There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has become so normalised in contemporary working life that most people no longer even recognise it as exhaustion. It presents itself not as tiredness, exactly, but as a low-grade flatness — a sense that you are always slightly behind, always catching up, always producing without quite knowing why or for whom.
This is, in large part, the legacy of the productivity movement. The last two decades have produced an enormous literature on doing more, faster, with less friction. Entire careers have been built on the promise that the right system, the right tool, the right morning routine will unlock your potential. What this literature rarely confronts is the question of whether more output is actually the goal — or whether it is simply a very compelling story we have been sold.
The problem with productivity culture
Productivity culture has a fundamental flaw at its centre: it treats output as an end in itself. The underlying assumption is that more is better — more articles written, more emails answered, more tasks completed, more books read. The person who reads sixty books a year is considered more serious than the person who reads twelve, despite the obvious possibility that the person who reads twelve books has engaged with them far more deeply, thought about them more carefully, and allowed them to change how they see the world.
The goal of more is so deeply embedded in how we talk about work that questioning it feels almost heretical. But heretical questions are often the most important ones.
What gets lost in the relentless pursuit of output is the thing that makes output valuable in the first place: thinking. Real thinking — the slow, meandering, sometimes frustrating kind — does not happen in the gaps between tasks. It requires space, deliberateness and a willingness to be uncertain for a while.
What cognitive science actually says
The research on creativity and cognitive performance is remarkably consistent on this point. The brain does not generate its best ideas under conditions of constant stimulation. Neuroscience has for some years pointed to something called the default mode network — a system that becomes active precisely when the brain is not focused on any particular task. This network is associated with creativity, self-reflection and the ability to make connections between disparate ideas.
Put simply: boredom is productive. Mind-wandering serves a function. The moments when nothing is happening are often the moments when the most important thinking occurs. The relentless filling of time — with podcasts, notifications, content, tasks — is not an enhancement of the mind’s capacity. It is, in many cases, its systematic suppression.
Practical implications for the writer and creator
For anyone whose work depends on original thought — writers, strategists, educators, creative professionals of any kind — this has very practical consequences. The habit of constant consumption is directly at war with the ability to produce anything original. You cannot fill your mind with other people’s ideas at every available moment and expect your own ideas to find room.
This does not mean abstaining from reading, listening or learning. It means building deliberate space around those activities. It means sitting with what you have read before reaching for the next thing. It means allowing yourself to be bored, to stare out of windows, to take walks that are genuinely purposeless. These are not luxuries. For a thinking person, they are necessities.
Slowing down as a professional practice
In practical terms, slowing down looks different for different people. But some patterns tend to appear consistently among those who do their most sustained and original work over long periods: shorter, more focused working sessions rather than marathon days; regular time that is genuinely unscheduled; a practice of writing by hand, which slows the mind in ways that typing rarely does; and a deliberate reduction of the input load — fewer subscriptions, fewer feeds, fewer notifications demanding a response.
The harder question
Behind all of this is a harder question: what is the work actually for? The productivity literature has very little to say about this. It is largely agnostic on purpose, and perhaps that is by design — a system that helps you produce more can be sold to anyone, regardless of what they are producing or why.
But for those of us who care about the quality of what we make, the question of purpose is unavoidable. Slowing down is not merely a technique for improving output. At its best, it is a practice of discernment — of asking, regularly and honestly, whether the work we are rushing to complete is actually the work worth doing.
That is a question that can only be answered in the quiet.