Productivity isn’t always fast 

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Slow productivity may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s not. What’s more, it could really help your team with radical prioritization. 

For so long, we’ve thought about productivity unilaterally: Go as fast as possible and do as much as possible. 

But are speed and volume what we’re actually after when we set out to complete a task? No. More likely goals are quality, consistency, and creativity. 

It begs the question of why, as an industry, we are so obsessed with the concept of productivity. 

What if productivity meant using the resources available – no less, no more – to sustain high-quality output over time? In effect, this is what slow productivity is all about. 

The author of Slow Productivity: The Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, Cal Newport, says, “The central goal of slow productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level.” 

Slow productivity focuses on rewarding behavior to reinforce the outcome you want. Speed isn’t the desired outcome. Quality and longevity are.

Misconceptions about slow productivity

Usually when we think about productivity, we’re thinking about how much we can do and how quickly we can do it. Slow productivity takes a different approach. Instead of looking at how much you do, slow productivity looks at how impactful the work you do is. It’s not about doing more, it’s about radical prioritization. 

Slow productivity means being intentional with how you prioritize work and committing to do the things you take on really well. When you take on less, you can focus your energy on your responsibilities with consistent focus, discipline, effective boundaries, and efficiency.

Slow productivity and radical prioritization are two sides of the same coin

To make slow productivity, you need to get comfortable with ruthlessly prioritizing work. This could look like protecting your team’s capacity, planning a few sprints ahead, pushing back on unplanned work (just because it’s urgent, doesn’t mean it’s important), or building extra time into sprints to allow post-mortems. When everything is treated as a priority, nothing is a priority. Deadlines get missed, quality declines, and team morale tanks.

Organizational pressures can make committing to slow productivity difficult. In volatile economic climates and fast-paced industries, teams are often asked to switch their focus erratically or are assigned new tasks without much forethought. 

IBM Education points out, “Another challenge to slow productivity [is] the challenge of managing “work that’s not yet assigned.” In other words, some managers may resist slow productivity because it would require them to prioritize and assign work instead of just emailing an employee, in the moment, about a task that needs to be done.” 

To create a culture of slow productivity on your team, you’ll want to establish planning processes at a weekly cadence or longer and aim to stick with the work planned for the week as closely as possible. Any changes in priorities should have clear reasoning that brings the team along for the ride. 

The impact of slow productivity on burnout

Adopting the ethos of slow productivity isn’t just about improving quality. It’s also a powerful way to reduce burnout on your team. 62% of people who are struggling to manage their work report feeling burnout “often” to “extremely often.” 

The World Health Organization lists the three main dimensions of burnout:

1. Feeling depleted of energy or exhausted
2. Feeling negative or distanced from one’s job
3. Experiencing reduced efficacy at work 

Traditional ways of thinking about productivity reinforce every single one of these dimensions. Slow productivity, though, is like an anecdote:

• It focuses on a manageable workflow over time that energizes employees instead of draining them.
• It provides the space for employees to make thoughtful decisions, reflect, and take on true ownership.
• It fosters an environment where employees can do their best work and feel proud of the impact they’re making.

What does slow productivity mean for start-ups?

In my most recent role as CEO and co-founder at a developer productivity start-up, I learned that sometimes, you need to slow down to move faster in the right direction.

At an early-stage startup, there are a million things that you can be doing at any point in time but, if your work isn’t leading to stronger product market fit, it’s not impactful.

For our first product, we said yes to as many customer requests as possible, which meant doing time-intensive work like supporting platforms. But, we didn’t have product market fit, so despite shipping a lot of features, we weren’t as productive as we could have been. For our second product, we reduced the scope we covered so that we could deliver on our core differentiators. This enabled us to unlock a different and accelerated level of growth. Our time on our second product was shorter and more productive.

Unfortunately we decided to wind down our start-up as the combination of growth and monetization still was not strong enough, but by embracing slow productivity and radical prioritization, we were able to get quite a bit closer. 

At a start-up, there’s this idea you need to go as fast as you can. Push as fast as you can go to get your minimum viable product MVP into the world. However, unless you slow down enough, you might miss that the work you’re doing isn’t having an impact on moving key results. I’ve learned that when you slow down and take the time to be intentional, that’s when you can take big steps forward.

Final thoughts

When we think about productivity, the first thought is often about doing more and doing it quickly. But slow productivity actually leads to far better results. With slow productivity, I learned to let go of tracking how much I do and instead focus on radically prioritizing so I can be sure my work has the intended impact.