James King

I am reading a book called Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport so I guess I am reading about work. But I am not working while I read – this is a book that I am reading out of pure curiousity and I am extracting joy from doing so.

In theory though, reading a book about productivity could make me more productive and thus better at my work. But if that is the expectation then so far, this book is different.

Slow Productivity starts with the premise that being really busy and doing more stuff is the path to Burn Out, not increased productivity. Indeed it suggests that knowledge workers are using tools like email and slack to ping others and remind them that they are busy, rather than accomplishing goals.

Even the concept of making work visible seems to add the risk that we will mistake the tracking of work for the completion of good quality work.

If that is true – then does the “slow” mean we should do less work? Doing less with our time seems to be the opposite of being more productive.

Productivity is not being busy

The book is not about slacking off though, just as it is not about generating greater throughput from every minute of your day. It is about getting more value from your time at work. More value for yourself and, through doing better work, more value for your stakeholders.

The “slow” part of the book’s title is about literally slowing by not rushing things or pursuing ever busier schedules. The productivity part of the title is about getting better value from your work rather than getting more done.

So productivity is not, in this book, about doing more, it is about enjoying more what you do and it is about producing work you can be proud of rather than work that you had to rush to get done for a deadline.

The way it proposes to achieve this seems to align with what I already believe:

• Do fewer things (which Pat Reed, the late agile guru, always championed)
• Work at a natural pace (which I guess aligns with sustainable pace but not maximum sustainable pace)
• Obsess over quality (which definitely aligns with Lean thinking but also to quality of knowledge work rather than completion of standard units of work at a set standard)

If these principles align with agile ways of working however, then this books throws down a challenge to the assumptions about how we actually actually work in agile, right from the start.

Ceremonies and visible work

When people adopt Scrum (and other agile frameworks) they often complain that there are too many meetings. They would rather be working than talking about work.

I have often responded that the hypothesis that if we, as a team, spend 10% of our time talking about work, then we will be more than 11% more effective in the remaining 90% of our time and therefore be more “productive”.

People also complain about putting post-it notes on walls, or more often now, updating electronic whiteboards and Jira like software. I tell them that making our work visible is the way for us to understand it as a team, so we can talk about it together and work out how to do it better – how to improve our quality and our “productivity”.

But, the book asks, what if we make the wrong things visible? Won’t we then focus on the wrong things? If we track completion of tasks then might we not encourage more task completion rather than deeper thinking and better quality?

Challenging questions

I believe these things to be true, yet the book asks fundamental questions that put these comfortable assumptions under some uncomfortable pressure:

• Do the people talking about the work understand and agree on what “productivity” is?;
• Does tracking a visible proxy of work, helping us focus on doing less things at the right pace to the right quality, or is it actually distracting us from those things? For example, if we talk about what meetings we attended and what tasks we completed, are we creating a bias to do more of those things rather than less?
• Are knowledge workers better off with more time to ponder their work and less reporting of what they are doing?

My basic instinct is to help individuals to work at a “natural pace” and that finding that is the core to doing good work. But when people work on interdependent things and they have commitments that others depend on, then it is more complex.

So, I believe strongly that talking about work is how we align and support each other. This means that talking about work is, indeed, work. This is not the end of the story however.

If talking about work is part of the work we do, it is also one of the greatest sources of waste in the work we do.

Reporting is necessary, but needless reporting that is done manually can be a lot of effort. Even worse – reporting that says what happened in the past, but that does not support decision making, seems to be even more wasteful.

Standups where we talk about work that needs no discussion is a drag on our energy and re-discussing the same stories 5 times before writing code seems like busy work and not productive at all.

So if we really want to talk about our work and we really want to make it transparent so that we can manage it, we should be both careful and deliberate in doing so.

What aspect of our work we choose to make transparent will impact both our sensemaking about our work, potentially creating great focus or greatly increased distraction.

So if talking about work is part of our work, a real challenge for me is to treat it as work, while still allowing people to slow down and collaborate as humans rather than just using our meetings to exchange work-related data.

So what should we talk about?

We should, if the book is right, be talking about how we do less things and how we obsess over quality, while allowing each other to work at a natural pace.

And indeed our meetings and tools should follow the same guidance – less talk and tool updates, but really good quality in them and them fitting into the natural pace of our work rather than interrupting it.

I am off to do some actual agile coaching today, which will involve talking about work, but not for the sake of talking. In fact I guess what I am paid for is to make it easier for teams to work at a natural pace while, importantly, seeing a real, visible and positive shift in quality.

Or I could just get another coffee and read more of my book. Either way I hope to get some high quality work done at a natural pace.