In a podcast about “Slow Productivity” Cal Newport suggests that organizations could do a lot to prevent employee burnout by shifting their goals to quality of output over quantity. This would let workers do their jobs at a more natural pace, working the way our brains are wired.
But let’s say we can’t wait for our company to make the shift from maximum output to fine craftsmanship. Can a focus on quality be helpful on a personal level?
Robert Pirsig seemed to think that a focus on Quality (Pirsig capped the “Q” to emphasize that he was talking about a transcendent ideal and not a spectrum of goodness/badness) was key to solving all kinds of alienation and disenfranchisement caused by the introduction of technology into human endeavors.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig says:
If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to get some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just “intuition,” not just an unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.
He goes on to connect a pursuit of Quality with peace of mind. He argues that you cannot produce quality without first having peace of mind. But there’s also a sense in which the experience and contemplation of Quality will produce peace of mind.
Pirsig’s idea of peace of mind had three characteristics:
- Physical quietness – we approach the situation calmly, deliberately, without unnecessary rush,
- Mental quietness – we are focused on the situation without wandering thoughts,
- Value quietness – we approach the situation without “wandering desire,” focused on Quality alone.
If Pirsig’s insights into Quality are correct in any degree, then it seems that a pursuit of Quality in the workplace would necessarily incorporate a practice of mindfulness.
As it turns out, there is evidence that mindfulness meditation can reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
So maybe Newport is onto something here by encouraging a shift from merely cranking widgets to cranking the highest quality widgets possible.
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