By Rob Cooney (@EMEducation)
Cal Newport is a philosopher for the digital age. He’s long been a thought provoking author and I’ve covered one of his previous titles here. (https://icenet.blog/2016/05/13/ice-book-review-deep-work-rules-for-focused-success-in-a-distracted-world/). In his latest book, he tackles head on the idea of productivity in our 24/7/365 knowledge work environment. There are many lessons we can take home as medical educators.
Newport opens his book with an exploration of the idea of productivity and the perverted way that knowledge workers have come to see their work (endless meetings (online or in-person), emails and chat programs, etc). He refers to these shallow activities of visible efforts as pseudo-productivity and goes on to explain how unchecked effort in this are quickly leads to burnout and the lack of meaningful outputs of out work.
He then goes on to propose an alternative, drawing on the slow food movement and the “slow” movement that followed, a philosophy he refers to as, you guessed it, “Slow Productivity.” He boils the tenets of this approach down to 3 simple yet difficult principles:
- Do fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Obsess over quality.
The remainder of the book takes each principle and explores them in detail through historical and modern examples of success within each area. Some solutions will sound familiar (limiting work creep by saying no) while others are not as obvious: working deeply on only 1 project per day.
One particular principle that I’ve long felt we needed in medical education is the idea of embracing seasonality (explored in the work at a natural pace section). Too often, medical educators move from task to task to task without pausing. Consider the current US graduate medical education annual workflow: graduation, orient new learners while opening early clerkships for specialty bound learners, review applications, write letters, interview applicants, match new residents, graduation again. All the while these educators need to maintain and/or improve the current educational curriculum, sit on clinical competency committees, remediate struggling learners, and deliver clinical care. Not to mention sitting on school or hospital committees, department meetings, national conferences, and trying to find time to engage in scholarship. There is no offseason. With that in mind, Cal does provide a few simple ways of recapturing some “small seasonality” such as no meeting Mondays or scheduling rest projects. Outside of this book, I’ve even heard of faculty scheduling quarterly mini sabbaticals that are essentially one-week blocks that cannot be booked for other purposes. Imagine what you and your team could accomplish with that kind of time!
Like Cal’s prior books, I closed the book and had hundreds of ideas to ponder. My guess is that you will as well. Read it and let me know how you think we can work smarter, limit the time thieves in our practice, and accomplish more meaningful work without burnout!
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