The Push/Pull Workload System
Stop letting people drop work on your plate — put it in a queue and pull it when you're ready.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 93%
Newport contrasts two metaphors for work assignment. In the push system, whoever needs something done pushes it onto your plate — easy for the sender, but with no control over how much accumulates, because they cannot see your load. The pull system, borrowed from industrial manufacturing, keeps pending work on a central list rather than on anyone's plate; when you finish something, you pull the next item in. The counterintuitive insight from manufacturing is that pull produces more, not less, because each accepted task drags fixed administrative overhead — emails to answer, meetings to attend — that multiplies with simultaneity while the workday stays fixed. He details a version individuals can simulate with a public queue.
Origin
The push/pull distinction comes out of industrial manufacturing process research. Newport imported it into knowledge work and details the full individual simulation system in Slow Productivity, as the operational mechanism behind the 'do fewer things' principle.
Core principles
- 01Push assignment has no control loop — the sender doesn't know your load.
- 02Every accepted task carries fixed administrative overhead: emails and meetings.
- 03Ten simultaneous tasks means ten times the overhead against a fixed workday.
- 04Pull throughput beats push throughput — the industrial manufacturing insight.
- 05The key metric is the rate at which you finish things that matter.
- 06Individuals can simulate pull with a public queue even inside a push culture.
How to run it
- 1
Recognise the push metaphor in your work
Notice that when someone needs something, they email it to you — getting it off their plate and onto yours with no knowledge of what you already carry.
Watch out Push feels easier for everyone in the moment, which is why it is the default.
- 2
Build a centralised holding list
Move pending work off individual plates and into one shared place — a Trello board or a shared document. The technology does not matter.
- 3
Run synchronising meetings (team version)
Every day or every other day, ask who is working on what, who is done, what they want to pull next, and what they need from the rest of the team to get it done.
Pro tip Include the 'what do you need from us' question — it converts the meeting into blocker removal.
- 4
Simulate pull as an individual
Put pushed work onto a public queue in a Google doc, and mark only the top three items as actively being worked on.
Pro tip When someone chases you, point to the queue: 'Yeah, it's in position seven. Once it makes it into the top three it gets my full attention.'
- 5
Offer swaps, not additions
Let your boss reprioritise by telling you what to swap an item with in the list — never by increasing the number of active items.
- 6
Sell it on throughput, not comfort
Pitch the system to your organisation as producing more value, not as making your life easier: 'I will produce more stuff if I can pull when I'm ready.'
Watch out Framed as personal comfort, it reads as a labour dispute and will be rejected.
In the wild
Newport explains that you are not a computer processor that switches cleanly between tasks. Everything you agree to do brings fixed administrative overhead — emails to answer, meetings to attend. Give someone ten simultaneous things and they carry ten times that overhead against a fixed workday, so most of the day goes to overhead, they are exhausted from context switching, and very little time is left for actual work.
→ The rate at which anything gets finished becomes very, very slow — whereas pulling one thing at a time leaves most of the day for the work itself, finishing it fast, then pulling the next.
Newport's adviser told him the right way to write papers was to work on one, make it great, and then move on to the next. Impatient and needing publications to get hired as a professor, he worked on three or four at a time to get more done.
→ She was right. Papers per year did not go up, because switching made progress on any of them hard. Her method — slow in the short term — produced better papers, finished each one faster, and got more done overall.
Hala Taha, running a company for over five years, reports the biggest recurring complaint from employees is always the same: 'I don't know what my priorities are. I feel overloaded.'
→ Newport's diagnosis: they need priorities established and to work on projects one by one rather than feeling they must advance everything simultaneously.
Common mistakes
Believing more simultaneous projects means more productivity
Newport calls this 'absolute nonsense.' Plot your finishing rate against number of active things: it rises briefly, then falls. You are optimising that curve, not maximising the input.
Dismissing the queue as bureaucratic overhead
It seems like a pain compared to just emailing people, but Newport calls the difference 'substantial, significant, almost astonishing.' The perceived friction is much smaller than the throughput gain.
Working the most recent thing instead of the most important
Push systems are purely reactive — you do whatever arrived last, not what matters most, which damages you later when genuinely urgent and important work goes undone.
Is it for you?
Best for
Overloaded individuals and teams where work arrives ad hoc via email and chat.
Not ideal for
Genuinely emergent or emergency-driven work where queuing is not viable.
From the transcript
“The problem with the push approach to workload is that there's no control over how much stuff is on your plate because I don't know…”
“The huge insight from industrial manufacturing processes is actually this pull methodology produces more stuff than the push.”
“This myth we tell each other that the more things I'm working on the more productive I am is just absolute nonsense.”
“This is not just about making my life easier. This is about making them more valuable for this organization. I will produce more stuff if…”
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