The lost art of accomplishment without burnout | Cal Newport for Big Think +

The Burnout Epidemic: A Call for Slow Productivity

We’re increasingly facing burnout. How is it possible to do work that you’re proud of and not feel like your job is encroaching on all parts of your life? It’s no longer enough to just see me in my office, looking vaguely busy. You can actually see every email I’m sending and how active I am in a Slack chat. I could do this on the way to work, on the way home from work, at home, on the weekends. Enough is enough. We’re increasingly exhausted. We have a faulty definition of productivity that we’ve been following, and what we need to do instead is shift our focus onto outcomes.

I’m Cal Newport, a computer scientist and writer. My most recent book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. The knowledge sector emerged in the mid-20th century. When it emerged, our best understanding of productivity came from manufacturing. Manufacturing is something that we could measure very precisely. For example, how many Model T’s are we producing per labor hour, going in as input? And we had a number we could look at.

Knowledge work emerges, and these types of metrics don’t work anymore because, in knowledge work, we’re not producing one thing. I might be working on seven or eight different things at the same time. This could be different than the seven or eight things that the person right next to me is working on. Our solution to this was to introduce a rough heuristic that I call pseudo-productivity. It said we can use visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort. So if I see you doing things, that’s better than you not doing things. Come to an office and we watch you work. If we need to be more productive, come earlier, stay later. We’ll just use activity as our best marker that you’re probably doing something useful. More and more of our time is focused on performing this busyness, which means less of our time has been actually doing things that matter.

So what’s the solution? Slow productivity is a way of measuring useful effort that is now much more focused on the quality of things you produce over time, as opposed to your visible activity in the moment. And I define it to be built on three main principles:

1. Do fewer things. This idea scares a lot of people when they first hear it because they interpret “do fewer things” to mean “accomplish fewer things.” What I really mean is “do fewer things at once.” We know this from neuroscience and organizational psychology: when you turn the target of your attention from one point to another, it takes a while for your brain to reorient. The things you were thinking about over here leave what’s known as attention residue. This is a self-imposed reduction of cognitive capacity. So you’re producing worse work. Even worse, it’s a psychological state that is exhausting and frustrating. So the experience of work itself just becomes subjectively very negative. So what happens if I’m working on fewer things at once? More of my day can actually be spent trying to complete commitments, which means I’m going to complete them faster, and probably the quality level is going to be higher as well, because I can give them uninterrupted concentration.
2. Work at a natural pace. One of the defining features of human economic activity for the last several hundred thousand years is that the seasons really mattered. There was migration, seasons when we were hunting, there was planting, seasons when we were planting, and harvest seasons when we were harvesting, and seasons where neither of those activities were going on. We had a lot of variety throughout the year in terms of how hard we were working. I think in knowledge work, if certain times of year are more intense than others, this will lead to overall better and more sustainable outcomes. So the principle of working at a natural pace says it’s okay to not redline it 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week. We can have busy days and less busy days. We can have busy seasons and less busy seasons.
3. Obsess over quality. And what this means is you should identify the things you do in your work that produce the most value and really care about getting better at that. Any quest towards obsessing over quality has to start with a perhaps pretty thorough investigation of your own job. And then once you figure that out, start giving that activity as much attention as you can. For example, invest in better tools so that you can signal to yourself that you’re invested in doing this thing well. I did this myself as a postdoc. I was at MIT. Didn’t have a ton of money at that time, but I bought a $50 lab notebook, and my idea was this is going to make me take the work I’m doing in this notebook more seriously, and it did. So something about having this more quality tool pushed me towards more quality thinking.

So this idea that you want to slow down, that you want to do fewer things, that you want to have a more natural pace, this becomes very natural when you’re really focused on doing what you do well. You begin to see all of those meetings and the email and the overstuffed task list not as a mark of productivity but obstacles to what you’re really trying to do. If you are embracing these principles, a few things are going to happen. The pace at which important things are finished is going to go up. The quality of what you’re producing is going to go up, and the happiness is also going to go up. This is going to become a much more sustainable work environment, and you’re going to be doing the work that’s going to make you better.

Sve češće se suočavamo sa iscrpljenošću. Kako je moguće raditi posao kojim se ponosite, a da se ne osećate kao da vam posao zauzima sve delove života? Više nije dovoljno samo videti me u kancelariji, kako nejasno izgledam zauzeto. Možete zapravo videti svaki email koji šaljem i koliko sam aktivan u Slack chatu. Mogu ovo da radim na putu do posla, na putu kući, kod kuće, tokom vikenda. Dosta je bilo. Sve smo više iscrpljeni. Imamo pogrešan definiciju produktivnosti koju smo pratili, a ono što treba da uradimo umesto toga je da preusmerimo fokus na rezultate.

Ja sam Kal Newport, računarski naučnik i pisac. Moja najnovija knjiga je Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Sektor znanja je nastao sredinom 20. veka. Kada je nastao, naše najbolje razumevanje produktivnosti dolazilo je iz proizvodnje. Proizvodnju smo mogli da merimo vrlo precizno. Na primer, koliko modela T proizvodimo po radnom satu, ulazeći kao ulaz? I imali smo broj koji smo mogli da pogledamo.

Nastaje rad sa znanjem, a ove vrste metrika više ne funkcionišu jer u radu sa znanjem ne proizvodimo jednu stvar. Mogu raditi na sedam ili osam različitih stvari istovremeno. Ovo može biti drugačije od sedam ili osam stvari na kojima radi osoba pored mene. Naše rešenje za ovo bilo je da uvedemo grubu heuristiku koju nazivam pseudo-produktivnost. Rekao je da možemo koristiti vidljivu aktivnost kao grubu proksi za koristan napor. Dakle, ako vidim da radite nešto, to je bolje nego da ne radite ništa. Dođite u kancelariju i gledaćemo kako radite. Ako treba da budemo produktivniji, dođite ranije, ostanite kasnije. Koristićemo samo aktivnost kao najbolji pokazatelj da verovatno radite nešto korisno. Sve više našeg vremena je fokusirano na izvođenje ove zauzetosti, što znači da manje našeg vremena je zapravo bilo utrošeno na stvari koje su važne.

Dakle, koje je rešenje? Sporo produktivnost je način merenja korisnog napora koji je sada mnogo više fokusiran na kvalitet stvari koje proizvodite tokom vremena, a ne na vašu vidljivu aktivnost u trenutku. I definišem ga da bude izgrađen na tri glavna principa:

1. Radi manje stvari. Ova ideja plaši mnogo ljudi kada je prvi put čuju jer tumače “radi manje stvari” kao “postići manje stvari”. Ono što zaista mislim je “radi manje stvari odjednom”. Znamo ovo iz neuroznanosti i organizacione psihologije: kada prebacite metu svoje pažnje sa jedne tačke na drugu, vašem mozgu treba neko vreme da se ponovo orijentiše. Stvari o kojima ste razmišljali ovde ostavljaju ono što je poznato kao ostatak pažnje. Ovo je samonametnuto smanjenje kognitivnog kapaciteta. Dakle, proizvodite lošiji rad. Još gore, to je psihičko stanje koje je iscrpljujuće i frustrirajuće. Dakle, samo iskustvo rada postaje subjektivno vrlo negativno. Dakle, šta se dešava ako radim na manje stvari odjednom? Više mog dana se može zapravo potrošiti na pokušaj da se završe obaveze, što znači da ću ih završiti brže, a verovatno će i nivo kvaliteta biti viši, jer im mogu dati neprekidnu koncentraciju.
2. Radi prirodnim tempom. Jedna od odlika ljudske ekonomske aktivnosti u poslednjih nekoliko stotina hiljada godina je da su sezone zaista imale značaj. Bilo je migracija, sezona kada smo lovili, bilo je sadnje, sezona kada smo sadili, i berbe kada smo žetve, i sezone kada nijedna od tih aktivnosti nije bila u toku. Imali smo puno raznolikosti tokom godine u smislu koliko smo naporno radili. Mislim da će, u radu sa znanjem, ako su određena doba godine intenzivnija od drugih, to dovesti do ukupno boljih i održivijih rezultata. Dakle, princip rada prirodnim tempom kaže da je u redu da ne preterujete 50 nedelja godišnje, 5 dana nedeljno. Možemo imati zauzete dane i manje zauzete dane. Možemo imati zauzete sezone i manje zauzete sezone.
3. Opsesivno se fokusirajte na kvalitet. A ovo znači da treba da identifikujete stvari koje radite u svom radu koje proizvode najviše vrednosti i zaista vodite računa o tome da budete bolji u tome. Svaki težnja ka opsesivnom fokusiranju na kvalitet mora početi sa možda prilično temeljnom istragom vašeg sopstvenog posla. A onda, kada to shvatite, počnite da dajete toj aktivnosti što više pažnje. Na primer, uložite u bolje alate kako biste sebi mogli da signalizirate da ste uložili u dobro obavljanje ove stvari. Uradio sam ovo sam kao postdoktorant. Bio sam na MIT-u. Nisam imao puno novca u to vreme, ali sam kupio laboratorijsku svesku od 50 dolara, i moja ideja je bila da će me ovo naterati da shvatim ozbiljnije posao koji radim u ovoj svesci, i jeste. Dakle, nešto u vezi sa ovim kvalitetnijim alatom gurnulo me je ka kvalitetnijem razmišljanju.

Dakle, ova ideja da želite da usporite, da želite da radite manje stvari, da želite da imate prirodniji tempo, ovo postaje vrlo prirodno kada ste zaista fokusirani na to da radite ono što dobro radite. Počinjete da vidite sve te sastanke i email i pretrpanu listu zadataka ne kao znak produktivnosti, već kao prepreke onome što zaista pokušavate da uradite. Ako prihvatite ove principe, desiće se nekoliko stvari. Tempo kojim se završavaju važne stvari će se povećati. Kvalitet onoga što proizvodite će se povećati, a sreća će se takođe povećati. Ovo će postati mnogo održivije radno okruženje, a vi ćete raditi posao koji će vas učiniti boljim.