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When it comes to productivity for higher education professionals, the number of journal articles published by faculty is usually brought to mind. The output for administrators and staff is less defined: their productive value is typically based on an overall sense that they are getting things done.
A relic from the industrial era mode of work, productivity in higher education is a race against time. There are tenure clocks, deadlines to meet, and the days, hours, or even seconds people expect you to respond to emails and “deliver the goods.”
Colleges and universities might seem ideal places for timeless production, or at least unhurried deliberation, compared to other knowledge work environments. Intellectual thought, student transformation, and other gears of academia can’t be rushed. Bureaucratic processes are expected. Just look at how long it takes institutions to make a hire.
Still, a paradoxical concept of “slow productivity” might be resisted by higher education professionals. Slow productivity is a term coined by author and Georgetown University computer science professor Cal Newport that he uses in his book of the same name to describe a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner.
Newport’s three principles of slow productivity are simple:
- Do fewer things.
- Work at a natural pace.
- Obsess over quality.
“This philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride,” Newport wrote. “It also posits that professional efforts should enfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.”
Every profession has its own rhythms of work and capacity to apply the principles of slow productivity. Despite naming higher education professionals among the knowledge workers who have great autonomy, along with freelancers and small business owners, Newport has firsthand experience in academia and how others in his field go astray and fail to use their freedom to choose and organize their efforts.
“Slow Productivity” wasn’t written for the higher education audience, but Newport addressed how professionals can apply his three principles within the academy on an episode of his podcast, “Deep Questions.”
“There’s congruence between the principles of slow productivity and what’s necessary to be successful in academia,” Newport said. “(You have to) make sure you’re aiming toward a realistic assessment of what’s needed.”
Before applying the three principles (or the do’s) in the context of higher education, here is one big don’t.
Don’t write your own story.
Too many academics develop their own idea of productivity. They might be prolific in writing papers but in venues that won’t lead to tenure or promotion.
The same goes for administrators who might be measuring success based on vanity metrics or a sense of productivity, such as the number of student appointments scheduled by an office instead of outcomes like retention.
Lead measures could very well serve the lag measure, but often they feed into someone’s false narrative about how productive and effective they are. Find out what is important right now, whether you’re a pre-tenure professor working toward the sufficient number of papers published in certain journals or you’re an administrator understanding what your institution values the most from you.
Look at what made successful promotion cases at your institution or talk to your manager about what moves the needle. Especially for early-career professionals, don’t create your own idea of success at your institution. You can shape that once you become department chair, dean, or vice president of your division.
“Don’t worry about if it makes sense or not, don’t get upset about it, don’t convince yourself that it’s somehow unfair or it’s not measuring the right things,” Newport said. “You have to see it as an arbitrary challenge: ‘I have to do X. What’s the best way to get to X?'”
Writing your story of success or changing the direction of your institution or department can come later, after you earn tenure or advance to an executive role.
Once you have your targets established, then you can focus on the most sustainable way to get there using slow productivity.
Do fewer things.
Work in higher education is cognitively demanding. It’s not manual labor or rote tasks that can be maximized by increasing work volume and speed or performed with other duties by rapidly switching contexts.
“Your work-in-progress limits need to be very small,” Newport said. “I’m working actively on this paper and that’s it. I’m focusing really intensely on a small number of things and I’m keeping my service obligations low. I can be a pain but I can be useful to my department after promotion.”
Newport advises having a quota system, where you agree with your supervisor to only take on a certain number of projects or committee assignments from others per semester before you start declining requests and say, “I already hit my quota.”
Work at a natural pace.
This is also critical in academia because higher education professionals are susceptible to burnout (35% according to Gallup research). Take advantage of the rhythms of the academic calendar and collective restoration that makes this work environment unique. Use cooldowns between more intense periods of work to optimize your efforts and resources. Constantly pushing your limits is not sustainable or natural.
For pre-tenure academics, Newport recommends a cooldown of about two-to-four weeks following the submission of a paper before working on the next project. Spend that time focusing on teaching or exposing yourself to new ideas and reading other journals to find inspiration.
Administrative staff can set boundaries by having a scheduled shutdown routine every day, limiting the number of times you check email, and blocking time to concentrate on important tasks or perform bouts of what Newport calls “deep work.”
Obsess over quality.
This is the principle that Newport says is the glue that holds the practice of slow productivity together and it is crucial in higher education work.
“As a professor, I teach classes, I submit grants, I deal with paperwork involving existing grants, I supervise students, I sit on committees, I write papers, I travel to present these papers and struggle to format them for publication,” Newport wrote in “Slow Productivity.” “In the moment, everything seems important. (…) In the end, great research papers are what matter for us. If we haven’t notably advanced our academic specialty, no amount of to-do list martyrdom can save us.”
You might not work at an R1 research institution like Newport where publications matter so much. You might not even be a professor. The point is everyone working in higher education has core activities, and you should obsess over the quality of what you produce in the tasks that matter most, even if it means missing other opportunities in the short term. Then you can leverage the value of the results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long run.
In the chapter about this principle in “Slow Productivity,” Newport encourages readers to improve their tastes and take bets on themselves. This can be achieved by academics by working with collaborators who publish in journals that lead to your promotion and putting yourself in situations where there’s pressure to succeed.
But obsessing over quality has two effects: It helps you do really good work while also helping you escape the trap of what Newport calls “pseudo-productivity,” which is the use of visible activity, such as answering emails and attending meetings, as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.
This doesn’t mean you should avoid doing these tasks altogether. Some things just need to get done, but once you realize how little they mean in the grand scheme of things, your perceptions and behaviors change.
Go slow.
“Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind,” Newport wrote. “A slower approach to work is not only feasible, but is likely superior to the ad hoc pseudo-productivity that dictates professional lives of so many today.”
Busyness doesn’t impress people. It’s the results that matter. Like the tortoise and the hare, it’s about where you end up, not the speed at which you move.
If you really want to be productive, go slow.
