How to cope with stress at work—and avoid burning out

Meetings, calls, notifications, multitasking: The modern workplace isn’t exactly known for its qualities of relaxation. In fact, 84 percent of Americans said in a recent survey that their employers contributed to at least one of the mental health challenges they face.

As burnout and stress reach epic proportions, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport has a counterintuitive message: Slow down. In his new book Slow Productivity, the bestselling author uncovers why we’re so unhappy at work. It turns out that one of the most embedded principles of the workplace—the need to be busy—is actually very bad for business. Rejecting that attitude is good for everyone, Newport argues, and it’s possible to achieve big without being needlessly busy.

National Geographic spoke with Newport about the paradox of the modern workplace and how you can incorporate the principles of slow productivity into your own life. This conversation has been edited for clarity.

(‘Urgency culture’ might lead you to burnout. How can you combat it?)

How pseudo-productivity makes work more stressful

Your book uses the term “pseudo-productivity” to describe modern-day work norms. What do you mean when you use that phrase? 

We use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. It goes back to the way we measured productivity in factories and in agricultural sectors. In a factory, you have the number of Model Ts produced. In agriculture, you can measure bushels of corn produced per acre of land under cultivation.

None of that worked in knowledge work; there were no clearly defined production systems you could tweak. So pseudo-productivity was the fallback: If we can’t measure productivity like we used to with numbers and ratios, then let’s just say activity is better than no activity.

If office work is so common, why’s it so stressful? 

The problem came with the IT revolution. We got email and computers, and later mobile computing and smartphones. Suddenly, pseudo-productivity sped off the rails because of the amount of work you could take on. The granularity with which you could show you’re doing effort with emails and Slack and jumping off and on digital meetings—all of that went up. That’s when we began to spiral toward the burnout crisis we see today.

I'm thinking about the boss who insists that you don't clock out until 5 p.m.

That’s classic pseudo-productivity. Activity is our measure of productivity. So more activity is better than less, and not doing activity is suspicious.

Why it’s better for business to move slower

What does this pressure do to our bosses and coworkers? 

When we try to embrace as many things as possible, we end up really slowing down what we produce over time. Pseudo-productivity just makes us worse at work. It’s a poor measure. It’s not successful if our goal is to actually produce good stuff.

When people take on more, though, doesn’t more get done? 

It can actually be, ironically, counterproductive. The administrative overhead adds up. Eventually you find yourself in this situation where most of your day is being spent servicing the administrative overhead of all these things you’ve agreed to do. There’s very little time left to make progress on the work. The rate at which anything gets done plummets. It’s bad for everyone. It doesn’t make companies more profitable. It doesn’t produce more value. It burns out employees and causes more turnover.

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The burnout epidemic is really pervasive. The data suggests that 77 percent or more of the modern American workforce experiences workplace stress. 

It’s a really hard situation right now, psychologically speaking. The way we’re working is just completely brain-numbing. One of the most baffling omissions in the economy of the last 20 or 30 years is that we have a sector based on using human brains to create value, yet are entirely incurious about how human brains function.

We treat human brains like black boxes that can just crank through tasks, one after another. The overhead of trying to keep track of these projects in your brain is brutal. It's intolerable for the human brain to try to juggle 10 different things that have ongoing, active obligations.

But aren’t tools like email and instant messaging designed to make work easier? 

If you understand the human brain at all, [you know] that multitasking is a disaster. When you switch your attention to something like an email inbox, it triggers a very expensive cognitive context switch. Your brain thinks, “Oh, God, we have to pay attention to this now.” It’s a disaster for the brain. It’s like you're running and wearing shoes that weigh 10 pounds.

People say history’s most productive figures have been hustlers, like Jane Austen who was rumored to write her books in secret while family members bustled in and out of her parlor. In your book, however, you show she was only able to produce her best work once she was relieved of most of her household duties and family pressures. 

You look at times past to get principles. Then my task is [to ask] how do we make that principle relevant? With Jane Austen it wasn’t until her life was simplified that she was able to do the work. It was a workload issue. We can look at modern knowledge work and let [her experience] inform how we do, for example, digital workload management.

How to change the way you work

So where can you get started in slow productivity?

I think workers have more autonomy than they realize. If you had to choose one thing to start with, I’d reduce the number of things you’re working on at once.

This doesn’t mean you have to reduce the number of things you agree to do. But make a difference in your mind between “I am actively working on this” and “I agree to this, but am waiting to start.” It can give you breathing room, let you catch your breath. Then slow down and figure out how else you can improve your work.

What would you tell people who struggle with perfectionism? 

As soon as you slow down, perfectionism rears its head. It’s an inevitable enemy of craft. The solutions I highlight in the book have to do with putting stakes in the ground. When the Beatles did Sgt. Pepper, they could have been in that studio forever. So they released a single from the album, a stake in the ground. Then they knew they had to finish it up. You can do the same thing if you commit to doing something by a certain time.

What’s the bottom line?

Pseudo-productivity strips us of self-respect. It says all you’re useful for is busyness. It strips us of a sense of craft, agency, and quality. In the long term, what’s going to establish and give you leverage in your career is to do the thing you do best really well. You’re still a craftsperson underneath. That’s what matters. You can’t lose sight of that.