 Well, welcome to ShowCal, great to have you. Of course, thanks for having me. And you know, the title of the book for me sounds like an oxymoron. I know for a lot of our listeners too, especially the clients we work with, when we think of productivity, we think of speed. So what do you mean by slow productivity and how did this project come about? Well, I mean, I think the fact that it sounds like an oxymoron, it gets to the whole motivation for writing the book. I mean, where this came about was I wanted to answer what I thought was a pretty straightforward question, which was how can you produce work that's good that you're proud of, it's meaningful, you can support your family on it without burning out and without letting work take over a larger and larger portion of your actual life? Like this seemed like a simple question. And so the problem, when you try to answer this question, the first problem you face is the way we think about productivity in knowledge work today is broken. It's why when you hear that term slow productivity, you think something's wrong, right? This is an oxymoron. So if you look into it, what's going on is in knowledge work, productivity came to mean activity, right? So activity is a crude approximation of useful effort. If we can see you doing something that's better than if we can't, this is really different, by the way, than the way we've thought about productivity for hundreds of years before that. I mean, before that productivity was typically very quantitative and clear. It was model T's per labor hour input. It was bushels of wheat per acre of land. We had ratios, we had systems, we were evaluating knowledge work that all fell apart. So we just said activity. More activity is better than less. I call this pseudo productivity. And basically my claim is that system fell apart once we got things like email and we had portable computers and we got smartphones and work became endless and it could follow us anywhere. And we could demonstrate activity digitally at any point. That whole pseudo productivity regime fell apart. So slow productivity is my alternative. All right, we got to start from first principles and rethink productivity to actually make sense. So for those in the audience that aren't familiar with knowledge work, what do you mean by knowledge work? It's a loose term, but I typically use it to mean people who sit at a desk or look at a computer screen for a living, which is an increasing part of the worldwide economy. Absolutely. More and more people, this is what they do. The formal definition is it's a job in which you add value to information using your brain. But that seems a little bit, little finicky to me. So I just like to think if you're looking at a computer, if you're annoyed by how much time you spend answering emails, you're a knowledge worker. And with that, your speed is often judged by the interactions of those around you. So when I think of slow productivity, if I'm slow to respond to a message, if I'm slow to get something done, everyone's gonna be on me in that team environment. Well, this is the problem with pseudo productivity. So activity, if that's our proxy for useful effort, what's the clearest way in a digital world to show activity? It's digitally. I'm answering the email really quickly. I'm on that Slack chat. I'm a Slack hero on all the Zoom meetings. And so this is the trouble we get in is that productivity reduces to just we all are talking to each other as much as possible. Yeah, and I talked to a lot of our clients who feel like they don't even have enough time in their day to actually do their productive work. They find that they take it home with them because during the day, they're in meetings, they're on Slack, they're answering email, they're doing all these activities that they know everyone else is looking at them for. But then when it comes to actual deep meaningful work for them and the big stuff that they have to move forward, they're doing it outside of working hours. It's absurd, right? But here's part of what happens with pseudo productivity is the work on each of our plates gets larger. So the number of things we say yes to that grows because it's A, very easy to put an obligation on someone's plate, you can just shoot them an email and B, no one tracks anyone else's workload. So the amount of things on our plate gets larger. So then what happens when we do too many things at once? Well, each of the things we said yes to brings with it its own administrative overhead, right? So if I say yes to this, whether I'm ready to work on it right now or not, it's gonna generate emails about it. It's gonna generate meetings where we have to talk about it. So I call this in the book overhead tax. So if you have more and more things you said yes to, you have to pay more and more overhead tax. And then eventually more and more of your day is dedicated to servicing from an administrative perspective what's on your plate as opposed to actually doing the work itself. And so you fall farther behind and more and more things pile up. And the only way out of it is I'm gonna wake up early, gonna work on the weekends, I'm gonna work at night. I mean, this is not just an ineffective way to work. I think it's deranging all day long. My God, I can't even work. We're just talking about it. And I think going along with that, we've talked a lot on the show about the rise of the loneliness epidemic and what goes to the wayside in this pseudo productivity situation is our relationships, family relationships, time for friends, time for anything outside of work. I mean, if we're coming home and doing our meaningful work, well, we're probably not meeting up with friends for dinner or we're probably not catching up with people. We don't have time in the pseudo productivity world. Yeah, it makes everything worse. So then we get increasingly unhappy. I mean, I think this is why we reached a tipping point on this during the pandemic. Right, I mean, I think that's when knowledge workers finally were saying enough is enough. The disruption gave people a little bit of distance so they could sort of look at, okay, what am I doing and ask those existential questions? Like, what is this? Why am I on Zoom for eight hours? You know, how is this possibly work? I mean, I just think things came to a head in the early pandemic and it fueled this large anti productivity movement which I think really picked up speed and that was really fueled by just a general frustration with the unsustainability of what knowledge work had become. And so people are ready now. Okay, we have to try something different. I was laughing on the car ride over here with my wife how one of her team members was asked to shoot a quick loom video for a client of a walkthrough of the software. And he was asked to do this by the co-founder of the company and I was like 440 in the afternoon yesterday. Early evening and he still hadn't gotten to it. And she started wondering knowing that that was something that she could easily do. Like, do I step in? Do I do the pseudo productivity work for someone else? Not thinking about, well, what are all the other things on that person's plate? Right? And I think a lot of us are now wired to pick up pseudo productivity for others just again to feel good about our to-do list and checking boxes and getting things done. Yeah, activity becomes this proxy. So activity feels good. Also one of the issues about our current world of work is I don't know what's on your plate. Right? Yeah. So we keep workloads and most of knowledge work obfuscated. It exists. In fact, I might not even know my full workload. It exists spread over individual email addresses and messages and Slack chats and informal conversations. No one knows what everyone else is working on. Everyone seems to have an attribution error where even though you know you're completely overloaded with things to do, you imagine the other person just sitting there with nothing to do. You see them as a vessel for executing your work, right? So you're like, hey, can you make this loom video? And then 10 minutes later, like, well, so why haven't you done it yet? Like I need this. Not realizing that, okay, they have 20 things on their plate and they can't even get to those 20 things because they're having email conversations about the 20 things. And it's why one of the ideas in the book is making workloads more transparent becomes a first step towards starting to tame them and getting away from this cycle of having so much to do that you have no time left to actually do it. So on that transparency piece, what I find really interesting and obviously we can talk about the rise of AI and how it folds into this technology piece, but it does feel, I mean, even internally in our company, when we have a new project, we spin up, you know, you have this tracking system, all these to-dos, all these meetings pre-populated and scheduled and it feels like we have a pretty good handle from a transparency situation on what everyone else is doing, but not really when it comes to the actual work in knowledge work. A lot of it again is, okay, did you get that outline? Did we do this one discrete thing, that quick action item? And it feels like transparency, but it's really not. Well, but even what you described, what you do already is 200% more transparent than most knowledge work firms, right? Because I think especially when you're technology adjacent, there's some better practices going on, right? Because if you look at a lot of this comes out of software development, and software development, it's knowledge work, but it also has one foot in the industrial because you're also producing a product on a timeline. So software development, they're more likely to experiment with more structured ways of thinking about workload. And so you get these agile methodologies come out of that sector where we do track work. Here they are, it's a card and it's on a board and it doesn't just exist on an individual person's plate. Here's the things that the project needs to get done, but each person maybe is just doing a sprint on one thing at a time. And then those ideas have percolated out some from peer software development to a lot of other technology adjacent areas, but most knowledge work doesn't even have that. So there's no notion of here's what we're working on and here's what individuals within the team are working on from this greater pile. In most knowledge work, everything that needs to be done is distributed among individuals. So it'll come in somewhere. Someone will think of something, a client will bother someone about something. And now it's obligation hot potato. This is on my plate. I don't want this to be on my plate. How can I get this on someone else's plate? Let me just send off a quick email. Hey, can you look into this? Now that email has implicitly put it on your plate. So now it's in your amorphous pile of things you have to do and then maybe you bounce another thing off to someone else. And so everything sits on people's plates as opposed to as you might see in like a peer software play. No, no, tasks sit assigned to the team until an individual takes them. And this is not just a semantic difference. It's a functional difference because once work is assigned to an individual, they have to pay the overhead tax. And so taking these 20 tasks and spreading them among four people, you've just made those four people's lives much worse because now they have to keep track of all four of these things. Whereas you'd be better off saying, no, no, these are over here. Just work on this. When you're done with this, we'll get something else. Like that is a better way of doing this. It's not how most knowledge work operates. Well, with that, there's this funny meme that's being popularized right now around shareholder value. And it's a lot of knowledge workers posting about what they're doing to derive shareholder value. And it just makes me think this concept of slow is so antithetical to shareholder value because every company wants to move faster, grow bigger and deliver for their shareholders. Yes. This is an interesting dilemma that I've really face looked into in my work over the years is a lot of these practices from an organizational perspective makes the organization less effective. So you're producing less shareholder value if everyone has 20 things on their plate and you have to email all day long and people are getting their work done in the evening, right? This is not, and we're gonna be very technical about it. It is like not a great way to get a good return on your investment in your neuronal capital. We're investing in a bunch of brains. We put a lot of money into this. We have to create buildings that are air conditioned and pay salary to all these things just so we can get brains to add value to information, right? That's the fundamental act of knowledge work. When we work this way, it's not a great return on that investment, right? So it's low shareholder return on value. Yet we don't see a lot of change to it, right? So there's this paradox. One of the explanations that I find somewhat convincing comes from an economic historian named Alfred Chandler. He wrote this book called The Visible Hand back in the 1970s, it won all the award Pulitzer Prize National Book Award. He got a Bancroft Prize, a lot of awards. And he was looking at the rise of big companies as a thing that really didn't exist until post-railroads. He's looked at the rise of big companies. And he said, one of the things that emerges out of this is what he called managerial capitalism, where it's not just, here's a relatively small company, here's the boss, he owns it. He's there and he knows everything that's going on and is relatively small what they do. He said, small companies are very susceptible to market signals. So if you run your small company better than another one, you'll all compete them. Big companies with huge collections of managers, he argued, they're more immune, their internal operation is more immune from market forces. So even if it's an ineffective way to run the company, there's other things you optimize for in terms of a big company that's different than just what's the best way to do this. Things like stability, avoiding risk. I mean, these are the things that become more important. So you can persist with a pretty ineffective way of working, even though it should, in theory, be affecting your bottom line. In modern knowledge work with these large managerial companies, there's just a buffer from the market pressure that would say, let's try something different. With that now, this rise of AI, there's more pressure on the individual knowledge worker to prove their worth almost in the pseudo productivity state of like, look at all this activity. And I know that I get a Slack report of who's on my Slack leaderboard and who's actually active. And I know as a boss, I wouldn't feel comfortable if I was being watched and managed every minute of the day with that oversight. But because we've brought this technology in, it feels easy to measure the pseudo productivity. And now we kind of have our elbows out. Like I got to prove that I'm valuable with all these companies downsizing. Well, and there's some irony here, right? Because here's my prediction is that what we're doing first in reaction to AI is exactly what you're talking about. Well, I want to be more human, which I think means I'm going to talk a lot because AI doesn't talk, I'm going to talk. And so yeah, I want to be very active so I can prove like I'm a worthwhile contributor. Look how many Slack chats I'm in. The reason why I think it's ironic though is where AI is heading within the professional sector is, you know, I really believe eventually it's going to take over more of that talking, right? I mean, where you really want to get to unlock productivity with sort of hybrid and AI models is I have my own chief of staff. It will figure out by talking to the other chief of staff agents of other people. It'll just talk directly with them, get me the information I need. We don't have to have a meeting. It can talk to other AIs and gather, okay, here's what we're doing. It can just like the president, the chief of staff, here's what you're working on next and here's everything you need, right? So it could give us a world, we're talking like two, three years out in which we no longer spend a lot of time on email or doing planning meetings. But here's where that's ironic. All that's going to be left in is the actual deep stuff. So if you've gotten used to what I do to show my worth as I email and chat all the time, when AI takes that over, all that's going to be left is oh, no, no, what is like the really hard creative deep stuff that you're producing for us because that's all people are doing now and there's nowhere else to hide. You can't signal your worth through just activity and a lot of people are going to be left in the lurch because they're like, this is what I got used to doing was being involved in talking about work. Now, I know for a lot of our clients who are in this state of just frenzy around activities when the first step of trying to create an even just time box and deep work for yourself, it brings up anxiety. And I almost wonder about the rise of ADHD around this. Like we're so used to living in this pseudo productivity world where it's just constant notifications and things buzzing that it's actually scary when we go sit down undistracted and do the actual deep work. Well, I mean, it also hit some primal instincts too, right? Because we think about what's going on while I'm trying to do deep work. There's messages gathering from people, like other people like to use the evolutionary terminology from our tribe. People in my tribe need things from me and I'm ignoring them. And we get distressed because we evolved in a context where don't ignore your tribe. No, you need to be part of it. You need to be a part of it. If they're tapping you on the shoulder and you're like, no, you're gonna ignore them. You're gonna get a club or a handaxe to the back of the head, right? I'm just left behind in the middle of the night. Yeah, it really matters, right? So we have a really hard time psychologically. So what we have to do, what we have to do about it is we have to reduce the amount of this sort of urgent needs response communication that's unfolding. And there's like two things we can do. We have to do both. One is we have to reduce the stuff we're working on concurrently. Everything brings with it its own conversations. Cut down the number of things we're actively working on. We cut down the number of ongoing conversations. We cut down the volume of this sort of urgent tribal communication. And then two, we have to take what's left and say, how are we gonna talk about this work? We could do the default, which is rock and roll. Let's just, I'll send you a message when I think about it. I hope you see that pretty soon and get back to me. And we'll just sort of go back and forth. Or we can come up with a better way to do this. Okay, here's when and how we talk about this. Here's our system for doing this work. The goal being, I don't want stuff showing up in an inbox, unscheduled, but urgent. Like if that's what I wanna get rid of, I'm not trying to be as time efficient as possible. I'm not trying to be as fast as possible. I'm not trying to be as high tech as possible. I want to minimize that sense of there's stuff waiting for me that someone needs an answer or there could be something that's waiting for me where someone needs an answer and I'd ever know. So what do I gotta do? I better keep checking. It's an interesting exercise that I've had a few of my clients go through around this thing where they feel this endless stream of inbox response that they need to interact with. And a lot of times there's one or two key areas where they really did need to react to that. It was something really urgent. It would have been painful for the business, it would have lost money, lost revenue, lost a customer. And that kind of gets stuck in your head and creates this always on need. And of course, the devices, well, they reward that with these notifications and getting the inbox zero and all of the fun stuff that goes along with that sense of accomplishment around pseudo productivity really work against us. Yeah, well, and the problem is because those occasional urgent things exist, you have to check all the time. And the checking is not cost free because when you check an inbox, you are being exposed to a lot of things where it's salient and it typically involves other people. And even if it's not urgent, it's still things that catches your mind's attention. So then your mind starts processing, let's start thinking about these other things. That's what our mind does. Like, oh, you know, like AJ needs this report. It's not urgent, but he needs to report. Let me start thinking about reports and then you start firing up those areas of your brain and inhibiting other areas of your brain. And then when you go back to what you were trying to work on, now you've scrambled all of your wiring. Like, I can't concentrate on this anymore. But this is why, you know, I'm a big believer in having systems for this type of communication. That's not unscheduled, right? I mean, like here's just a thought experiment. Like imagine you had office hours twice a day, meaning this half hour or 45 minutes, you know I'm available. Like my phone's on, Zoom's on, my door is open. And imagine you just had us set up with your clients. But they knew, like, okay, if I have something urgent or I need to get an answer, like the best way to do it is go to whatever the next office hours is and just like pick up the phone. They'll be there, we'll work this out in a couple minutes. Right? Now there's nothing to check in between. Yeah. You know, like I'm not too far at any point from one of these next office hours. The people who I know have tried this, they worried at first like a client or something is gonna say, no, no, no, no, I want accessibility. You're making my life harder. But that doesn't actually happen because what does a client want? What does your colleagues want? It's not accessibility, it's clarity. Right. How do I have an issue? I want clarity on how I get this issue resolved because until I have that clarity, it's floating around in my head and it's a source of stress. You know, I wanna get this resolved. If I know this is how this is gonna work, I can call you at this time and I'm gonna get an answer. I'm like, great, I know what to do here. And I feel good. If I don't have clarity, then I'm gonna demand accessibility. So I was like, look, I'm just gonna send this out here and I don't know until I get a response what's gonna happen with this. Then I'm gonna be like, respond, respond, respond. Come on, come on, come on. I don't wanna just sit here. Bump to the top of your inbox. Yeah, I don't wanna, because I'm wasting cognitive resources here wondering when you're gonna get back to me. So you might as well just be really quick. And I've seen this time and again when people have tried this. As long as there's clarity, here's how this thing gets resolved. People tend to be happy with it. They're like, I don't need you to respond. In fact, I don't want you to respond right away. I have other things I'm doing right now. I like the idea that you have a shared document somewhere, another thought experiment, where I can just throw on it, talk about this next time we chat, because now it's out of my head. I don't need you to email me right away. I just need a place I can put this or know there's a place I can go. I just set it down and know that we'll meaningfully pick it up when we're both ready. We'll pick it up. Yeah, there was a company once I profiled where they had their clients sign a communication agreement. Okay. Not just a contract for services rendered. A contract about this is how we're going to communicate. And they said, we have weekly meetings. We have a weekly call with you and we have an itinerary. And you can add to it, you know, whatever you want. And when we get to the call, we'll go through everything and then we will send you right after the call a written record. Like here's everything we talked about, everything we committed to. Like here's where thing is, they were terrified. We're going to lose all of our customers, right? Their customers are going to be like, no way. I want to just be able to email you whenever the customers loved it. Because like they don't actually want to deal with and start a conversation with you as soon as they think up an issue. They just want a way to get that issue off their mind. So knowing they could just write it down and it will for sure get discussed and we'll get discussed on Thursday and they'll have a written record of it once they discuss, they're happy. Yeah, there was a marketing agency we were working with a few years back and it was not quite that level of agreement but they basically outlined what their scope is very clearly and what communication around the scope would entail from their end. And anytime we deviated from that they just pointed back to the scope and said, hey, this is what we're really focused on. And what was interesting at first I felt very frustrated because it was like, well, there's this other thing that's kind of related to marketing that I think you should know. And they're like, no, let's just get back here. And what I found in that relationship after looking back over time we actually got a lot more done with them as our agency than the other agencies who were just throw it in the marketing hopper and let's talk about it in the next meeting and you end up just spending so much time focused on things that really aren't moving the goalposts forward for what you really wanted to get done. I don't know if you remember this but in the late 90s, early 2000s I had a web development firm in this period. Back then there was this big idea with this fantastic idea and it's what we did but it was what everyone was doing in that space of the client extranet, right? Remember this? So it was like the client portal and you would log in and it was, here's the, it would be a calendar and you would see like all the upcoming meetings and you had all these briefs and they would sign the brief and it would be posted and everything was laid out. Like this is every step. This is when we're gonna talk about it. Also there was a work progress blog was a big thing. So the client could see like, okay, here's what's happening. There's movement. They work, there's movement or whatever and it was fantastic. We had to rely on that because when I ran this company I was in high school, right? Because this was the first.com boom. And the first.com boom, people were like, if you're young that means you know a lot about technology. Like it was crazy. There's no reason to be hiring a 17 year old to do this but I took full advantage of people not understanding the internet. So I was in high school before cell phones. So there was no way to contact me, right? You're actually in class. I was literally in class and it was fine because like the mode back then is you had communication briefs and client extra nets and the client could log in. I think you could leave questions there. You could see what we were. Yeah, it's like commentary discussion board. Yeah. There's what's going on. And it was very well structured. As you're talking about like with the marketing firm you looked at, you would have these various briefs and you would work through the briefs and meetings and then you'd commit to paper what you were doing and you'd have the customer sign it and then you would post the sign thing. And so we could run a company in high school with no way to contact us during the day without it even being a problem. But then I've talked to web designers more recently and they lament those days to like, I wish we could go back because it just sort of fell apart as all of knowledge work became more subsumed by this hyperactive hive mind if everyone can reach everyone everywhere the extra net era went away. Yeah, it was one point of contact. And now I mean they could find my LinkedIn. They could find a comment on this exact podcast on our blog to interact with me. There's just so many channels for that communication to happen. And it feels like almost every time you try to like wall off one like another one pops up. Yeah, well, so we went from a slower model to steal the term from the book. We went from a potentially slower model of productivity to a faster model. The whole knowledge work industry basically fell into this hyperactive fast productivity. All of this started roughly in the 2000s, right? Because you get the front office IT revolution in the 90s. So, hey, we have a computer at every desk. These computers are networked. And they have this thing called email. And then the 2000s laptops come along as being a much more like accessible option. So now we could work from home. You get more ubiquitous internet. And the whole thing begins to spiral out of control. That's why, you know, in the 90s you might still have an extra net and we're gonna, here's how we communicate. And it was, you know, okay, we get this. This makes sense. But by, you know, 2005. No, let's just, we got to be able to reach you all the time. Like this is what work has become. And people don't realize how sudden that was. I mean, there's a researcher named Sophie Leroy, right? And she did this great work on what's called attention residue. So sort of studying how we, when our attention is fragmented in modern work it really reduces our ability to think, right? This was her thing. But her story is what was so cool, right? Is that she had been in, I guess, graduate school. So studying sort of psychology, organizational psychology. It was like, eh, whatever. I don't think I want to go in academia. Like she discovered you can buy things with money. So she's like, I'm gonna go back to the working world, right? So then she returned to the working world. She was doing consulting in New York. And the things had changed. This was the early 2000s. Things had changed so much since when she had been in work in the 90s versus when she returned to the 2000s. Things got so much faster. People had so many more things on their plate. There's so much more communication. She said, oh, I got to go back to academia because someone has to study this. This change happened overnight. And she went back and sort of wrote the definitive work on distraction. It was like a five-year period. She left work when the grad school came back and was like, the whole world is different. It changed in that period. I know my first job, there was never any reason to reach out to anyone else on the team outside of working hours. I would never pick up a phone outside of working hours. It would wait till the following day in a meeting. We would discuss it, or even at the water cooler. But I would never call anyone outside of nine to five. And now the expectation is, why are you not responding outside of those hours? Yeah, it would be convenient if you would just respond. Yeah, it's the ongoing conversation never stops. Yeah, I mean, that's fast productivity. That's pseudo productivity. So we talked a little bit about this before we hopped in here. I've had the luxury of traveling, spending a lot of time in Italy, and you talk about the slow food movement in the book around this concept of slow. And one of the things that's always been funny when we invite our other American friends, Western friends to come join us in Italy for a meal, how they're like getting antsy around, getting the bill, and like we gotta check our phones and we gotta like, why are we not moving fast? And sometimes they'll get upset like, I wish we could just tip them so they would move faster. And my wife and I just laughed because we're like, no, we actually enjoy this. Like we love that things move this slow. We could savor each course. There's no rush to move forward onto the next one or leave, but it is very different for those of us who are in the pseudo productivity mindset in all facets of our life to just enjoy a long meal with friends. Well, I mean, so it was surprising to me how much slow food actually influenced my work on slow productivity. I mean, I looked into slow food just because of the word slow, right? So I thought this would be tangential, you know, like, well, I'm working on slow productivity as a concept that I should know, like why are other things called slow, but actually the philosophical substructure of slow productivity owes a lot to the philosophical substructure of slow food. So like here's the way it influenced me. I didn't know much about slow food till I looked into it. And it turns out it has two really big ideas. You know, one, in responding to a sort of result of modernity you don't like. So the sort of fast food culture in this particular issue. Don't just critique, offer a positive alternative, right? That's the first of the two big ideas of slow food, right, Petrini was saying, I wanna offer you a approach to cuisine that makes McDonald's superfluous. I'm not gonna just say why McDonald's is bad. I'm gonna make it superfluous, right? Two, don't invent the new approach from scratch. Look back to existing traditions because these traditions have probably formed over years through cultural evolution. Yeah, so look back to the way your great grandmother ate. Don't just say, here looking forward, I can invent a new way to eat. Both of those ideas I ended up adopting as I went deeper in the slow productivity. So like first, don't just critique what's going on with fast productivity. I mean, we've had plenty of critique here, but the anti-productivity movement that arose and got accelerated by the pandemic, largely just critiques, right? It's just productivity is bad. It wants to blame it. It's a lot of looking for blame. It's capitalism. No, it's not capitalism. It's sort of social media hustle culture. No, it's just trying to find things to blame, which is fine, but kind of stops there. But slow food was said, no, you got to offer the alternatives. So slow productivity is an alternative to the fast productivity, not just a critique. And then two, and this was the more surprising one, looking back at traditional culture. And like, well, where are their traditional knowledge workers, right? Like this knowledge work was coined in the 1950s. But what I realized is, if you look back historically, we have a lot of traditional knowledge workers. It's the artists, it's the playwrights, it's the philosophers, it's the scientists, the monks. These are all people who made a living using their brain. And of course, their circumstances are very different. So we can't literally copy how they work. Hey, let's work like a monk. Like we can't go to a monastery. Like I have to go to meetings, right? But what we can do is recognize, like with slow cuisine, they had a lot of freedom and flexibility to experiment with what works best. If you are an artist who is a patron of the Meta Cheese, you had a lot of flexibility. What really works best for creating stuff with my mind? So we can see them as these little natural experiments of what's the right way to do stuff with your mind, to produce value with your mind. Then we can isolate those principles and then adapt them to modern knowledge work, right? And that's what I ended up doing. That was all slow food that inspired me to do that. That was the breakthrough. That's why this book doesn't cite a bunch of social psych studies. And instead, it's stories. It's, you know, it's Jane Austen. It's George O'Keefe. It's Newton. It's Galileo. It's Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's Mary Oliver. It's realizing like, oh, they're the ones who did the work of figuring out what works when producing value with your brain. And then I did the work of saying, so how do we bring that to a job or have a laptop and meetings and a boss or whatever? And it turns out a lot of the principles they discovered can be adapted to modern knowledge work. So one thing that really stands out to me there is just, you know, with the names and the stories in the book, you know, famous for their knowledge work, yet all of it happening slow. So they obviously understood this and I'd love to unpack the three principles in the book and we can start to talk about some practical ways that we can bring these into culture for ourselves. Cause I feel in, and I'm sure in a lot of our listeners' minds this concept of, okay, that all sounds great. I'm feeling all of this pressure, but how do I actually do it? Yeah, so that's where all the interesting stuff comes. Right, like you discover these principles and you figure out how it can apply. So we'll just start, I'll summarize like the three big principles, right? Just so we're all sort of oriented. So like the three big things that came out from studying these traditional knowledge workers should work on fewer things, right? Notice that doesn't mean complete fewer things. So people get stressed about this. Not complete fewer things, but work on fewer things. Work on fewer things at once. This will actually probably mean you complete more things but you have less on your plate at once. Two, work at a natural pace. So it's not just, it's taking longer. It's having more variation. There's periods of big intensity and periods of lower intensity, like trying to get away from this homogenized eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, like we're just like in a factory, always trying to just be all in instead have way more variation. And then three, obsess over the quality of what you do. Those three principles together that will get you to a much slower way of thinking about productivity. Yeah, I think it's a great framework as we approach our to-do list and think about all of those tasks on our plate. And exactly the first thing fewer, everyone's like, but I have to complete these things for all the other team members who are tapping me on the shoulder virtually in all of these different capacities. Yeah, but here's the reality of it. So first of all, why should we do this? Then second of all, we can say how to do it. Why we should do this is this overhead tax we were talking about. So if you have more things on your plate, you spend more of your time servicing the administrative overhead, not accomplishing the task, but servicing the administrative overhead. The more time you spend dedicated administrative overhead, the less time you spend actually accomplishing things. And it's not as if the administrative overhead nicely lumps together. No, no, no, it spreads out over your day, which makes it harder and harder for you to make any real progress on actually completing things. So if you have less things on your plate at a time, your ratio of administrative overhead to execution gets a lot smaller, which means the rate at which things finish goes up, right? So there's a deep motivation to wanting to do this. It's actually a better way to process through a list of things. Now the question is how do we actually pull this off? And one of the points I wanna make is you say no all the time already, right? You don't happen just coincidentally to exist in a work environment where the amount of work coming your way is just like exactly matching how much time you have available. No, everyone is just throwing stuff at everyone else. And you're saying no all the time. So it's not as if you're not saying no. So what are you really doing here is you're just changing the threshold of where you say no. Yeah, it's a problem with the triage, right? It's just like an emergency room. It's like if you just took every patient who walked in at any given time, well, there's even people who are dying in the emergency room because they have much more severe injuries than a person with a cough or a sniffle. And for a lot of us, we're just not triaging the work as it's coming in as effectively as we can. What most people end up doing, they're heuristic for workload management is because they think what they're doing by the way is I say yes to everything. No, you say no to a lot of things. So what do they do? What's their metric? Is they use stress as their governor on workload, right? So you asked me to do something. There's a social capital cost to saying no, right? If however, my workload has grown so high that I'm just completely anxious and stressed out, then I have psychological cover to pay that social capital cost. So the pain of my workload is now sufficiently high to outweigh the pain of having to say no to you in the moment, right? That's how most people actually govern their workflow. The problem is, is this means that you have engineered your workload to always be 20 or 30% too high, right? Because you're using I'm about to burn out as your metric. This is why by the way, a lot of people spiraled out of control in the first two or three months of the pandemic is because people operate typically at this level of I have 20% too much to do. Then the pandemic came and the switch to remote generated all at once. They can extra 20% of tasks that had to be done right away. So people had this sort of dump of new work unexpectedly. Well, if you're already 20% overloaded and then someone adds 20% more work essentially overnight, people just spiraled out of control. And this is where I began to get reports from readers and listeners of mine who are saying, I'm in Zoom meetings eight hours a day. What is that? That is administrative overhead has now taken every minute of your day, right? And that's from people. Invisibility, right? That's the one thing that comes into the equation here when we were going into the office together and your office door was closed or you were at your cubicle and you were staring at a screen. We could mentally be like that person's busy. I probably shouldn't bother them. But then that visibility was completely removed in work from home. Yeah, then you're an empty vessel that can do my work. There's this cool story. It's not actually in this research study but the researcher told me about it. So just a Gloria Mark is a researcher who's really the top thinker and a researcher on what goes on in the office with workloads and attention, right? So she has this paper, which is really cool because what they did in this paper is they went to this company and said, we're gonna take a dozen employees and just turn off their email. And we're not gonna give them like a big heads up. We just wanna, it was like, let's see what happens. It's like a research methodology where it's like, let's just break something and see what goes wrong. Like that's how we're gonna understand it, right? It's like pull out this cable and see what breaks. Now we know what this cable does. So they took 12 employees and just said no email for a week and they watched them and they studied them. And they were actually, they liked it, not surprisingly. They were productive, not surprisingly. But Gloria told me a story that wasn't in the paper but about one of the subjects from the paper. And it was a guy who part of his job because this was like a, they did research and development lab. Part of his job was setting up one of the research labs and it was sort of a time consuming thing to do. And he was always really annoyed because his boss would email him, like all these things. What about this? What about that? And he'd have to keep stopping what he was doing and answer these emails and it really slowed him down. So then when this guy was selected to be email free, he told Gloria, like, oh, this is great. My boss doesn't bother me anymore. I can just sort of like set this up. And what made the story cool was his boss's office was three doors down from the lab where he was setting up. So just that extra friction of I have to walk 12 feet down the hallway and be like, hey, Bob, can you do this for me? Just that extra friction got rid of the bulk of the stuff that he was being asked to do. So I think you're on to something when you get rid of all of the social capital cost. And it's not just a shut door. It's also like, if I have to look you in the eye and ask you to do something, I have to actually confront that I am, it's a social debt I've just created and I'm a little bit more certain. I'm putting something on you. I'm putting something on you. None of that exists digitally. And we don't, I can't see it. Drop down the sign, okay, this is your to do. And all of a sudden that person's list is tripled. Yes, that's the, walking 10 feet and saying, hey, can you do this versus email? Yeah. Most of the work go away. The boss was like, I, this actually doesn't raise, I don't want to pay the cost. I'll just take care of it. It's not really that important. Well, what's fascinating to me is that stress is a governor. It's kind of the same thing I experienced in Italy around food. It's like, as an American, you see American portions and then you go to Italy and you're like, oh, this pasta portion. But when it's slowed down, you actually don't overwhelm your system and eat more than you need to eat. And then you come back from Italy and it's like, I ate pasta and pizza and I lost weight. Well, yeah, because you were just going slow. Right, right. The Americans problem is not that they eat pizza, it's that they eat half the pizza. Right. 30 seconds because they got into that slack. Yeah, yeah. Yes, we get something similar with work, right? You slow down in this analogy, the quality of what you produce now goes up, right? I mean, the big thing about slow productivity is the hard parts can get started. Because once this flywheel's turning, the results start to come, right? No one's bothering you about your workload when you're shipping faster than anyone else. When you start obsessing over quality and you start getting really good at something, now you have a lot of control over your job and people are like, okay, how do you want to do this, right? I mean, it's a really positive, self-reinforcing loop. The scariest part of slow productivity, it's that first month where you're convinced everything's about to fall apart, you know? I know for a lot of our listeners, they're not quite in leadership positions yet. They want to move to that place, right? The middle manager and above role where it's a lot easier to delegate and it feels like you have more control over what that workload could be, but how do we get started on fewer things when it feels like everyone around us just wants to keep coming at us with more? So a lot of the ideas in the book, I'm now realizing, come back to the strategy of making your workload more transparent, right? So instead of having it just be something you know about and no one else does, put it in front of other people's face, right? And there's a lot of ways to do this, but here's a way that it started as a thought experiment but people are actually doing it. So now I describe this as like, this is real advice. All right, so you have like a shared document and at the top of it, it says, here's the things I'm actively working on right now. And you can keep that to like two or three things. And then below it, here's the QA things, you know, I've agreed to work on next and in the order I'm gonna do them. And now when someone comes to you and says like, hey, can you do this thing for me? You say, yeah, go throw it on the workload document, right? And make sure I have, you know, you can point me towards whatever information you need to do it or this or that. They now have to confront, oh, this is everything on your plate. And so this is, you're not actively working on this right now, you're working on these three things and there's six things ahead of it, you know? And now I'm recalibrated. I'm not even gonna hear from you about this for like another month. And in fact, maybe then I'm not even gonna put this on your plate because you clearly don't have the cycles to do it. And it's not some amorphous claim of busyness, it's concrete of these things going on. You can even tell people, just keep an eye on this document. You can see, am I working on it actively or you can watch it like march up towards the active work? Like there's no, you don't even need to bother, you're not gonna do meetings until it gets up there. It sounds preposterous, right? But it's not at all actually when people try it. If people like, okay, I get what you're doing, I get where this is. If I'm your boss, I can also now make decisions with you about prioritization. Like I can come in and say, not just this is a priority, but this is the thing I want you to de-prioritize, right? So now they have to actually, they can be helpfully involved in prioritizing. And you're free to just work on the things at the top of that list. Everyone else sort of knows, I'm waiting till my thing gets up there to accomplish. It gives you a lot of breathing room. You think it's good to annoy people, it doesn't. Again, clarity trumps accessibility. What's interesting is it introduces that social capital to all team members now. Because typically in these situations, it's just you and the other person. But now if they have to bump someone else's priority on that list, then they gotta go explain why theirs got bumped down. And now it's much more collaborative than just here's a load of work. I want you to do this for me. That starts to dissipate. Now if you work in a team, another simple easy thing to do is to say, okay, we have a document of what our team needs to work on and we will keep that separate from individual people's plates. And then separately, people are working on individual things from these. In fact, you could even go through and put your initials on this list next to the things you're actively working on. Again, it seems like a small thing. But by separating in this case, what the team owns versus what the individual is doing, the individuals don't have to have seven things on their plates simultaneously. So now the email showing up in your email inbox are greatly reduced because you're not talking about seven different things. You're talking about the one thing you're doing. And the other things, the team knows they haven't been forgotten. It's on this list, but no one is responsible. It also triggers another thing that happens in teams is when you have incoming, oh my God, this is something we need to do. The person that that comes into who realizes that feels this moment of panic of this is on me. I don't want to drop this. So what am I going to do? I'm going to be like, we got to hop on a call and talk about this, right? And now you have another call on your schedule or I'm going to send out an ambiguous email message, cc in five people. Hey, what are we going to do about the Johnson memo? Yeah, now you've created all this discussion. With this strategy, there's an alternative. Oh, I'll just throw it on the list. I put it on here. I write it on the list, you know. Now it's on here. We're not going to forget it. We'll talk about it at the next team meeting. It's off my mind. I'm happy. Yeah. You know, these are like small things, right? Nothing here is like a complicated project management tutorial. None of it is about like the anti-productivity people like taking a righteous stand against, you know, you understand, you know, what my workload is like. And no, it's just we list our projects. And the plus side is the visibility piece is so key to you getting promoted and being seen for the work that you actually do. I know for a lot of our clients where they struggle on the communication front is they're happy to bury their head in the work and just plow through work. But then they're not good at the visibility around all the great work they're doing. But if it's documented, if it's archived and everyone's seeing it and it's collaborative, well now that visibility goes up. Yeah, so if you obsess over quality and there's a reason why that's the third principle and you have visibility, then you really begin to leave a trail that's impressive. It's like, okay, I'm seeing the work you're doing and the work is really good. Yeah. You know, and I don't notice that you're not on Slack. What I notice is this is really shipping. That reality is so true that actually the other problem can happen as well, which is as you shift the more visibility, it's bad for the people who are doing the opposite, which was, I'm not really doing much, but I'm an email warrior. You know what I mean? I'm on there. And so we have some evidence from this, there's a particular work philosophy called ROW, R-O-W-E. Results only work environments. And during the pandemic, I wrote a profile of this philosophy and the founder for the New Yorker. So I talked to a bunch of companies to work it on this. It's a little, it's a difficult philosophy to execute. It's a little complicated, but it's like instructive to learn from it. But like the key thing for our purposes, if you're a ROW work environment, it's all just results, right? So that's what you're measuring on. Like when you work, how you work, that's up to you. Every project you work on, you kind of make an agreement about, okay, here's where we're gonna talk about this. It's all results. So they have no notion of vacation days or in office days or not in office days. And this is a more familiar now post-pandemic, but when this came up in the early 2000s, people were like, are you crazy? What's going on? One of the things they found, at least some of the companies I talked to, is you lose like 20% of people when you do this because there's 20% of people from the non-managerial class who were just off you skating, right? They were just like sending lots of messages and jumping on and down through things. When we heard through the pandemic, some of them had two, three full-time jobs. Yeah. They were just in the shadows. One of the terrible things about the pandemic for individuals, especially for parents, is suddenly now it was like, hey, in addition to doing your job, you also have to be doing childcare and like home and education, all doing it once. We should probably be a little bit worried that it was terrible, but also like people had, it worked like the companies didn't fall apart. So then you should be thinking about like, wait a second, how much work were we actually doing if we could add so many other things onto your plate? So when the people went the row, that's what they found is that about 20% of people, it became clear, oh, you weren't really working. They also lost, which I think is interesting, about the same percentage of managers. Because for some managers, they had a very hard time switching to that because they liked, yeah, answer my email. You don't do that in a results-oriented environment. And so 20% of managers also moved on. So yeah, so it's not without its cost on the other side as well, is the good news is, if you're getting after it with your work, this makes your life way better. The bad news is if you're not, it also makes that hard to not notice. Yeah, to obfuscate and hide in the shadows and email. You bring up a great dynamic in the book, push, pull and the shift that you recommend. Can you break that down? Cause I thought it was really fascinating. I mean, I think this is the right way to think about workloads. And we could almost use it as an umbrella term for some of the particular strategies I was talking about, but the conceptual shift is instead of pushing work on the someone's plate, people instead pull work onto their plate when they're ready for it. That is, I mean, this is well-known in manufacturing. This is well-known in software development if you use like Kanban or something like this. I mean, you literally have columns on a board and you pull something over to the next column when you're ready for it. It makes all the difference though. This is the way that human cognitive work should unfold. You pull something onto your plate when you're ready for the next thing. This idea of work exists and we just push things on the people's plates. And so everyone just, all the work is distributed on the everyone else's plate. It is just a terrible way to allocate resources, right? Like we don't do this in software development. We don't just say, here's all these features we need to add to the software and just like, can you just do these 20 years? These 20s are yours. Make sure these 20 features get added and the marketing department's calling you up and hey, what's going on with the, you know, the new user form or whatever and you have to have conversations and meetings. Now software development figured out like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how you write good code. We'll keep these over here. You're working on this thing and we'll have like a five minute standup every day where you're like, here's how it's going. I need help on this. You get it and you sprint. Like all I'm doing is focusing on one thing till it's done, more people should be doing that. I mean, this is the way to actually use your brain to actually do good work. And so a pull methodology, that's what we should be doing. Well, it also creates agency. And I know for a lot of people who are in jobs where they don't find it meaningful or purposeful, one of the main reasons they quit, they give up is they feel like they have no agency with everyone just pushing more work on versus like, hey, I want to do that. I'm excited to do that. Let me take this on. Yeah, yeah. And the transparency here helps as well because now you see like how much is someone working on? Yeah. Like, oh, he's working on, push more stuff over there. You know, part of what happens when you don't have this type of transparency and you don't have that agency is it also becomes really inequitable, right? Because now what is beginning to control how much work is on your plate? Part of this now becomes factors that are completely unrelated to the things you would care about. It becomes things like, are you able to get away with in a social sense, say no more often? All right, boundaries, are you a good communicator? Are you just like kind of rude and people just put up with it? Yeah, so now being rude becomes a professional advantage, which is like actually not the thing you want to, I don't want to advantage, this happens in law firms a lot, is that the people who are sort of like rude and antisocial sometimes, they get more work done, is they just say no, people stop bothering them about these other things. Yeah, they don't want to work with them. So then they move up to the partner track quicker and then your partner's like full of a bunch of, you know, antisocial degenerates, right? This was like Richard Feynman, you know? Yeah. This was his famous strategy for getting good physics work done, is he said, I actively cultivate the reputations being irresponsible and eventually people stop asking me to do things. Cause it's like, if we put Richard on this committee, he's not going to do any of the work and it's going to make things worse, you know? So if you're a Nobel Prize winning physicist, you could do that. I guess people expect you to be weird and idiosyncratic and antisocial and you can get away with it. All right, so what about people who aren't that? Well, then now you're doing like twice as much work. This breakdown's on a lot of lines. Like there's interesting research saying when it comes to, they call them non-promotable tasks. It's like tasks that are not directly related to how you're evaluated or how you get performance. So, you know, organizing the birthday cake, you know, this type of thing, right? Like women, for example, are significantly, they take on significantly more of this than men you'll see in studies. So now you've created attacks on being like a reasonable human being. It's like, great. Now men are going to get an advantage because they're like less socially adept. They don't care. They get the weird cake, you know? So they're like, fine, we'll just let the, yeah. And so, yeah, you get these unplanned inequitable outcomes as well. So there's like all sorts of other motivations for transparency, you know? And also it just makes clear, people say, yeah, but all these little things need to get done. Great, now we have to confront what they are. Like how many of these things do we have? Like maybe we shouldn't be just distributing these among random staff members. Maybe we should have like a dedicated admin that does this. Maybe we shouldn't be doing the birthdays. Like it forces you to actually make really intentional decisions. Is this really necessary? I mean, so much of slow productivity is about just being intentional, like asking the question, how are we actually doing this work? Does this make sense? You know, we don't ask these questions right now. Knowledge work is so weird in this way. That it's just like shoot from the hip, you know, rock and roll. This company just introduced a new productivity software tool. Let's get that, you know? And there's no, there's so little discussion of how do we actually want to do this? I mean, I... Well, yeah, I think for a lot, especially tangential to tech, they look to tech to force productivity. So if this tool can come in, that will increase productivity. If this AI can come in, that will increase productivity. They don't often look at the communication, the strategies and the frameworks that they're already operating in. And with a lot of this pseudo productivity, one thing that we notice in our clients all the time, who are really struggling to get promoted is, it's also unclear what quality really is. Because everyone is so busy and no one sits them down and goes, this is actually the quality of work that gets you promoted. This is the quality that's unacceptable. And they often see the email warrior putting in subpar quality and still getting promoted because they're shuffling paper. So I'd love to focus on that principle for those who are not in a place where equality is very clear, but recognizing that also provides meaning to your work when you can really feel good about what you deliver. Yeah, yeah, I mean, craft itself is something humans are wired to feel good about, right? Because I mean, this is partially what separated our species from other species. We want to make our intentions manifest concretely in the world. And when we do, our brain lights up. And it's like, oh, okay, this is good. I mean, this is why we get these elaborate leisure hobbies. Why are we learning the woodwork or mastering a physical like triathlons or knitting or whatever it is, golf, right? Because we love the feeling of getting better at something that's hard. We're just wired to enjoy that. And so in work, once you start saying, I'm gonna obsess over quality, like I care about the quality. What do I do that's most important? I care about the quality of it. And I want to get better. I want to see that I'm getting better. This unlocks a lot of slow productivity benefits, but it also unlocks just more satisfaction. Like it really does change your relationship to work. But then the two things it does at the same time is once you start obsessing over quality, you naturally begin to care less about business, right? I mean, like think about the people you know that are least communicative on email. They're not hopping on calls all the time or whatever. They're probably people that have a real craft they care about, you know? Chris Nolan, the director doesn't own us. Doesn't own a phone, right? It's because he's got this other thing, right? That he's working on. He's trying to make Oppenheimer, you know? And so he's like, this is what I'm really focused on. So the stuff that we fill our time with seems, you know, unnecessary. And then as you get better at something, you get more leverage to slow down. Because people are like, oh, wait a second, you're doing this thing really well. All right, you keep doing that, you know? And now you have more leverage to not be on 20 projects, to not always be answering the emails, right? I mean, so Chris Nolan can keep not having a phone because Oppenheimer made almost a billion dollars, right? So it's a kind of a virtuous cycle. That's why I think this quality piece is really the glue for everything else. You feel better. It just naturally shifts your attention away from business. And then it makes it more possible to shift away from business all from the same idea. And you truly can become a linchpin, you know? And a lot of these situations, being the Swiss army knife who does everything average but can get everyone's studios done, actually doesn't get rewarded over the long haul. Yes. So you end up getting lost in the shuffle and getting dinged for things that were out of your control because you are, quote unquote, good at everything. But if you are great, if you are the one person in the company that always delivers on that type of project, that task, that outcome, then people will respect you for that and you will move up quickly. Yes, the trade-off is I always think about it as you're trading accountability for accessibility, right? So you're basically saying, hold me accountable for producing stuff that's great. But as an exchange for that, because that makes my life scarier, right? Because I'm being held accountable for results and those results might not be good. The trade-off is I don't have to be accessible. Like that's the trade, you gotta trade something for not being accessible. I mean, it's why the advice people give to assistants in industries where you have to start as an assistant and then move up is you wanna be hyper-competent. You wanna like demonstrate that you're very, very smart. You don't wanna be too good. If you're too good at like, I keep all of your requests organized, I'm indispensable to you, then they don't wanna promote you. It's like, oh, this person is like really good at putting out fires and anticipating like what the issue is gonna be here. But that's not actually the skill you need to be at the next higher level, right? It's like the talent agent doesn't need to be good at figuring out that, okay, I thought ahead that this car service I'm gonna have to pick you up, there might be traffic and it could swing by and get your dry cleaning. That might make you indispensable to another agent, but they don't wanna promote you because that's not at all interesting for the stuff that's gonna matter once you're a junior agent. So it's like you almost wanna be not too accessible, too good at the small, too good at the, I always get a response on email. Artificially put delays into your email response. Apologize at least a few times a week. Oh, sorry, I didn't see this earlier. So people are like, yeah, okay, I don't always hear right back. So maybe when the next small thing comes up, no, you're not gonna sit the cow, I'm gonna send it over to someone else. Yeah, yeah, having some demonstrating that you're not a great Swiss Army knife is not necessarily a bad thing as long as you can then back it up with quality. You know, really good carving knife. Yeah, I think that's the piece that often gets lost in the social media advice around slow work, quiet quitting, and a lot of these like, just let everything drop. It's like, well, you will be judged on that. So if you are letting things drop and being intentional and drawing boundaries, then you better be delivering at the quality that is necessary for you to be recognized. Yeah, I think that's the trade-off that's lost. This is the issue with a lot of, I think the current anti-productivity literature is that it's trying to set up instead more of a zero-sum dynamic, right? So it's, which it was more of the dominant dynamic between managers and workers in other sectors and through more of economic history. So when you get sort of standard left-wing labor politics, it's looking more in a situation where I own a factory, you work at the factory. We have a zero-sum relationship here. Like the more I make you work, the better life is for me and the less I work, the worse is life is for you. So now we have to sort of bargain and that's why we'll do collective bargaining and because it's zero-sum. And that's why you need regulatory framework. That's why you need labor unions because it's zero-sum. What makes your life better makes my life worse. What makes my life better makes your life worse. Knowledge work is not quite that. It's more that we're just all really bad at work. That's a big part of it, right? So it's just, I mean, the way knowledge workers work does not produce more money. The fact that we're on email all the time, it's not like that produces more money for the owners of the company. That makes the company less profitable, right? It's just it's hard and there's managerial entrenchment and it's difficult to do. So we kind of work in this haphazard way. Well, I mean, even human nature, if you look at hunter-gatherers to agriculture, there was always slow baked in. There's seasonality, there's hibernation, there's crops that have to grow that you have to tend to. It's not you're harvesting every day. You're not killing every single day and you're hunting. You're waiting, you have to be slow and recognize that there's gonna be days where there's zero yield. So I mean, I went into this because I was fascinated by this question. So like in the book, I said, here's the question I'm interested in. What did work, I guess I'll put quotation marks around, but what did work look like for most of our history? So I'm talking roughly 300,000 years ago until roughly 15,000 years ago. So the whole Paleolithic period where hunter-gatherers, right? What did work look like? Because my thought was over that long of a timeframe, we probably, there's an evolutionary game going on here. So we're probably, what are we evolved for? Whatever we were doing for that first 285,000 years. And so then I got into this question of like, well, how do we know how like our Paleolithic ancestors work? So I got into the Paleoanthropology and then it turns out there's like a whole field of anthropology that emerged in the 20th century where what they would do is study extant foraging communities. Like there's some hunting and gathering communities left there's very few now, but there were some left. Not that these communities were direct reflections of the ancient path, but they showed what work meant for foraging. So what is it? What is the actual work rhythms like for foraging? Which is what we did for hundreds of thousands of years and found some really cool studies on it. It's like a really interesting, whole interesting. So I wrote a long New Yorker piece on this too. So I really nerded out on this. We'll link it in the show notes. But the main, one of the main things that was found is that in the intensity of work is all over the place. Just like you're saying. And on lots of different timescales, right? So in this one study, it was down following a community in the Philippines. They would go follow them. The researchers would follow them on like a hunt. It's really up and down. Like it might be for hours in the middle of the day. They're just sitting under trees. It's sunny, it's hot and the animals are in the shade. So like, okay, we're just gonna chill. Okay, now, but when we're on a stock, it could be three hours of like we're running, you know? The fishing, it would be, you'd be in the boat napping and then you would be working. There's some days we are heavily foraging and other days, because the weather was bad, you do nothing at all, right? And then you had seasonal variations on top of that as well. Like in the rainy season, you're basically doing nothing. So it was super varied. So that's the environment we came from was one in which the work had a super varied intensity with periods of really locked in. And periods of I'm napping and stuff in between. Socializing. Socializing. And it was what we did not do was work starts now and I'm gonna be locked in and focused for eight hours. And then I'm gonna do this day after day after day. I mean, this is not what we're wired for. What I'm curious about in writing especially, a book like this, it bridges the creativity side with the knowledge work, because all the research and the stories that go into it. And when we think about a project as big as a book for a lot of our listeners, writer's block comes to mind, like how do you even take on a project like this and how do you use slow to productivity in writing slow productivity? So do you have any guidance around the principles as you applied them in writing this book? Well, I mean, when I work on these type of books, I spend years with the ideas, right? Because for an idea book, the thing that really matters are the ideas. And then everything else is just craft. Now that I have the ideas, do you know how to research it and write it? And that's more craft and that can be done pretty systematically. Now I'm just right. I mean, I write all the time. So I'm very used to writing. The hard thing is the ideas. So these take years for me to work out. So like this book in particular, I was doing a lot of work for the New Yorker, right? So I sort of took on a position there in like 19, 2020. And so I used that as a platform to explore a lot of the ideas. So for years, I was just exploring ideas because I was magazine writing. It gives you a really useful way to get sources to talk to you. And it also gives you feedback too. Feedback and heavy scrutiny from world-class editors on like, is this idea working or not? So I mean, I spent years working through these concepts. I coined the term slow productivity in 2020. I began to really unpack it on my personal newsletters and podcasts in 2021. I introduced the term slow productivity as a title of a New Yorker article in early 2022. So I slowly let these things unfold. You get feedback, you're exploring it. And then when it came time to actually write, and I typically will write a book in eight months. It's not as if I was starting from scratch at the beginning of eight months and saying, what do I wanna write about? I knew everything I was gonna be writing about. I knew there was holes. I needed some research, but I basically had it all worked out. So that eight months when I'm writing, that's just a mechanic in the garage time. That's just craft time. Okay, now I gotta actually put together sentences and like figure out the storylines. And it was interesting for this book because I did, it was like a bonus. I was offering people who pre-ordered it. I said, okay, one of the things I'll offer you if you pre-order it was a chapter by chapter audio commentary, like directors do for movies. I just thought this would be really cool. And I recorded this recently. And it was really fun actually to go through each chapter and remember and walk through all the craft stuff. There's a lot of that, the craft stuff's interesting. It was like, well, I couldn't make this work. And then we cut that and then this started the flow. And so I don't know, I always tell idea writers that there's two different stages. There's coming up with the idea and that takes as long as it takes. And it could be forever. And then there's the craft portion. I know what I wanna say. Now I really care about editing the proverbial film so that it flows. It feels almost like there's the sourcing and the weaving of the textiles and then there's the seamstress that comes in and cuts everything up and makes the beautiful dress. But sourcing those original ideas and the cashmere and the silk, that's where a lot of the time, deep thought is spent. Yeah, and figuring out like, what if we did this color and we wrapped it in this way? Yeah, and both are important, you know? Cause where do things fall short? Like if we think about books, it's always one of those two things, right? So it's either, if it's not someone's first book often what makes a book not function is the ideas weren't really there. They kind of forced it. Like I need to write another book now and they kind of forced it. And it's written fine. But you're like, what am I learning here? It's a payoff, yeah. Or if it's someone's first book, you often get the opposite. It's an idea they've been gestating forever. So I was like, this is a great idea. This is why they got the book deal. But the craft isn't there. And it's a lot of these sort of hokey, the stories are hokey and everything just like perfectly works out and it's full of rhetorical questions. And there's all these things you see in bad idea books like writing for the sake of writing. Like you're clearly just trying to fill out the rest of this chapter. I can imagine you on some Monday morning like I gotta get to a thousand words. What about this? You know, so it's like when one of those two things falls short, the book doesn't work. Right. So in writing this book and the response you've gotten what's been the most surprising around this concept and idea as obviously you've proved it out in your articles and now in the book. People are almost immediately, even before they read it just a title are saying, yeah, I'm on board. Yeah. I was thinking I was going to have to do a lot more convincing, right? That's why I take my time of, let me explain the problem with today and how we got there and pseudo productivity. People are like, no, yeah, I'm still a productivity, let's go. Yeah. You know, before they even know the principles and really the last time I got a response like that was maybe when I wrote deep work. People are like, yeah, deep work. Yeah, I need more of that. Yeah. Even before they read the book, you know and people kind of invented their own definition of what it meant. So I'm surprised how ready people were. I thought I was going to have to do a lot more convincing. Yeah. Well, I feel like so many of us feel like we're in an out of control car with no breaks and they know that in those moments where they feel themselves internally they're most productive is when there is the time and the space and it's slow and it's not forced. And that's why you hear all this advice about airplane mode and throw your computer out the door when you go on vacation and go right when you're away from this environment because so much of this environment is just faster and faster. I mean, I think this is the problem is it's not as if people like this way of working, right? They'd like the fast working. Like, hey, this is what work is. Like you're really going to have to convince me this is the right way to work. That was the surprise is no, no, people really disliked it. And I think that's what's so deranging about our current moment, right? Is that when you know I can only get good things done when I have time and space and breathing room to do it. And you can't have it. But your job is like, we want you to produce good stuff. By the way, if you're not checking your email every five minutes, the whole world's going to blow up. It's like a professional gaslighting, right? You're like, this is crazy making, right? This is what happened with the eight hour zoom marathons in the early pandemic is that it was like a Kafka play. Like it was like a metaphor for the absurdity of life or something. People are like, this isn't even real. Like this can't possibly be real. This is like some satire about the British, you know civil service in the 1800s or something. Like it's just real like, it's like a David Foster Wallace novel. Like it really, it's deranging because people are all looking around and like, we all know this is crazy, right? I mean, there were some viral moments where people would just film themselves sitting in front of the computer and then try to swap that out as they're zoom. So it looks like they're there while they're actually behind the scenes doing the real work. I mean, do you know the movie Office Space from 2000, right? Like so Mike Judge was so ahead of this, right? He was sensing this early on. But you know, there's that moment where the consultants come in, the efficiency consultants and they're interviewing and the employees trying to explain his job. And finally they're just like, what is it that you actually do here, right? And it was like a joke back then. Actually, that's like most of us right now. Like that's like, except for now, the scene would be like, well, I answer emails. And like, oh, and then, and then you do the, no, then I answer emails. Yeah, I'm the Slack leaderboard. And we talk about the conversations we're gonna have where we're gonna talk about work. Yeah, look at all these meetings I attended. Yeah, it's like, oh, so like are you in a business where like you get paid for going to meetings? No, are you in a business where like, your clients are paying you for emails? No, so what are we doing here? I mean, it's, people are so done with it. I think for us, and we don't talk a lot about productivity on the show, but the impact that this has on your relationships. And I talked about that earlier, like the quality of life at home with your partner, your spouse, your loved ones, your friends, all of that seems to have been pushed to the wayside with the pseudo productivity. And then your relationships at work have also been harmed in this pseudo productive world where we see the jerks, the assholes getting ahead. We see the people who are gruff, who are rude, creating boundaries that allow them to slide away from doing the actual work. And then we feel a lot of times we're doing quality work but we're not being recognized in this current environment. Yeah, and I think this is one of the reasons that this is particularly misery inducing, the relationship piece. I mean, this is why I think mobile computing played such a big role in the crisis of pseudo productivity is because this is a major thing that we didn't realize. But once I have the ability to demonstrate activity wherever I am, because I can send an email wherever now, I can jump on Slack or ever. Now think about psychologically, every moment where I'm not at the office, I have to be negotiating this trade-off of like, okay, so what gets priority here? Should I demonstrate a little bit more work or should I like have a conversation with my partner? Should I do a little bit more work or should I go for a walk? You have to constantly do this negotiation. And that is exhausting. And it also generates all this resentment, right? And you get like a lot of resentment towards your work. And I constantly have to have this negotiation. This got a lot worse, of course. Again, like I think the early pandemic was just like a magnifying glass. That's why it was, I keep talking about it. But when a lot of people were completely remote for the first time, so now this negotiation became constant. Yeah, because I'm just home all the time and I have to do other things while I'm at home. So now I'm just constantly having this back and forth. It's where I got a lot of messages from readers and listeners. I replicated some in the book where they had this sort of just intense resentment towards work. And the thing that was setting people off was they would get an email from their boss in, you know, May of 2020. And I was like, the key thing here is everyone's, we gotta just like stay productive. And it was like setting people off because just suddenly every moment of their day they had to go through this negotiation. That's where I think quiet quitting came from in part. Like listen to the rhetoric of quiet quitting. My life is more than just the labor I can produce. You know, this type of rhetoric in the context of knowledge work wouldn't make sense in 2019, right? But it suddenly made sense when every part of your life you had to be assessing could I be doing something here that demonstrates productivity? So it's that the ability to do pseudo productivity at any time that really came in and made work much more psychologically taxing. Well, I also look at the dynamic now as you go to hybrid and who's running back to the office first around productivity. It's like, no, now I can actually get deep work done at the office because I'm not babysitting. I don't have all these distractions and I'm not expected to be on all these Zoom meetings anymore. Like I want to go back to the office. Yeah. Well, and hybrid is, you know, I have an article it'll be out by the time this interview air so I can talk about it. But I wrote an article for the Atlantic. I mean, unless something goes really bad today it shouldn't be coming out. But so I had this, I was talking about hybrid work, right? Because I have this proposal. Okay. I have this bold proposal. But first I looked at the data. Hybrid work is where we ended up post pandemic. Yeah. Right. So if you just look at the data of remote capable jobs. What you see is you get to March of 2020 and almost everything jumps fully remote, right? On-site jobs dropped from 60% down to like 12. Right. So that's what you would expect. Then something kind of unexpected happens. Two things unexpected to happen. One, the on-site jobs basically never come back. They bounce back up a little bit to about 20%. And they've been there ever since, right? So like that was it. Like basically like most remote capable jobs are not fully on-site. But the other thing that happened is fully remote work just has been it steadily fell, stabilized low, hybrids what came up. Hybrid is a 2x more percentage of people's jobs than any of these other categories remote or on-site. Four jobs that are capable of doing this. So here's my proposal is, okay, we already just made, that's a major change, right? Like we now kind of permanently almost like the majority of these jobs in office some days and home the other days. Here's my proposal. The days that were at home, and I think we should synchronize this if possible, the days you're at home, no email, no meetings. That happens when you're in the office. We could do the opposite, but I think this way is going to be better for various reasons. In the office emails and meetings. So now at home days, the whole culture is just get things done. Work on the things you have to work on. All right, then when do we talk about work and have conversations about work on the other days in the office. But hey, now that we're in the office, instead of saying, hey, let's throw a Microsoft Teams invite that's gonna have to sit on my calendar and eat up 30 minutes, I'm probably just gonna grab you and be like, hey, what about this? What about that? We're gonna have in-person meetings in the office. So then at the end of that meeting, we can talk about like three other things. And in seven minutes, we've just taken care of 70 emails that would have been sent to other ones. Yeah, agendas and all that. I think those two things could have a huge impact on the overload crisis to just feeling everything that's going on right now. Because A, you're getting more done. You have all this uninterrupted time. You're not completely exhausted. And then B, the communication we do is now a lot more efficient because it's largely in-person when we communicate. The context that we're in. Right. The context that we're in. So now we have less days that people are pushing work on our plates. We have less big meetings squatting on our plates. Office hours can actually be office hours. Great, as long as we're all in the office. Yeah. These two hours every afternoon, just come in. And we don't have to set up a formal meeting just like swing by, we'll talk about it. And I don't mind doing that because I know the next day I can spend the whole day just working. I think if we did this, I call it hybrid attention versus just hybrid work. I think this could make a huge difference on that first principle of slow productivity that's doing fewer things. I just think people would be so much happier. Work would be so much less deranging. Well, I also feel just based on that trend and again, the environment that it creates, you can basically structure it in a way that is universally adopted quite easily. And I feel like a lot of these initiatives really fall flat because as I said earlier, we're injecting new technology, new platforms, we're trying to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways. It's like, no, office hours are office hours. It's like, I could only reach my professor in his office hours. Other than that, he was doing deep work, researching, working on papers, publishing. And it worked out. And you know what? You still got your questions answered. Like I'm teaching a class right now. I have office hours. I have a great TA that has his own office hours. And you know what? My students are never that far away from getting a question answered. But if they want a question answered right now, they can't do it. But we're used to this in academia. The other thing about hybrid attention is really what's the hard part about this is having a schedule where some days you're at home and some days you're at work. We've already done that hard work. That's the drastic change. Like if I came to you in 2019 and suggest, yeah, like here's what we're gonna do. Like two days a week, your employees aren't gonna come into the office. Like what are you talking about? Like we can't do that. But that's the hard part. Now that we already have a difference in kind. We just spelled the myth around productivity at home. Because before that, everyone's like, if you're home, you're just doing laundry, watching TV, you're not gonna be productive. Well, the pandemic forced us all to showcase that that's not true. And the funny thing about it, because in the early pandemic, I wrote an article about the history of remote work. And the funny thing about it is that until the pandemic came up, people were convinced this could never work, right? Because the period in which remote work became possible without huge headaches was like roughly 2006, right? So 2006 is when we already had Skype, Skype-added video conferencing. So that was it. We had pretty wide penetration of at-home broadband. We had very wide penetration of at-home computing. People had laptops. And now we could do conference calls and video conferences, low-cost, because we could do it over the internet, right? So everything was in place in 2006 for remote work. And a few places tried it. There were some really big examples. And the managers almost immediately were like, I don't like this at all. I don't like this one bit. And they canceled them. And we never touched it again until the pandemic came. And the managers up and down were saying, people just won't work if they're at home. Like it just won't work. Things will get missed. They obsessed over the potential small bad things you create. You imagine like, well, what if this happened and I couldn't get in touch? They were very distrustful of their employees. I mean, this is why Yahoo canceled. Marissa Meyer at Yahoo canceled their experiment because she had her IT team look at the server logs. And she was like, well, how often are they logging into the servers when they're at home? And then she got sort of obsessed with this idea that they're not logging in that much. What if they're at the beach? You know, it was just weird, just like fear. And so they were convinced this will never work. And then in like three weeks, we realized like, actually it's fine, it works fine. Yeah, that was the hard part. It was learning that we could do that. And the rest of this stuff wouldn't be too hard. I'm a huge fan of that proposal. And I'm thinking about it now, how we could roll it out internally because I feel like we've all essentially agreed on hybrid and now with that structure of communication and ability to do deep work at home, I think would really unlock not only slow productivity, but just overall employee satisfaction with the roles that they're in. So many of the complaints are around the pseudo productivity. So the two numbers I saw that I think helped support it. So one, when we shifted to hybrid work, online meetings jumped up because we were still doing meetings whether we were at home or not. But when you're at home, the only way to coordinate about something is to have like a Zoom meeting, right? Because I can't just grab you and talk about you. So the report I was looking at reported a 252% increase, right? In virtual meetings since the start of the pandemic and the numbers not going down. So it's not just, oh, in the beginning of the pandemic when we're fully remote, even since we've stabilized at hybrid, we have this 252 increase has stabilized. Then there's numbers that says roughly half of hybrid employees really think meetings are much less effective than they used to be because now it's not only the virtual, but like some people are at the office and some people are and it's this weird mix or whatever. So now we have to say concrete numbers. All that goes away if we just don't really do virtual meetings anymore. I can't remember the company, maybe you know from the research that essentially created a plugin that would add the cost of that time for every staff member to join that meeting. I love this. And it basically showed, okay, I'm adding this person, their hourly rate is X. And now this meeting is actually costing the company this much money. And it's that transparency piece that you talked about where it's like, well, wait a second, do we really need this $2,000 meeting to talk about a potential for another meeting? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I love this idea of reducing asymmetries in work generation where one person can do a little bit of effort to create a bunch of effort from other people. It's there's a section in the book called make people work harder, right? And it's all about these asymmetries. Like I love this plugin idea. Like another thing that we're just making people do a little bit more work, for example, to assign something to you. Like, okay, I have to collect for you. Like, let me know once you've gathered all the information I need to do this thing. And then I'll work on it. You get a lot less things coming your way because it's really quick to say, hey, can you deal with the Johnson contract sin? Right. But if I have to actually gather the information and a lot of what's going on here is obligation hot potato. I just want to get this off my plate. Like what I'm doing now is just trying to whack my inbox down. And if I actually have to do more work to assign you something, that's it, I'm not going to do it. Another idea along these lines is reverse meetings. So no, no, no, I can't make five people come to me and all have to spend an hour of their time as each of them only has five minutes of things to say, but we have to go through like everyone's thoughts. No, I have to go to each of you. So I'm only taking five minutes of each of your time, but I have to like, go to your office hours and go to that person's office hours and go to that person. I, as the convener of the need for this information, I should have to do five times more work than the other five people that are in it, you know. Ideas like that I think go a long way. Yeah, that friction, you know, I'm picturing your Google document with the projects I'm working on, okay, add it and adding it in a Google form that's like, okay, you want to add this, now get me all the details, fill out this form and this form in this box, and then it'll populate on my document. And you'd notice that no one wants to go through the extra five, 10 minutes of collating all the information you need to then have that on your plate. My department chair at Georgetown's great at this because like one of the things that happens in academic departments is there's always people who very much in the moment have like a complaint about like, we should be doing this. Why aren't we doing that? I mean, just sort of like send this all towards the department chairs are actually like, why are we dealing with this? It is this great, I think completely reasonable response, which is like, yeah, you know, we should discuss any issue that needs to be discussed. Here's what you need to do. You need to like circulate or whatever through the department and gather feedback. And then if you propose the discussion topic to the faculty with two weeks notice, it can then go on the agenda so that we can discuss it at the next faculty meeting. Nothing makes it on to the agenda. Nothing makes it on, because what are they really doing is like in the moment they're like me mad, you know? Yeah, just getting rid of that emotion moving on. So if you as the department chair there is like, okay, so I guess I have to deal with this now too. And you know, it could just be this huge asymmetry. He gives a little bit of friction into it. Like, yeah, okay. These things have to be two weeks in advance and like gather some information. And hey, guess what? Most of these things weren't so important. I love this discussion. Let's make it frictionless for our audience to find your work in the book. Yeah, so at CalNewport.com. I don't use social media. So this is speaking of friction. Yeah. So that's the place to find me. The book, Slow Productivity, you can find it anywhere books are. But at CalNewport.com slash slow, we made it so you could get a big excerpt. So if you want to sort of read about a bunch of this stuff. I also have a podcast, Deep Questions, but you can find wherever podcasts are. And it's just this type of stuff. People call in or write in with questions about their jobs and how to be slower and be less distracted. And we just sort of rock and roll and chat about these things. And so check that out too. Love it. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me.