Why Am I Working More and Getting Less Done?
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Why do we feel busier and less productive in modern knowledge work?
Our brain just can't do it. We're like, oh, that's just what work feels like. I'm always like vaguely distracted and anxious. It's not what work has to feel like. That's actually a side effect of a way of working that's not really compatible with our brains.
Smart girl. Dumb questions. Why are we working more and getting less done? And should that meeting have been an email? I'm Naeem Araza. This is Smart Girl Dumb Questions. And today I'm talking to Cal Newport, professor at Georgetown University, expert on how tech shapes our lives, and the bestselling author of so many books, including Deep Work, Slow Productivity, Digital Minimalism, and my personal favorite at North Star, A World Without Email. Cal, can you give us A World Without Email?
I tried. It was one of the worst selling of my recent books. I think it's because the bookstore employees were shelving it in the fantasy section and so that people didn't get to it. So look, it hasn't caught on, alas.
I found it really validating because in parts of it, you're discussing the World War II U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General Marshall, and describing how he took himself offline and managed to win a world war, win a Nobel Prize. But it made my emails feel less important, certainly.
Well, I thought that was an amazing story, by the way, that he's running the U.S. military in World War II. And the way they used to deal with heart health, you know, in the first half of the 20th century was like, well, you really probably shouldn't work past like 5 or 5.30 because you might die. So he's like, great, I will run the war without working past 5.30.
They just made it work. Yes. The one thing that I hate more than email is this word busy. And I find myself using it all the time and hating myself for it. And I'm curious where it came from because it feels like a status symbol, like a Porsche Cayenne and like a fourth kid being busy. And your writing and whole theory of work and life does a good job of undressing and disarming the word.
Yeah. You know, I think. I think there's multiple sources for why we feel more busy and why we talk about being more busy. We get the personal computer revolution in the 80s and 90s and the email revolution in the late 90s into the 2000s. And so the personal computer made it possible for workers to do more things. Like the range of possible tasks you could do skyrocketed. Mm-hmm. once you had a computer on your desk. Then the ease with which you could ask someone to do something skyrocketed once we had network connections on those computers and could email. And so now we had a sort of almost unlimited collection of types of things we could be doing and way more requests coming in for us to do things. What we lacked was any notion of workload management.
So KnowledgeWork did not have some notion of you should have X number of active tasks and other tasks are waiting in this holding dock. And we had no notion like this. So people just took on more work.
Because it's not like a factory line with quotas and unions and, you know, all the caps, basically.
I think that's exactly right. And so we have a feeling of busyness in the 2000s, like the 21st century, that
we
probably didn't have in like 1970, in part because we literally have more things on our plate. And then our brain knows this. So our brain is constantly trying to riff through this file of facts of all these various things we've committed to. And it's bouncing, what about this? What about this? Making sure we don't forget things, internally reviewing and re-reviewing. And what does that sensation feel like? This uneasy sense of, oh my God, I have so much to do. So I think we actually literally feel busier because of these technological changes in the office.
What I really like about the way you come at this is the way in which you explain how our lives and minds are a bit downstream of technology, and then also how we might flip that. This is the second episode of my What Even Is Work series, which is brought to you by Zoom. And what I really want in this conversation is for you, Cal Newport, to give us a cheat sheet to people who feel that
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Why do we feel busier and less productive in modern knowledge work?
0:00–34:05
2
What is the “hyperactive hive mind” and how does it affect our brains?
34:05–41:39
3
How does pseudo‑productivity differ from real productivity?
41:39–43:27
4
What exactly is deep work and how can you tell you’re doing it?
43:27–56:09
Speakers
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