Permission to Reject the Trance of Busyness - Granted
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
Cal Newport is one of my favorite counter-cultural authors. He has done so much to help me retrain my brain to reject the trance of busyness. In his books Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Slow Productivity (his newest tome), he makes persuasive arguments to discard pseudo productivity busyness mindsets and embrace languid intentionality instead.
In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport gives us a mini history lesson on the human construct of productivity. When we as a species worked mainly in agriculture, productivity could be measured as the amount of food a parcel of land could produce. When we moved into the industrial era, productivity could be measured as the amount of output produced from a given measure of input. But then came the knowledge work sector and its cognitive effort, which made measuring productivity much harder if not impossible. This difficulty to establish productivity metrics created pseudo productivity measures. Easy to observe metrics like hours worked, number of emails sent, number of meetings on a calendar, and even how fast employees walk or how stressed they look became ways to review employee productivity. I used to joke when I worked at a New York financial firm that if you want to get a glowing year-end review, speed walk past your manager’s office a few times a day with a notebook in your hand looking a little bit frazzled.
If we’re thinking logically, we know that just because you’re sitting at your work desk for more hours, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing more tasks. Additionally, just because you send a ton of emails, it doesn’t mean you’re getting more meaningful work done (you may actually be distracting not only you, but many others from getting true, meaningful work done).
According to Cal Newport, slow productivity is a philosophy for organizing knowledge work in a sustainable and meaningful manner based on the following 3 principles:
Do fewer things.
Work at a natural pace.
Obsess over quality.
Slow productivity rejects busyness as a false badge of pride. We should pivot away from performative activity and pseudo productivity and lean into languid intentionality. And Cal Newport’s books are full of ideas on how to develop a more slow productivity mindset.
I feel like I’ve always been a natural rejector of busyness. Even when I was new in my career, I had set hours when I was at work. People knew I wouldn’t be at the office after closing time, but they also knew that I was hardworking and available for the hours when I was present. I didn’t create or attend unnecessary meetings to boost my meeting count or visibility. I didn’t live in my inbox and constantly respond to emails all day. I methodically worked on my most important objectives each day, took breaks when I needed to, and then kept working. I stayed calm and progressed through my tasks in a prioritized manner. You can be the calm in the busyness storm in your workplace, and you can celebrate and give positive reviews for your colleagues who also work in a more impactful and meaningful manner. The more individuals reject the trance of busyness, the more professional culture can shift toward truer and more rewarding work.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team