On Time: Cal Newport pushes us to embrace slow productivity

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Busywork is no stand-in for productivity

Last week in the first episode of our series on how we make the most of time we have, we got literal and granular about how we put the hours in our days to best use. We talked about logging our days in 15-minute chunks to explore where we were wasting time–and to see if we were really living our values. 

Today, I want to take a step back. If we're really going to explore what it means to use our time well, we can’t limit our conversation to how to do more or different things. That’s a fast path to burnout.

Our guest is Cal Newport. He’s a computer science professor at Georgetown, and a writer. For the last several years, his work has focused on how to help workers around the world get more done by becoming less distracted. His most recent book is called SLOW PRODUCTIVITY: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. 

He invites us to rethink our ideas about productivity altogether. Historically, the way we thought about it came from a time when people worked on farms. And then in factories. How many ears of corn can you show for your day? How many cars came off the assembly line.

A half a century ago, when people started working in offices and the idea of knowledge work emerged, we began to look for new ways to evaluate how productive someone was. And that barometer became activity. How busy did you look when you were sitting at your desk, answering phones or eventually, returning emails?

Cal has a word for this. He calls it pseudo-productivity. And it basically means busywork. It tells us little about what a person has accomplished. He asks us to think of time differently–not as something to fill up, but as a path to outcomes. And, he offers suggestions for how to DO work in a way that lands us at those bigger outcomes.

You can find the episode here, or listen below:

☕ Office Hours: Let's talk about productivity

This week on Office Hours, our producer Sarah Storm gets into the myths of being productive. How should we think about it as a community? As usual, we'll go live at 3pm EST on Wednesday. You can rsvp by clicking on the link below and you can even get a calendar invite now, or you can always find us on the LinkedIn News Page.

Hello Monday is LinkedIn News’ weekly podcast about the changing nature of work—and how we must change to keep up. It's hosted by me, Jessi Hempel. Subscribe to the show's newsletter.

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