Title: A Slower Way to Amp Up Your Productivity

This story is a part of our “Ask a Professor” series, in which Georgetown faculty break down complex issues and use their research to inform trending conversations, from the latest pop culture hits to research breakthroughs and critical global events shaping our world.

Professor Cal Newport doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions. He tunes up his systems and fires up goals at the beginning of the school year. 

But the computer science professor does have tips for shaking up the way we work and study in 2024, particularly in the midst of constant distractions, interruptions, pings and dings. 

According to new research, people can only focus on one screen for 47 seconds on average, and the brain takes 25 minutes to refocus on a task after a distraction. In constantly diverting our attention to email, chats or newsfeeds while working on something important, Newport says, we exist in a “neurological liminal state of conflicted attention targets.” In other words, we can’t fully focus. 

“The true productivity poison in the modern workplace or educational environment are the quick checks of unrelated sources of information that create that persistent state of divided attention,” said Newport, an associate professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and a New York Times bestselling author. “This not only reduces our cognitive capacity but is also exhausting. Both our work and our mental health suffer.”

To evade these distractions, the New Yorker contributor, researcher and podcast host proposes blocking off time to work without any “quick checks.” And in his forthcoming book, Slow Productivity, he proposes a philosophy to produce more meaningful, better quality work in a way that’s sustainable long-term. 

“Slow productivity highlights a way forward in which you can sidestep the demands of an always-on hustle culture, and yet still find pride and meaning in your professional efforts,” he said. 

The advice can also be applied to students, he says, to avoid burnout and exhaustion and make college more meaningful. 

Read on to learn how we got to the state of constant busyness and what you can do to funnel your attention into higher quality work in the classroom and workplace in 2024.

What impact does constant distraction have on us? Are we more distracted than we’ve ever been?

It takes our brains a considerable amount of time to achieve full focus on something important. If we keep temporarily diverting our attention to quick distractions, such as checking in on email or chat conversations, or scrolling through social media headlines, we never achieve this focus, but instead exist in a neurological liminal state of conflicted attention targets. This not only reduces our cognitive capacity but is also exhausting. Both our work and our mental health suffer.

Do you have any tips for filtering out distractions and improving our focus in the workplace and study hall, particularly as the new year begins?

The true productivity poison in the modern workplace or educational environment are the quick checks of unrelated sources of information that create that persistent state of divided attention I described above. The key to avoiding this poison, therefore, is to keep your focus unwavering when working on something hard. When studying, writing or trying to come up with a new idea, insist on a rule that allows no quick checks during that period. You’ll produce better quality work, you’ll produce it faster, and you’ll do so with less mental fatigue.

You’re writing a book that comes out in March called Slow Productivity. What is slow productivity?

Slow productivity is an alternative philosophy for producing meaningful work that is designed to be sustainable. It focuses less on busyness at small time scales and more on producing better results on long time scales. It’s an approach to getting things done designed to work with our fundamental human needs and not in opposition to them.

You’ve mentioned that slow productivity focuses on doing fewer things, working at a natural pace and prioritizing quality. Do you think that’s feasible in a world that expects constant, quick output? What would it take to get to this kind of workplace?

Our current state of unending business – which I call “pseudo-productivity” in my book – can feel like it’s something that’s demanded of us by faceless entities. How else can we explain why we would put up with such an exhausting mode of work? But as you look closer into the issue, the origins of pseudo-productivity becomes more haphazard and bottom-up than most realize. More sustainable definitions of productivity are possible! But they require a lot of clarity in how you are going to work and why it will end up being better for everyone involved. 

Some of this clarity might be personal; for example, maintaining clear internal quotas on how many tasks of a given type you’re willing to take on at once before you start to say “no.” Some of this clarity might instead be collaborative; for example, instituting daily office hours as the main way for your colleagues to ask you questions or discuss small issues, saving yourself from needing to wrangle back-and-forth email or chat conversations throughout the day. Ultimately, people who embrace slow productivity produce better work, which is, in the end, what matters to colleagues and clients.

What kind of benefits does slow productivity provide? 

The biggest benefit is that it combines a natural drive to produce things that matter without also driving us into burnout. Finding this balance is important. Right now, the two big responses to the demands of modern knowledge work are to either go all in on hustle culture or adopt an anti-capitalism resistance mindset in which work itself is vilified as a side-effect of endless power games. Neither, on its own, can fully offer us all of what we need. Slow productivity highlights a way forward in which you can sidestep the demands of an always-on hustle culture, and yet still  find pride and meaning in your professional efforts.

How did the American workplace morph into this always-on mentality?

The constant busyness of modern American pseudo-productivity is a relatively recent phenomenon in the context of knowledge work. As I argue in my book, when the knowledge sector first emerged as a major economic force in the mid-twentieth century, managers and business owners, not sure how to measure productivity in a setting without widgets to count, fell back on using visible effort as a proxy for useful production. The more you seem to be doing, the more productive I’ll assume you are. This compromise began to fall apart once we introduced mobile computing and network communication into these jobs. Once it became possible to access and continue work in any place and at any time, a definition of production built around activity devolved into more and more activity, until we find ourselves in our current moment of widespread burnout. 

Can slow productivity apply to students? If so, how? 

Back when I was a graduate student at MIT, I ran a popular blog, called Study Hacks, that focused on advice for the student experience. One of the most common problems I encountered were students burning out due to excessive workloads. Pushing back on this idea, and encouraging a slower alternative, became one of the primary themes of my online writing. 

The core of my student advice back then was the following motto: Do less. Do better. Know why. 

Don’t take too many classes (triple majoring was a big deal at MIT at the time before the administration finally had to ban it). Instead, focus on really diving deep into the smaller load of classes you do take. It’s better to be the star in one class than to survive an overloaded schedule. And finally, embrace the intellectual adventure of being a student. Don’t view college as something to suffer through to open up opportunities in the future. Make it something you find meaningful right now. Combined, these ideas can still lead you to lots of impressive opportunities after graduation, but in the meantime save you from exhaustion and misery.

What is your number one advice for students and their study habits at the start of a new semester? 

Do fewer things. There is no one in your future, be it a grad school admissions committee or hiring officer at a company, who is going to go through your schedule and estimate the difficulty of your workload. You don’t earn extra points for surviving a hard course schedule or excessive number of activities. Pare down your schedule until you have more than enough time to tackle what’s on your plate. Do these things well. Enjoy the rest of your time.

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? If so, what are they this year? When is the best time of year to change our habits? Can we make these changes any time?

Like many academics and students, I always find that the beginning of the fall, not the new year, is the right time to tune up your systems and update your goals.