Here’s another Nature’s story on slow productivity:
Slow productivity worked for Marie Curie — here’s why you should adopt it, too
August 2024. Link.
The story is immensely inspiring. I archived it here and highly recommend reading it! Here are some excerpts:
Slow Productivity is a call to arms to reject the performative busyness of the modern workplace, where frequent virtual meetings and long e-mail chains sap so much of workers’ attention. One exhausted postdoctoral researcher interviewed by Newport defined productivity, as it is currently measured in academia, as “working all the time”.
Combined with the front-office IT revolution — personal computers, then portable computers with e-mail and networks, and then smartphones — meant that things really began to spin out of control for knowledge workers and the toll of exhaustion and burnout have begun to increase.
Instead, Newport urges knowledge workers to “do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.”
Richard Feynman thought that peace of mind was the most important requisite of creative work.
[Newport says] “A big thing I tried to do in the book is figure out how you can leverage the autonomy you have and how you organize your labour to get away from the worst excesses of super productivity. You can’t say no to a lot of things. But you can have a more transparent workload management system so your boss can see you’re doing all the things you’re being asked to do.”
And, reflecting from the time of graduate school when Newport were at MIT, working along the theory group—perhaps the most intelligent herd on the planet:
“I learnt great lessons about the importance of concentration. The students had a distrust of digital technology versus the human brain. These are computer scientists who don’t use computers,” he says, adding, “These ideas infused my thinking. It was an important, formative time, even if I didn’t realize that until later.”