From the latest iPhone’s processor to home delivery apps to team communication tools like Slack, our modern world is all about speed. But at a certain point, what if humans react like Tom Cruise's supersonic jet in Top Gun: Maverick when he pushes it past Mach 10 and it burns up? There has to be a tipping point at which more speed, less rest, and greater intensity start to yield diminishing returns and then, eventually, pushes us off the edge of the burnout cliff. But what if we can change the way we work to prevent ever getting to that point?  

In his new book, Slow Productivity, Cal Newport states that “The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that ‘good’ work requires increasing busyness – faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation.”

One of the challenges Newport believes we’re facing is that the measurements for productivity have become too nebulous. Sure, you can work for a hard-driving sales director for whom quarterly targets are everything, or toil in a marketing department that quantifies every metric to the nth degree and is always aiming for more likes, clicks, and views. But most roles don’t have the kind of solid outputs that industrialists like Henry Ford loved, like the number of cars rolling off the assembly line every day and the average amount of time it took to complete each one.

As a result, it’s often hard to tell when or if our boss thinks we’re doing a good job, a bad one, or somewhere in between. Due to the lack of clarity, we also struggle to evaluate our own effectiveness and value beyond simply completing as many routine tasks as possible. This is the enemy of doing the kind of deep work that Newport has praised in his previous books – the projects that satisfy the soul during their creation and conclude with an end result you can be proud of.

“In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness, we also gravitate away from deeper efforts toward shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list,” he wrote in Slow Productivity. “Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety – it’s safer to chime in on email threads and ‘jump on’ calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.”

In other words, we become engaged in pseudo-productivity, constantly feeling the need to look busy, start new tasks every few hours, and endlessly talk about them with our colleagues. This is weaponized by technology, which enables endless back and forth messages, constant meetings, and ticking check boxes for infinite small tasks in online task management tools.   

A Blueprint for Slowness

Newport believes that the three-stage antidote to the problems caused by going too fast is:

1)    Do fewer things

“Toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things, as it chokes our schedule in administrative kudzu and splinters our attention into fragments too small to support original thinking,” Newport wrote. His solution is to heed the words of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and “do less, better.” One way to do so is to set daily “office hours,” during which you let colleagues know that you’re available to gather and discuss anything pressing. Limiting your availability like this will give you back more meeting-free time to focus on the few high priority projects at the top of your list.

2)    Work at a natural pace

Newport believes that we’ve become stuck in a cycle of going so fast and so hard for so long that it has become our new normal to feel like we’re constantly close to a breaking point. Yet he offers potent examples – from Galileo to Marie Curie – to show how people in the past who pursued a more leisurely cadence actually came up with more meaningful and enduring discoveries. “Don’t rush your most important work,” Newport recommended. “Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.”  

3)    Obsess over quality

One of the main casualties of working too fast for too long is quality control. When our attention is splintered by excess quantity and we have to go at warp speed to keep up with the illusion of urgency, our standards can slip. Recommitting to doing your best requires you to be more selective and recalibrate your pace. “The first principle of slow productivity argues that you should do fewer things because overload is neither a humane nor pragmatic approach to organizing your work,” Newport wrote. “Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable.”

Why Working Faster and Longer Isn’t Better

Carl Honoré is another countercultural thinker who is encouraging us to stay below our natural speed limit or suffer the consequences. He has been writing about the virtues of downshifting for 20 years. In his first book on the topic, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, Honoré took aim at the trend of every task being made to seem urgent and needing to be completed ASAP.

“Of course, speed has a role in the workplace,” he wrote. “A deadline can focus the mind and spur us on to perform remarkable feats. The trouble is that many of us are permanently stuck in deadline mode, leaving little time to ease off and recharge. The things that need slowness – strategic planning, creative thought, building relationships – get lost in the mad dash to keep up or even just to look busy.”

A big part of the problem is the way that the standard workday is set up. Since the Industrial Revolution, every 24 hours has been divided into rigid shifts. With the advent of the electric lightbulb, it became possible for factory owners to get their employees to work around the clock. While this rarely happens in developed countries in quite the same way today, there are some parallels, with many software companies having teams of programmers in Europe or Asia beavering away at all hours, while everyone at the American HQ goes hard and fast from eight AM to 5 PM.

The compensation model from the Industrial Revolution has perpetuated too, with it still being the norm to pay people for a certain number of hours, whether they’re salaried, on a contract, or compensated hourly. When this is the way that value is defined, it’s natural for an employer to try and squeeze more and more out of each employee and to drive them to do their work faster.

This has encouraged presenteeism to perpetuate. As a result, we’re expected to always respond in seconds to DMs, make ourselves constantly available for yet more meetings, and constantly refresh our inboxes to ensure we’re immediately aware of new assignments. And with so-called productivity apps, calendars, and inboxes on our phones, the expectation for a rapid reply extends around the clock, no matter where we are. And then, if it’s task-related, we’re meant to not just respond, but also immediately get to work. But at a certain point, you can’t keep up with the continual increase in pace, which is where mental health declines and burnout kicks in.

Perhaps counterintuitively, a Stanford University professor found that hitting an upper threshold in work hours also starts to take a toll on the amount and quality of work you complete. “In his research, economics professor John Pencavel found that productivity per hour declines sharply when a person works more than 50 hours a week,” an MSN story stated. “After 55 hours, productivity drops so much that putting in any more hours would be pointless. And those who work up to 70 hours a week are only getting the same amount of work done as those who put in the 55 hours.”

Pursuing a New Approach to Creative Work

Honoré argues that the constant pressure to produce work faster during long set hours is out of step with our modern economy, in which jobs demand ingenuity and “the kind of creative thinking that seldom occurs at a desk and cannot be squeezed into fixed schedules.” One of the fixes he proposes to the endless demands of doing more work at a quicker pace is empowering people to set their own schedules. While there is something to be said for a team keeping a few common hours open to collaborate, why should it matter if someone gets their tasks done before dawn, at midday, or in the evening?

“Studies show that people who feel in control of their time are more relaxed, creative and productive,” Honoré wrote. Once you have this kind of autonomy and can toggle the need to perform on and off, you will be able to decide when you need to work quickly and when to slow down. The latter will provide a greater opportunity to connect disparate ideas, come up with new ones, and be imaginative.