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Last quarter I caught myself doing something embarrassing. I had a quiet Tuesday afternoon-no meetings, real deep-work time-and I spent forty minutes drafting a Slack update about “everything I had going on this week.”
Nobody asked. Nothing in it changed any decision. When I finished I felt strangely better, like I had done something. I hadn’t. I had performed. I went looking for why the urge had been so strong.
The One Principle That Doesn't Cost You
Researchers at Columbia Business School ran a series of studies, published in 2017 in the Journal of Consumer Research, asking Americans to evaluate two fictional people: one constantly busy, one with regular leisure. The busy one was rated more competent, more ambitious, higher status.
Among Italians given the same studies, the effect reversed-leisure read as high status, busyness as ordinary. The American urge to look busy isn’t a personal failing. It is a rational response to an environment that rewards the signal.
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Cal Newport’s 2024 book Slow Productivity gives this signal a name: pseudo-productivity. He defines it as “the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.”
The book argues this is what is burning knowledge workers out, and proposes three principles in response: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality.
The first two principles are good advice and very hard to follow, because the Columbia research is showing you exactly why. Doing fewer things and working at a natural pace both cost you the busyness signal.
If your environment reads “calendar full” as “competent,” then dropping commitments isn’t just an internal adjustment-it is a visible status concession.
Newport mostly argues you should do it anyway, citing how Galileo or Jane Austen worked. Philosophically appealing, practically thin.
The third principle is different. Obsessing over quality doesn’t require visible inactivity. It hides inside your existing calendar.
You can be in the same meetings and still ship work twice as good as the people doing the same work in those meetings. Quality is the one principle that doesn’t cost you the signal.
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Why the Signal Is So Hard to Drop
The Bellezza paper has held up unusually well. The American result has replicated; the Italian comparison has too.
The mechanism the authors identified is the useful part: busyness signals scarcity. A full calendar tells observers “this person is in demand.”
So the move worth making isn’t shaming yourself for performing busyness-it is recognizing the performance for what it is and deciding which performances are worth the cost.
The forty-minute Slack update I wrote was free for me. Most performances are not.
The Move
If you take one thing from Newport this year, take the third principle. Do fewer things and work at a natural pace are real moves but they cost you the visible-busyness signal your environment is paying you for.
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Obsess over quality is the one that hides inside your existing calendar. Pick one piece of work this month that you would normally ship at 70%-a report, a presentation, an email to a customer who matters-and take twice as long to ship it at 95%.
Nobody on your calendar will see the change. The work will. Newport’s book makes the case in detail if you want it: https://calnewport.com/slow-productivity/
—Prompt N Productive—