As I soon discovered, this growing anti-productivity sentiment wasn't confined only to my readers. Between the spring of 2020 and the summer of 2021, a period spanning less than a year and a half, at least four major books were published that took direct aim at popular notions of productivity. These included Celeste Headlee's Do Nothing, Anne Helen Petersen's Can't Even, Devon Price's Laziness Does Not Exist, and Oliver Burkeman's delightfully sardonic Four Thousand Weeks. This exhaustion with work was also reflected in multiple waves of heavily reported social trends that crested one after another during the pandemic. First there was the so-called Great Resignation. Though this phenomenon encompassed retreats from labor force participation in many different economic sectors, among these many sub-narratives was a clear trend among knowledge workers to downgrade the demands of their careers. The Great Resignation was then followed by the rise of quiet quitting, in which a younger cohort of workers began to aggressively push back on their employers' demands for productivity.

"We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher," writes Celeste Headlee in the introduction to Do Nothing. A few years earlier, this sentiment might have seemed provocative. By the time the pandemic peaked, however, she was preaching to the choir.

* * *

As I witnessed this fast-growing discontent, it became clear to me that something important was happening. Knowledge workers were exhausted—burned out from an increasingly relentless busyness. The pandemic didn't introduce this trend so much as push its worst excesses beyond the threshold of tolerability. More than a few knowledge workers, thrust suddenly into remote work, their kids screaming in the next room as they suffered through yet another Zoom meeting, began to wonder, "What are we really doing here?"

I began extensively covering knowledge worker discontent, as well as alternative constructions of professional meaning, on my long-standing newsletter, as well as on a new podcast I launched early in the pandemic. As the anti-productivity movement continued to pick up speed, I also began to cover the topic more frequently in my reporting for The New Yorker, where I'm on the contributor staff, ultimately leading, during the fall of 2021, to my taking on a twice-a-month column called Office Space that was dedicated to this subject.

The storylines I uncovered were complicated. People were overwhelmed, but the sources of this increasing exhaustion weren't obvious. Online discussion of these issues offered no shortage of varied, and sometimes contradictory, theories: Employers were relentlessly increasing the demands on their employees in an attempt to extract more value from their labor. No, it's actually an internalized culture valorizing busyness, driven by online productivity influencers, that's leading to our exhaustion. Or maybe what we're really seeing is the inevitable collapse of "last-stage capitalism." Fingers were pointed and frustrations vented; all the while, knowledge workers continued to descend into increasing unhappiness. The situation seemed dark, but as I continued my own research on this topic, a glimmer of optimism emerged, sparked by the very tale with which we opened this discussion.

* * *

When I first encountered the story of John McPhee's long days looking up at the leaves in his backyard, I received it nostalgically—a scene from a time long past, when those who made a living with their minds were actually given the time and space needed to craft impressive things. "Wouldn't it be nice to have a job like that where you didn't have to worry about being productive?" I thought. But eventually an insistent realization emerged. McPhee was productive. If you zoom out from what he was doing on that picnic table on those specific summer days in 1966 to instead consider his entire career, you'll find a writer who has, to date, published twenty-nine books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards. He has also penned distinctive articles for The New Yorker for over five decades, and through his famed creative nonfiction course, which he has long taught at Princeton University, he has mentored many young writers who went on to enjoy their own distinctive careers, a list that includes Richard Preston, Eric Schlosser, Jennifer Weiner, and David Remnick. There's no reasonable definition of productivity that shouldn't also apply to John McPhee, and yet nothing about his work habits is frantic, busy, or overwhelming.

This initial insight developed into the core idea that this book will explore: perhaps knowledge workers' problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition of this term that has taken hold in recent decades. The relentless overload that's wearing us down is generated by a belief that "good" work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation. I came to believe that alternative approaches to productivity can be just as easily justified, including those in which overfilled task lists and constant activity are downgraded in importance, and something like John McPhee's languid intentionality is lauded. Indeed, it became clear that the habits and rituals of traditional knowledge workers like McPhee were more than just inspiring, but could, with sufficient care to account for the realities of twenty-first-century jobs, provide a rich source of ideas about how we might transform our modern understanding of professional accomplishment.

As I soon discovered, this growing anti-productivity sentiment wasn't confined only to my readers. Between the spring of 2020 and the summer of 2021, a period spanning less than a year and a half, at least four major books were published that took direct aim at popular notions of productivity. These included Celeste Headlee's Do Nothing, Anne Helen Petersen's Can't Even, Devon Price's Laziness Does Not Exist, and Oliver Burkeman's delightfully sardonic Four Thousand Weeks. This exhaustion with work was also reflected in multiple waves of heavily reported social trends that crested one after another during the pandemic. First there was the so-called Great Resignation. Though this phenomenon encompassed retreats from labor force participation in many different economic sectors, among these many sub-narratives was a clear trend among knowledge workers to downgrade the demands of their careers. The Great Resignation was then followed by the rise of quiet quitting, in which a younger cohort of workers began to aggressively push back on their employers' demands for productivity.

"We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher," writes Celeste Headlee in the introduction to Do Nothing. A few years earlier, this sentiment might have seemed provocative. By the time the pandemic peaked, however, she was preaching to the choir.

* * *

As I witnessed this fast-growing discontent, it became clear to me that something important was happening. Knowledge workers were exhausted—burned out from an increasingly relentless busyness. The pandemic didn't introduce this trend so much as push its worst excesses beyond the threshold of tolerability. More than a few knowledge workers, thrust suddenly into remote work, their kids screaming in the next room as they suffered through yet another Zoom meeting, began to wonder, "What are we really doing here?"

I began extensively covering knowledge worker discontent, as well as alternative constructions of professional meaning, on my long-standing newsletter, as well as on a new podcast I launched early in the pandemic. As the anti-productivity movement continued to pick up speed, I also began to cover the topic more frequently in my reporting for The New Yorker, where I'm on the contributor staff, ultimately leading, during the fall of 2021, to my taking on a twice-a-month column called Office Space that was dedicated to this subject.

The storylines I uncovered were complicated. People were overwhelmed, but the sources of this increasing exhaustion weren't obvious. Online discussion of these issues offered no shortage of varied, and sometimes contradictory, theories: Employers were relentlessly increasing the demands on their employees in an attempt to extract more value from their labor. No, it's actually an internalized culture valorizing busyness, driven by online productivity influencers, that's leading to our exhaustion. Or maybe what we're really seeing is the inevitable collapse of "last-stage capitalism." Fingers were pointed and frustrations vented; all the while, knowledge workers continued to descend into increasing unhappiness. The situation seemed dark, but as I continued my own research on this topic, a glimmer of optimism emerged, sparked by the very tale with which we opened this discussion.

* * *

When I first encountered the story of John McPhee's long days looking up at the leaves in his backyard, I received it nostalgically—a scene from a time long past, when those who made a living with their minds were actually given the time and space needed to craft impressive things. "Wouldn't it be nice to have a job like that where you didn't have to worry about being productive?" I thought. But eventually an insistent realization emerged. McPhee was productive. If you zoom out from what he was doing on that picnic table on those specific summer days in 1966 to instead consider his entire career, you'll find a writer who has, to date, published twenty-nine books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards. He has also penned distinctive articles for The New Yorker for over five decades, and through his famed creative nonfiction course, which he has long taught at Princeton University, he has mentored many young writers who went on to enjoy their own distinctive careers, a list that includes Richard Preston, Eric Schlosser, Jennifer Weiner, and David Remnick. There's no reasonable definition of productivity that shouldn't also apply to John McPhee, and yet nothing about his work habits is frantic, busy, or overwhelming.

This initial insight developed into the core idea that this book will explore: perhaps knowledge workers' problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition of this term that has taken hold in recent decades. The relentless overload that's wearing us down is generated by a belief that "good" work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation. I came to believe that alternative approaches to productivity can be just as easily justified, including those in which overfilled task lists and constant activity are downgraded in importance, and something like John McPhee's languid intentionality is lauded. Indeed, it became clear that the habits and rituals of traditional knowledge workers like McPhee were more than just inspiring, but could, with sufficient care to account for the realities of twenty-first-century jobs, provide a rich source of ideas about how we might transform our modern understanding of professional accomplishment.