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:
A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:
1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.
As you'll learn in the pages ahead, 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. In the second part of this book, I'll detail the philosophy's core principles, 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.
My goal is not to simply offer tips about how to make your job somewhat less exhausting. Nor is it to merely shake my metaphorical fist on your behalf at the exploitative fiends indifferent to your stressed-out plight (though we'll certainly do some of that). I want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done. I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you're proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way. Not every office job, of course, will enjoy the ability to immediately embrace this more intentional rhythm, but as I'll detail, it's more widely applicable than you might at first guess. I want to prove to you, in other words, that accomplishment without burnout not only is possible, but should be the new standard.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, we must first understand how the knowledge sector stumbled into its current malfunctioning relationship with productivity in the first place, as it will be easier to reject the status quo once we truly understand the haphazardness of its formation. It's toward the pursuit of this goal, then, that we'll now start our journey.
PART ONE
FOUNDATIONS
CHAPTER ONE
THE RISE AND FALL OF PSEUDO-PRODUCTIVITY
In the summer of 1995, Leslie Moonves, the newly appointed head of entertainment for CBS, was wandering the halls of the network's vast Television City headquarters. He was not happy with what he saw: it was 3:30 p.m. on a Friday, and the office was three quarters empty. As the media journalist Bill Carter reports in Desperate Networks, his 2006 book about the television industry during this period, a frustrated Moonves sent a heated memo about the empty office to his employees. "Unless anybody hasn't noticed, we're in third place [in the ratings]," he wrote. "My guess is that at ABC and NBC they're still working at 3:30 on Friday. This will no longer be tolerated."
* * *
On first encounter, this vignette provides a stereotypical case study about the various ways the knowledge sector came to think about productivity during the twentieth century: "Work" is a vague thing that employees do in an office. More work creates better results than less. It's a manager's job to ensure enough work is getting done, because without this pressure, lazy employees will attempt to get away with the bare minimum. The most successful companies have the hardest workers.
But how did we develop these beliefs? We've heard them enough times to convince ourselves that they're probably true, but a closer look reveals a more complicated story. It doesn't take much probing to discover that in the knowledge work environment, when it comes to the basic goal of getting things done, we actually know much less than we're letting on...
What Does "Productivity" Mean?
As the full extent of our culture's growing weariness with "productivity" became increasingly apparent in recent years, I decided to survey my readers about the topic. My goal was to nuance my understanding of what was driving this shift. Ultimately, close to seven hundred people, almost all knowledge workers, participated in my informal study. My first substantive question was meant to be easy; a warm-up of sorts: "In your particular professional field, how would most people define 'productivity' or 'being productive'?" The responses I received to this initial query, however, surprised me. The issue was less what they said than what they didn't. By far the most common style of answer simply listed the types of things the respondent did in their job.
