“Slow Productivity” is Low Quality
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport promises depth, but delivers recycled ideas, empty anecdotes, and an academic echo chamber. I didn’t learn a thing. Skip it.
I really liked Deep Work. It was sharp, practical, and thought-provoking. So when Cal Newport came out with Slow Productivity, I thought: why not?
Mistake.
The first part feels like a watered-down remix of Antifragile by Nassim Taleb—minus the edge, the humor, or the intellectual punch. What follows is a string of dull anecdotes, stretched concepts, and an almost complete absence of counterexamples. It’s all one-directional preaching from inside the ivory tower.
Honestly, I don’t think I could be friends with Cal. He seems too locked into his professor-researcher bubble—and very proud of it. There’s an academic stiffness to the whole thing, a sense that the world begins and ends with tenure-track insights.
I didn’t learn a thing. Nothing to apply. Nothing to challenge me. Nothing to remember.
Save your time. Skip this book. You won’t miss a thing.
