I often only feel I have worked enough if, at the end of the day, I am bone-tired and wrung out. The team who designed the original Macintosh computer wore T-shirts boasting WORKING 90 HOURS A WEEK AND LOVING IT! This could be the insane slogan for our professional class. Many of us have built our identities around working to the point of exhaustio

Doomscrolling, binge-watching TV shows, mindlessly checking emails or WhatsApp notifications – these are the ways we sabotage our feel-good emotions during our downtime. The resulting stresses contribute to what I call depletion burnout. It comes from not giving yourself enough time or space to truly rejuvenate.

Slow productivity, more than anything else, is a plea to step back from the frenzied activity of the daily grind. It’s not that these efforts are arbitrary: our anxious days include tasks and appointments that really do need to get done. But once you realize, as McPhee did, that this exhausted scrambling is often orthogonal to the activities that m