Engineering leadership · Book notes
Slow Productivity and the work that keeps making more work
Cal Newport's Slow Productivity names the task engine, work that looks small and keeps spawning more tasks until it crowds out the thing that actually matters.
You realize that blue green deploy really means the way that we structure our repos has to change. Oh, and actually the build process for the machine images has to change, and oh, we have all these dependencies that have to get updated for us to update the build process, and then all of a sudden you get this task list that is nothing to do with blue green but everything to do with blue green.
Cal Newport calls that the task engine in Slow Productivity, his 2024 book aimed at knowledge workers. The three principles of slow productivity are: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. The task engine is part of the first principle.
Newport gives the example of having to choose between two jobs: research a hard topic and write it up, or organize a one-day conference (like a team on-site). Most people would pick the event, because it seems easier.
Organizing the onsite is going to continue generating task after task after task, because you’re going to have to organize schedules, figure out hotels, talk to caterers, come up with an agenda, clear the agenda with other members of the team, things like that. It’s just going to keep generating tasks.
And then you just hand over the document and you’re done. And the event still totally wins because all of the individual tasks are small and you can just do them before lunch and feel productive the whole time.
I have a paper trail of my productivity, but you’re like, did you do something meaningful? Did you actually do something you’re excited about working on? Is it gonna move the needle on the business at the company? And that’s a much harder standard to hold yourself to.
Newport’s term for this paper trail is “pseudo-productivity”.. visible activity that stands in for real productive effort. This is why it’s so hard to stop doing busy work: it looks like progress.
The fifth most important thing in your day is the greatest enemy to the first most important thing.
The task engine is usually the fifth priority, but it doesn’t seem that way until it eats into the week you were supposed to spend on the first priority.
Slow productivity is not the antithesis to accomplishing big cool stuff. Cal Newport argues it is the way to accomplish big cool stuff.
Newport floated the idea of slow before, in a 2021 essay on the anti-busyness revolution. But the task engine only helps once you can see it. So how do you spot the task engine before you agree to it?