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The UK Guide to Slow Productivity: Do Less, Work Better, Stop Running on Empty

Two decades of productivity advice have not moved the number. UK sickness absence in 2025 sat at 2.0% of working hours lost — identical to 2024 and still above 2019 — with 148.8 million days gone, 9.8 million more than before the pandemic. In 2024/25, 964,000 people in Great Britain were living with a work-related condition of stress, depression or anxiety and 511,000 with a work-related musculoskeletal disorder, between them costing 40.1 million working days and £22.9 billion a year. Slow productivity is the honest case for a slower rate, and then the method: do fewer things properly, at a rate you can sustain, in hours you have actually agreed to. It admits what cannot be claimed — the advice has not demonstrably made anyone more productive, and Britain still has no statutory right to disconnect, so the boundary is a policy you write, not a rule you cite. Ten chapters, nine named frameworks: the Slow Test, the Three Clocks, the Boundary Statement, the Load Ladder, the Attention Ledger, the Recovery Ration, the Six Standards, the Red-Green List and the Evidence File. You will find out what the health and absence figures actually say, why managers have the lowest absence rate of any occupation, how to write a boundary your employer can agree to, how to take load off before cutting hours, how to set recovery as a fixed ratio, and what to do if you cannot change your workload at all — including the six-month tribunal clock that began on 1 October 2026. Ends with a week-by-week 30-day plan and a one-page Slow Productivity Sheet. Every figure was checked against its original source on the day of publication: the Health and Safety Executive, the Office for National Statistics, Acas, GOV.UK and the World Health Organization. It is not legal, medical or employment advice. Written for people who need to do something with it on a weekday, in plain English, by PracticaleBooks.com.