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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Overview for whoever doesn't want to read the article or just react to the headline:

The author is a professor of computer science at Georgetown who has authored numerous books on how to do well in school and career by minimizing distraction and increasing focus. He's arguing against the California 32-hour work week bill, which he says will be counterproductive on its own without addressing the core problems of excessive coordination and multitasking that is what he believes is truly burning out knowledge workers more than sheer volume of hours.

He is calling this "slow productivity" in honor of a movement from Spain dedicated to cooking instead of eating fast food, which takes longer but is ultimately more enjoyable and rewarding.

How on earth this gets interpreted as media damning right wing work ethic is maybe one of the more bizarre things I've seen happen on HackerNews recently.

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Cal Newport is a good writer and worth listening to, but most of his advice applies only to himself. I work 9-5 for a company that uses Slack, email, alerts, etc., like most of HN. I'm not a tenured professor with a lot of clout that can shut himself from the world whenever I please.

I've learned from Newport and apply some of his stuff to my own life, of course, but it's been over ten years of listening to him telling us we're doing it wrong, when most of us have no choice.

I find it hard to believe that Slack etc would increase my productivity.

Why? A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find tons of historical context on discussions / decisions without someone needing to forward you a bunch of emails or historical docs. It also means you can get relatively quick answers to tribal knowledge questions while also have an async option for everyone on the answering side to shut down Slack for focus time.

Of course if you're only optimizing for your single productivity measured in lines of code written then I can see your point, but software engineering at scale is a team sport, and Slack has traits that make it better than email/in-person discussion/phone/zoom/in-doc comment thread.

> A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find tons of historical context on discussions / decisions

You'd think, until your org. decides to deploy a 2-3 month retention window on all slack content because of legal concerns.

I've found slack to be a pretty poor tool for knowledge sharing like this in comparison to a more document-driven form of communication. We previously used a wiki-tool for this (I don't think it really matters which one), but in recent years we've used Basecamp for this.

I'm completely sold on decisions being driven by a doc of a few paragraphs with the conversation around it co-located in the comments. It's easy to scroll through a list of such conversations in the message board and read through the context with discussion. In comparison, finding a previous conversation is slack is much more difficult.

Even if I can find the conversation, I think that the chat-focused nature of slack encourages short, loosely worded messages. This is great in the moment but the lack of context a few months on is pretty tough to deal with.

All fair points, and I agree there are theoretically better solutions. It's just that in practice I've specifically seen Confluence and Basecamp fail due to lack of buy-in, and comment threads are good in Google docs/Quip but proliferation of docs is a problem. In my experience Slack has just been the least-bad in many cases, not that I think it's optimal. YMMV.

That’s very fair - I’ve seen the same thing with confluence. Maybe having slack as a suboptimal knowledge store in these situations beats the alternative?

Is this your experience?

I am in a similar boat. Working in an agency that's part of a global tech/consulting firm and having multiple clients with multiple projects to juggle I know a bit about meetings and context switching.

Being involved in the Slow Food movement I also see the inspiration for slow productivity.

But I can't agree with the negative, somewhat fatalistic point of view.

I believe we need voices like Newport to someday be heard by people at the top running companies that are plagued by middle (project) managers that need to be seen as doing something.

I have seen the value of great client and project management first hand (albeit these were far and few). And I have seen the productivity it provided for the teams involved by providing goals, guidance and a map as well as trust and keeping distractions away as best as possible.

And I have seen busywork, work simulation and the simulacrum of work.

I value uninterrupted time to get stuff done. And I learned to be okay with days filled with meetings that also pay the rent. I know what I enjoy most, though.

> I believe we need voices like Newport to someday be heard by people at the top running companies that are plagued by middle (project) managers that need to be seen as doing something.

My cynical view is that execs don't care because, well... startups still IPO, get acquired, they get rich, etc. Profits still go up. I know most startups don't and companies still fail, but the point is nothing is affecting the people with power to change things.

To nitpick here: many tenured professors also use Slack, email, alerts etc. There's also often an (implicit) expectation that they can get stuff done in the evenings, on weekends etc. (e.g., paper reviews, grants, references, etc.). So I don't think it's quite as easy for modern-day profs to just 'shut [themselves] from the world'.

To be fair, many tech companies are moving to 4 day work-weeks (eg https://buildremote.co/four-day-week/4-day-work-week-compani...) - so 32 hour weeks aren't viable just for a tenured professor

Yea, I like reading him but his suggestions are myopic. He's an idealist and has clearly never faced the full-time profit driven work world that the majority of us inhabit.

I can't decide to use Rust at my current job, but there are a lot of people on HN for the last ten years telling me that I'm doing it wrong with memory-unsafe programming languages. I still think this is interesting and useful information. Perhaps if I'm making a new company or starting a project, I might choose Rust if it makes sense for me.

A way that I look at Newport's writing is, he's making claims that most organizations are leaving money on the table by not adopting better work methods. I can't unilaterally go Newport-style at my current job. But this is a forum with lots of entrepreneurial people on it, and maybe someone would like to test his theory and smoke the competition by starting a company that values Deep Work/Slow Work/etc.

I would say it still is damning the Protestant work ethic in that it doesn't assume leisure is slothful. The fact the author references Spanish people cooking instead of eating fast food should be a hint as to what worldview that drives such a behavior (Catholics don't see work the same way as Protestants do).

Because while I don't believe a strong work ethic is a right wing thing, I do believe that believing a strong work ethic is a right wing thing is a right wing thing.

HackerNews has reached the point where it's visible enough that it's being consumed by those with the most time.

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