Book Review - Cal Newport's Slow Productivity - DBR 035

Do Busy Right

This will be a review of Cal Newport's book, Slow Productivity. By the way of introduction, if you've listened to much of my podcast, you know that I pay a fair amount of attention to Cal and what he's doing, because I think he's really bright, really focused on the idea of productivity. If you don't know who he is, you should take a look. He's written several books over his career. He did a Ph.D. in computer science at MIT and then got a tenure track job at Georgetown, where he researches computer science. Cal writes books on the subject of productivity, and he's very thoughtful about that sort of stuff. So just about anything he's written is thought provoking on this subject. In Slow Productivity, he thinks a lot about how to be very effective in his variety of knowledge work. And then he takes that and generalizes it and helps us all understand knowledge work productivity. He's written some fairly controversial ideas. He wrote a book titled A World Without Email, where he does case studies of companies that have gotten rid of email internally. He has some ideas about why, exactly, email might be bad for productivity. It has a lot to do with who assigns whom work, and how do we take this stuff on. Cool Grandpa (with Greg Payne) podcast guest episode

• https://cool-grandpa.us/2024/06/ep-187-doing-busy-right-with-larry-tribble/ (available now)

What’s slow productivity about?

• Cal takes on the notion of “pseudo productivity”
• He tries to bring in the notion of slowness to our productivity processes.

Who is this book for?

• At the end of chapter 2, Cal mentions “[this book] targets in particular anyone who has a reasonable degree of autonomy in their job”. He re-addresses this idea in the conclusion.
• Good for him.
• I think this note should be quite cautionary. I’m not sure that the prescriptive ideas should/could be applied in other areas.
• That said, Cal is always interesting and (given his acknowledged constraints and target audience) very insightful.

What I’m looking for in this book

• Why and how would we slow down? It’s counter-intuitive.
• The notion of productivity in the book
• Ideally, we would see an experiment, but that's not currently possible
• So we look for definitional / theoretical things
• Cal’s Definition of knowledge work - “the economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort”
• It has to have market value
• How do we measure knowledge worker productivity?
• Quality and value in knowledge work
• Definition of quality? Not yet.
• Cal’s ideas about quality (as relates to value)

Attention compass is the knowledge work tool for organizing knowledge work Overhead tax

• What is it?
• Overhead tax is related to task switching
• Computers can APPEAR to multitask
• Humans have nowhere to ‘park’ the previous state
• Since we (humans) can’t multitask…
• ... we talk about focus and extending that period of time
• Overhead tax of ongoing projects – where’s the stuff?
• Overhead tax of picking up and putting down (even on a solo project)
• Overhead tax is related to task status
• Understanding and maintaining a view of status is very hard
• Overhead tax is related to team communications
• Overhead tax is related to complexity of the project’s situation
• Overhead tax is variable, but never zero (per project)
• A task is at it’s most complex while it is in-progress
• Total overhead tax is related to the number of concurrent ‘projects’

Cal's tip on the challenge of managing time

• One for you and one for me

Takeaway: Work on the overhead tax

• Overhead tax takes on two primary forms:
• Related to the number of projects underway
• Related to the ‘complexity’ of each project underway
• The book highlights components of the overhead tax:
• Task switching - Also starting and stopping
• Status reporting
• Team communication
• In progress = high complexity
• Attention Compass addresses overhead tax

Idea to avoid: “obsess over quality”

• I worry when Cal talks about ‘obsessing over quality’
• Does obsessing over quality lead to procrastinating on delivery
• Products really have no value until they’re delivered Work in progress is bad

Takeaways:

• If you want to explore Cal’s work for the first time, I would go with Digital Minimalism or A World Without Email.
• If you’re in early career, you could hardly do better than So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
• If you’re a long-time Cal reader (as I am) this is a great extension of his larger, stated purpose.