, focused, and brilliant. He’s the author of seven books, including Herding Tigers and The Brave Habit, and host of the Daily Creative podcast.
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