Calm Over Chaos
In 2021, Jonathan Frostick made a LinkedIn post featuring a picture of himself lying in a hospital bed.
He wrote that, despite having had a standard Sunday, when he sat down at his desk at 4 PM to prep for the work week, he’d had a heart attack.
Reflecting on the ordeal, he shared six resolutions that he had made.
The first was that he was “not spending all day on Zoom anymore”.
In Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport shares Frostick’s story to illustrate the consequences of “overhead tax” - the administrative overhead that comes with every new commitment, such as “back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information… or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators.”
With too much overhead tax, Newport writes, “you’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.”
The more work you try to do, the less you actually accomplish, and the longer it takes you.
Newport advocates that you do less:
“When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility.”
The concept that you can actually get ahead by doing less might seem paradoxical, as it is at odds with the societal and economic belief that you should always be working.
As Anne Helen Petersen writes in the essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”,
“I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time… because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it - explicitly and implicitly - since I was young.”
Or, as late-stage capitalism’s constant demand for growth might ask, if you’re not capturing every possible customer, immediately responding to every interaction, and existing everywhere those customers are, is your marketing really effective?
But short-term tactics mean short-term results.
Calm over chaos is a deliberate choice.
It’s one that might seem inherently risky.
But doing the same things in the same way will guarantee the same results.