Performative Busyness

"If you're not at your desk, you're not working."

Late last year, I finally got around to reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity on the recommendation of a friend. I usually don’t read business or self-help kinds of books unless they are either: a) assigned to me as part of my work or b) come by a strong recommendation of one or multiple trusted friends. I don’t mind them! I just have a to-be-read list that is quite long, and these kinds of books are often at the bottom of that list.

Slow Productivity was finally recommended to me enough times that I bought and read it last year.

This was my first exposure to Newport, perhaps somewhat surprisingly given he’s written books that run parallel to some of what I write about here—like Deep Work or Digital Minimalism.

Anyway, I really enjoyed Slow Productivity when I read it last year. I’ve spent my whole career as a “knowledge worker,” and I have seen it go poorly when some organizations (or individuals within organizations) try to measure the productivity of knowledge workers like they’re a part of an assembly line of some kind. I’ve seen the bad fruit of not letting creative people actually have room to think and produce good, creative work.

At the same time, I have seen abundant, sweet fruit when organizations and managers who recognize the need for knowledge workers (especially creative workers) to meander and putz around on their way to doing good work.

To borrow from and paraphrase Kierkegaard: sometimes the best thing you can do is just take a walk.

I can’t tell you how many times some of my best work ideas have come to me on my midday trips to the gym or a lunchtime walk around the neighborhood.

So, I’ve been meaning to share about this book for some time, but it’s slowly been pushed back in favor of other topics. This is the first of what will be a handful of pieces about the book and some key quotes I enjoyed.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Newport writes toward the beginning of the book in a chapter called, “The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-Productivity”:

If you can see me in my office—or if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly—then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something.

…

As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work.

….

Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort became a source of anxiety—it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.

My dad started working from home for IBM in the early 1990s, when IBM was a leading brand in home computing and working from home was novel. In fact, here’s a picture a local newspaper took in our home reporting on the phenomenon. That’s me on my dad’s lap in our converted dining room.

Because my dad worked from home virtually my entire life as a child, I understood two things from an early age: 1) remote workers are real contributors that do real work that matters, and 2) it’s awesome having your dad around to finish up work and immediately be home for coaching baseball games or otherwise being with the family.

So you can imagine when I took my first real job as an adult, I was disheartened to learn that the prevailing culture was, “If you’re not at your desk, you aren’t working.” This seemed to be the rule when I asked to work from my parents’ house while traveling for holidays, but it did not appear to apply when I was asked to work from my apartment on the weekends—strange how that works!¹

Anyway, I’m so grateful to have had work experiences and managers in the last decade that are more interested in the product of my work than my busyness.

Why Managers Get Scared

When it comes to knowledge work, we need to be much more interested in results than we are in activity. A lot of managers bristle at this. Why?

Because this posture requires more of managers!

It requires managers to have a firm understanding of what they want their teams to produce, and it requires managers to recognize when they have given their teams too little (which can lead to laziness or inactivity among the team) or too much (which can lead to bad results or turnover).

When managers maintain a posture of “if you’re not at your desk, you’re not working,” it doesn’t necessarily produce better results from the team, but it does give the manager a feeling of absolution—the manager may not have any idea if the team is doing good work, but at least no one’s doing the laundry between meetings!

Lazy managers struggle with people who don’t appear busy because their team’s busyness is the only way they can know work is getting done. It requires active, tapped-in managers to trust teams to produce results without the appearance of busyness. It requires regular meetings, active communication, and trust.

Where We’re Headed

The world of knowledge workers is ever-changing, and the onset of AI in the workplace is perhaps going to be the most earthshaking experience we’ve had yet. The cornucopia of AI tools at our disposal have the ability to make knowledge workers more productive than we’ve ever been, while at the same time busying us with tasks that may look innovative and clever, but not actually produce any better results.

Employees in knowledge sectors are reporting feelings of burnout at high rates, and despite promises that AI will help knowledge workers, perhaps even leading to four-day work weeks, it sounds like many who are adopting AI in their workplaces right now are doing so out of a sense of obligation or fear of being replaced.

Wherever we go next, it is going to be important for us to consider that busyness and “productivity” are not always related.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is not responding to all of those emails immediately or crafting an even more robust prompt for ChatGPT.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is go for a walk.

1. I should say, however, that I am so grateful I spent the first handful of years in my career working in an office building with other people. Newly-married, just-out-of-college Chris definitely benefitted from working in a traditional office environment for a few years before being allowed to work from home. Even today, I often say that if I could go into an office every day that is located 5-10 minutes away from my house, I’d prefer that to working from home. But that kind of arrangement can be hard to come by!