In the summer of 1966, toward the end of his second year as a staff writer for The New Yorker, John McPhee found himself on his back on a picnic table under an ash tree in his backyard near Princeton, New Jersey. “I lay down on it for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic,” he recalls in his 2017 book, Draft No. 4.
McPhee had already published five long-form articles for The New Yorker and, before that, had spent seven years as an associate editor for Time. He wasn’t, in other words, new to magazine writing, but the article that immobilized him on his picnic table that summer was the most complicated he had yet attempted to write.
McPhee spent eight months researching the topic in the lead‑up to his picnic table paralysis, gathering what he later called “enough material to fill a silo.” He had read all the relevant books and talked to all the relevant people. Now that he had to start writing, he felt overwhelmed. “To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me,” he explained. “It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”
So McPhee lay on his picnic table, looking up at the branches of that ash tree, trying to figure out how to make this lumbering mass of sources and stories work together. He stayed on that table for two weeks before a solution to his quandary finally arrived: Fred Brown. The revelation that jolted McPhee off his picnic table was that Brown seemed to be connected in some way to most of the topics that he wanted to cover in his article. He could introduce Brown early in the piece, and then structure the topics he wanted to explore as detours from the through line of his adventures with Brown.
Perhaps knowledge workers’ problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition of this term.
It’s a marvel of long-form reporting and one of the more beloved entries in McPhee’s long bibliography. It couldn’t have existed, however, without McPhee’s willingness to put everything else on hold, and just lie on his back, gazing upward toward the sky, thinking hard about how to create something wonderful.
When I first encountered the story of John McPhee’s long days looking up at the leaves in his backyard, I received it nostalgically—a scene from a time long past, when those who made a living with their minds were actually given the time and space needed to craft impressive things. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a job like that where you didn’t have to worry about being productive?” I thought.
But eventually an insistent realization emerged. McPhee was productive. If you zoom out from what he was doing on that picnic table on those specific summer days in 1966 to instead consider his entire career, you’ll find a writer who has, to date, published twenty-nine books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards. There’s no reasonable definition of productivity that shouldn’t also apply to John McPhee, and yet nothing about his work habits is frantic, busy, or overwhelming.
There’s no reasonable definition of productivity that shouldn’t also apply to John McPhee, and yet nothing about his work habits is frantic, busy, or overwhelming.
This initial insight developed into the core idea that my new book Slow Productivity explores: perhaps knowledge workers’ problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition of this term that has taken hold in recent decades.
These revelations sparked new thinking about how we approach our work, eventually coalescing into a fully formed alternative to the assumptions driving our current exhaustion: slow productivity.
A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:
- Do fewer things.
- Work at a natural pace.
- Obsess over quality.
This philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. It also posits that professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything. The philosophy’s core principles include, providing both theoretical justification for why they’re right and concrete advice on how to take action on them in your specific professional life, regardless of whether you run your own company or work under the close supervision of a boss.
This philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride. . . . A focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.
The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation.
I have come to believe that alternative approaches to productivity can be just as easily justified, including those in which overfilled task lists and constant activity are downgraded in importance, and something like John McPhee’s languid intentionality is lauded. Indeed, the habits and rituals of traditional knowledge workers like McPhee are more than just inspiring, but can, with sufficient care to account for the realities of twenty-first-century jobs, provide a rich source of ideas about how we might transform our modern understanding of professional accomplishment.
This has been adapted from Cal Newport’s recently published Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout with permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Calvin C. Newport.
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