By volume, I’m referring to the total number of obligations that you’re committed to complete—from answering a minor question to finishing a major project. As this volume increases past a certain threshold, the weight of these efforts can become unbearably stressful. Humans are uniquely adept at crafting long-term strategic plans for accomplishing

The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level.

For knowledge workers, the biggest sign that the status quo is broken is the rise in self-reported burnout. This past summer, McKinsey and Lean In collaborated on a survey of more than sixty-five thousand North American employees, primarily from knowledge-sector jobs. They found a significant increase in those describing themselves as feeling burnt

A recent Gallup poll shows that American workers are now among some of the most stressed in the world. Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief workplace scientist, pointed out how these stress measures rose alongside metrics that show an increase in employee efforts. “The intersection of work and life needs some work,” he said.

Recent research out of Iceland, for example, had more than twenty-five hundred participants, many of them in desk jobs, try a four-day workweek.