The Jane Austen productivity myth
In the modern workplace, we’re all trying to squeeze meaningful work in-between endless distractions. Reading a new book by Cal Newport – and knowing a little emotional science - might help.
Like many people, I owe what I thought I knew about Jane Austen’s working habits to Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s Own, she describes the novelist writing in short bursts while trapped in the family sitting room “subject to all kinds of casual interruptions”. This gave rise to the popular image of Austen, who published her work under a pseudonym, hiding manuscripts of what would become Pride and Prejudice or Emma under a piece of blotting paper or some needlework whenever visitors popped by to keep her talent a secret. It has become a powerful metaphor, both for the inequalities faced by female writers throughout history and the determination and resilience we believe are required to pursue creative dreams.
It is, though, a myth. Austen did her best work during two periods when she was relatively free from chores and social obligations. The first, in 1796, was after the family closed the boys’ school they ran out of their home, easing Austen’s schedule of cooking, cleaning and bed-making to the point she could work at a desk upstairs by day and read drafts to her family at night. Her second great period of output, in 1800, coincided with the Austens’ decision to extract themselves from the social scene in Chawton. “There were no dances and few dinners,” biographer Claire Tomalin writes, “and they remained largely withdrawn into their private activities.”
Austen is just one genius whose output legend is disputed by Cal Newport in his new book, Slow Productivity. Newton didn’t discover gravity in a moment of inspiration when an apple fell on his head: it was the result of 15 years worth of largely quiet contemplation in the Lincolnshire countryside. Galileo may have seen his swinging chandeliers and got an inkling about physics in 1584, but it was seven years later that he finally developed the laws of pendulum motion. Copernicus, Marie Curie and Aristotle are other examples of individuals whose ideas took time and space to percolate before transforming the world.
Newport argues there are lessons to learn from these stories, even in today’s frenetic work life with its blizzard of emails and Slack notifications. His basic contention is that the pace we work at is all wrong. Deep, thoughtful reflection – the space between activities where our brains do their best work – has been devalued, replaced by the anxiety treadmill of ‘performed busyness’. A passage from the book’s introduction will be particularly arresting for anyone working in an office or creative industry:
As the twentieth century progressed, visible-activity activity became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity and knowledge work. It’s why we gather in office buildings using the same forty-hour workweeks originally developed for limiting the physical fatigue of factory labor, and why we feel guilty about ignoring our inboxes, or experience internalized pressure to volunteer or “perform busyness” when we see the boss is nearby. In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness, we also gravitate away from deeper efforts toward shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list. Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety – it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.
The reason for evoking Austen, I think, is not just to make the point that even the greatest talents need time and space, but to echo one of Woolf’s more sobering arguments when she wonders what ‘lost novelist or suppressed poet’ fell through the cracks of history because of female suppression. What great works of art – or even just decent Google Slides presentations – are being lost to the Sisyphean pressure of replying to Slack threads?
As Newport acknowledges, none of this yearning for a slower and more expansive work life is particularly new. We’ve been moaning about the suffocating impact of the Slack-Zoom pincer and online presenteeism for years – certainly since the pandemic. Slow Productivity offers some useful time management ideas for tackling this, including diary blocking and other methods, and is well worth a read for those trying to claw back a little head space.
The truth (about dopamine) can set you free
Reading Newport’s book randomly – my partner had a proof copy lying around – happened at an interesting time for me. I’ve just returned from a two-month writing sabbatical. After weeks focusing on a single project, conversing only with the very young or elderly fellow inhabitants of my local library, opening Slack with its string of red flashes was a queasy trip. I’d forgotten the mix of low-level anxiety and vague excitement it stirred up in me. By the end of the first week, the big ideas and zoomed-out thoughts I’d had while away felt clouded and harder to reach. I was back to interrupting my flow – whether that was reading, writing or editing – to check Slack every five minutes and see if there was anything urgent to respond to.
One passage in particular by Newport got me thinking about how we are often our own worst enemies with this stuff:
It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules – it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness about ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.
If you’re lucky enough, as I am, to work with great people, then this jitteriness is largely self-imposed. The next question is: why? I remembered something I’d learned writing a piece about boundaries for the Observer a while back, about how dopamine works.
Most people know dopamine as the ‘pleasure chemical’ produced in our brains when something good happens. It’s often conflated with serotonin because of the similar role they play in regulating mood (SSRIs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – are what usually get prescribed as antidepressants). Hence when we talk about getting a ‘dopamine hit’ online, we usually mean the small, self-affirming pleasures of getting a like or nice comment on Instagram, which in quick succession can feel like a sugar rush.
Dopamine is far more sophisticated than that. We experience a release of it not just when things trigger our reward system, but when we anticipate something rewarding or significant happening. As psychologist Vaughan Bell explains, it is a powerful driver of both behaviour and attention – and not just around positive events. In studies of roulette players, for example, as much dopamine occurs when they lose money with a near-miss as when they win. This is what encourages them to keep betting. It helps explain why a Slack notification, even from a channel full of information you know is dull or irrelevant to you, is so hard to resist. Your brain processes the signal as a potential reward before logic has had time to weigh in.
The people who design the technology we use, of course, know this fine well (Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus is an excellent deep dive into this). The primary goal of the platform is never usefulness, it’s always to seize our attention no matter what. Whether it is good for us or the work we do is irrelevant.
In the battle to keep our version of Austen’s “casual interruptions” at bay, knowing this and keeping it front of mind can be useful. We often experience that pull towards performing busyness – checking emails, replying to threads, leaving the right emoji reaction – as a form of anxiety based on the imagined expectations of others. A vague feeling our colleagues will notice and disapprove if we don’t pop up every five minutes, even when we know logically that they are far more likely to remember and appreciate some deeper, useful piece of work we do.
Remembering this is, at least in part, the byproduct of a chemical reaction to a piece of technology is one way of keeping things in perspective, and maybe even giving ourselves the license to step away from it for a bit and work on something else. A useful reminder that feelings, though always sources of interesting information, are rarely facts.
Books in this post:
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin
Stolen Focus by Johann Hari