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Guest Essay
By Cal Newport
Mr. Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout,” from which this essay is adapted.
For most of human existence, the pace and intensity of productivity varied widely from season to season. During the roughly 300,000 years that Homo sapiens wandered the earth in bands of hunters and gathers, nature dictated the rhythms of their daily activities.
Following the development of agriculture around 10,000 B.C.E., the relationship between work and the seasons became even more structured, with predictably busy planting and harvesting seasons interleaved with predictably quiet winters.
It was the Industrial Revolution that ultimately ruptured this natural work cycle. In a mill or a factory, unlike on a hunting ground or a farm field, the relationship between effort and reward is constant — the more hours you run your factory, the more products you produce. This led to a conception of work as something that should occur at the fullest possible intensity, without variation, throughout the year.
When knowledge work arose as a major economic sector in the 20th century — the term “knowledge work” itself was coined in 1959 — it borrowed this approach from manufacturing, which was the dominant economic force of the time. Office buildings became invisible factories, with members of this growing class of workers metaphorically clocking in for eight-hour shifts, week after week, month after month, attempting to transform their mental capacities into valuable output with the same regularity as an assembly-line worker churning out automobiles.
In recent years, I’ve come to believe that the decision to treat the pacing of cognitive jobs like manufacturing jobs was a mistake. We seemed to have forgotten that life in the mills and factories was miserable. The unrelenting pace of those jobs eventually required the formation of labor unions and regulatory innovations, like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which introduced a mandated workweek and overtime pay — all of which emphasized the artificiality of forcing our efforts into such an unvarying and demanding rhythm. And yet, as more of us shifted into the comparable comfort of office buildings, we carried over this same flawed model, forged on the factory floor.
The problem with the invisible factory, however, goes beyond the fact that it makes us unhappy. It’s also ineffective. The process of producing value with the human brain — the foundational activity of many knowledge sector roles — cannot be forced into a regular, unvarying schedule. Intense periods of cognition must be followed by quieter periods of mental rejuvenation. Energized creative breakthroughs must be supported by the slower incubation of new ideas.
Studying the habits of successful creative people who worked outside a traditional office environment, we find they gravitated toward more varied schedules. Georgia O’Keeffe, for example, unlocked her famed productivity only after she began fleeing the city each summer to find quiet inspiration painting at Lake George in upstate New York. Lin Manuel Miranda spread the development of “In the Heights” over more than five years, as he found repeatedly returning to the play proved more conducive to creativity than trying to grind it out in one intense push. Marie Curie paused her pioneering research on the subject of radiation to take her family on an extended vacation. When she returned, she went back to her work, which would eventually win her two Nobel Prizes.
For these well-known figures, taking time off, or varying the pace of their efforts, was not just about relaxation or escape but about improving the quality of their output over time. Seasonal variation wasn’t a perk of their schedules, but quite literally a more natural way to work. It’s no surprise, then, that so many modern knowledge workers feel burned out or frustrated with their professional routines. We’re forcing efforts best served by a looser rhythm into an unnatural and busy uniformity.
Our current era — in which the disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic have opened the door to exploring more radical ways of organizing knowledge work, such as fully remote positions or four-day workweeks — is the perfect time to push back against the “invisible factory” model and embrace seasonality.
Applying this general idea could take on many forms. Most obviously, knowledge sector organizations could directly identify certain seasons to be quieter than others. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the American publishing industry still largely offers “summer hours” — employees leave early on Fridays so that they can jump-start their weekends. This convention creates an overall atmosphere of slowness during the summer, allowing people to catch their breath before the busy fall publishing season picks up.
Strategies to vary pace, however, don’t need to be explicitly seasonal. The software development company Basecamp asks its employees to consolidate their work into “cycles,” which last from six to eight weeks and are focused on a small number of clear goals. Crucially, each cycle is followed by a two-week “cool down” period in which employees can recharge and regroup by fixing small problems and taking time to consider what to tackle next. “It’s sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cool-down period to fit in more work,” the Basecamp employee handbook says. “But the goal is to resist this temptation.”
The authors of the influential 2016 book “Sprint” — Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz — argue that this cyclical approach can be adapted to non-software industries as well. They propose a “design sprint” strategy in which a team drops everything — no meetings, no emails — to focus on a single challenge for five intense days, before stepping back to rest and process the results. They argue that this approach leads to better results than trying to mix together efforts on several projects into a single unvarying mush of busyness and exhaustion.
Organizations might instead consider adapting the idea of sabbaticals from academia. Professors are typically offered one or two semesters free from teaching and service responsibilities roughly once every seven years — an idea itself borrowed from ancient Jewish scripture, which commanded that you leave your farm fields fallow one year out of every seven. In a corporate setting, instead of waiting so long for a break, you might more regularly reward work on particularly hard projects with mini-sabbaticals, perhaps two to four weeks long, during which you’re freed from attending meetings or working on difficult tasks.
This idea of paid sabbaticals is slowly starting to catch on in corporate settings. The email marketing company AWeber, for example, offers a four-week paid leave to those with a decade or more of service, while the walkie-talkie app developer Zello provides multiweek breaks after only five years. Presumably, as it becomes clear that such breaks are not just a benefit but also a source of renewed creativity, we might find companies willing to offer them even more frequently.
Some jobs, of course, can’t support long breaks from intensity. If you’re the host of a weekly podcast, you cannot easily take breaks from releasing new episodes. In this case, smaller-scale variations in effort can still make a difference. If episodes publish on Fridays, maybe the following Mondays are kept clear of all appointments beyond unstructured brainstorming sessions. This allows a slower start each week to better balance out a more harried ending. At first, this might feel like you’re wasting time on Mondays, but what you’re gaining in exchange is a more sustainable pace that sidesteps burnout and keeps quality high.
Maybe you won’t convince your boss of the value of seasonality. But not every strategy of this type requires buy-in at the organizational level. There are also more surreptitious ways to gain some of the benefits of this approach.
In 2022, the concept of “quiet quitting” — refusing to put in more than the bare minimum in your job — gained traction online. But it eventually lost steam as its adherents realized their employers didn’t share their enthusiasm for the idea. Hidden in this debate, however, was a pragmatic observation: You have more control over your workload than you might at first imagine — saying no more often and systematically avoiding optional tasks can significantly reduce your sense of busyness. While permanently quiet quitting will almost certainly be noticed and frowned upon, temporarily keeping your head down and sidestepping more commitments than usual probably will not.
Most people are probably already deploying this strategy on occasion, perhaps during a time-consuming move or while taking on extra caregiving responsibilities for a sick family member. So why not make it a more regular part of your routine? You could, for example, schedule an intentional slowdown every July or in the month leading up to the Christmas break. Individuals, in other words, can often put some version of regular seasonality into their schedule without anyone realizing what’s going on.
For those steeped in the invisible-factory mind-set, these seasonality strategies might be unsettling. In the industrial context that shapes so much of how we currently think about work, the game played between employer and employee is zero-sum: Time not spent busy is revenue lost. But these dynamics do not hold in the knowledge sector. Extracting value from the human brain is not something that can be regularized like installing a steering wheel on a Model T. Introducing more variation into the pacing of our work is not a concession made to labor, but a smart recognition of how to produce the best results over time. This type of variation is aligned with the long history of humans engaging in productive activity. It’s the grinding regularity of manufacturing that’s the outlier, not our instinctual attraction to a more natural pace of work.
Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of the forthcoming book “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout,” from which this essay is adapted.
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