In Defense of Slowness

Hey, DALL-E, please generate an image that symbolically represents busyness, frantic activity, and the frazzled existence of a modern parent who is also a knowledge worker.

What if you could accomplish more by doing less? What if the frenetic pace of our daily lives (and the lives of our kids) could be much more humane? Slower? This might sound naïve or impossible. Is it?

Do we want slower lives? Let’s start with that simple question. Even if slow is possible, is it desirable? I certainly know a lot of people who would struggle with that question. They thrive in fast-paced environments with long days and unexpected twists and turns. They love the thrill of going non-stop and the feeling that comes with accomplishment and contribution. I’m like that myself (though not completely). I seek variety, avoid boredom, and love a challenge. My days are full and often full of the unexpected. It’s exhausting and exhilarating. I love it.

A life of busyness and constant activity is nothing new for those of us who live and work (and study) in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles. The dramatic and ongoing move from rural towns to urban centers started in the 1890s, but it’s still a very new pace and way of living for humans. The effects of urbanization and industrialization on our world and quality of life are so far reaching that scholars are actively debating if we are now living in a new epoch know as the Anthropocene. Our non-stop activity has consequences.

Are early mornings, late nights, back-to-back meetings, skipped lunches, Teams and Slack chats, clanging notifications, missed workouts, engorged inboxes, and never-ending after school activities simply rational responses to the existential dread of the Anthropocene and a looming climate collapse? Maybe. But I think it’s more complicated and interesting.

Our outer ecology is suffering in the form of climate change and our inner ecology is suffering under the burden of constant busyness. In his landmark letter (known as an encyclical) on climate change, Laudato si, Pope Francis comments on this directly: “Nature is filled with words of love, but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances? Many people today sense a profound imbalance which drives them to frenetic activity and makes them feel busy, in a constant hurry which in turn leads them to ride rough-shod over everything around them. This too affects how they treat the environment.” So the busyness of our daily lives is driving both us and the earth crazy?

But wait a minute . . . aren’t we busy so we can be productive contributors to society? So that we can take care of our families and show our kids the value of hard work and commitment? Isn’t that the story we tell ourselves? Isn’t all this busyness evidence of productivity?

I’ve carefully avoided the term “productivity” until now. In his new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport, a Georgetown professor of computer science, argues that we now confuse busyness with productivity. Activity is not the same as useful effort. “The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that ‘good’ work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.” More is better, right? But more of what?

Pseudo-productivity, according to Newport, is the belief that looking busy is more important than completing meaningful work. It is “the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.” Most of us probably recognize this. And it’s more than just email and task overload. As knowledge work becomes the norm in our economy, it is fostering a culture where the appearance of productivity is often valued, rewarded, and conflated with meaningful and productive work.

This has always been an issue in education where there can be a tendency to conflate “seat time” (the number of minutes a student is sitting at a desk in a classroom) with learning. Seat time can create the illusion of learning (the students look busy, are taking notes, and listening to an instructor), but the real question is: are they actually learning? Did they go from understanding less to understanding more and how do we know? The same holds true with the busyness of our kids outside of school hours. I am sometimes shocked at how little time our students have each day or week to be with friends, watch a movie, or pursue a hobby for fun. We risk filling our kids’ lives with just as much pseudo-productivity as our own.

What can we do about this? Newport argues that we should focus on three things:

• Do less
• Take your time
• Focus on quality

Doing less means eliminating as many of those activities that produce the appearance of productivity but aren’t meaningful or productive as possible. This requires a relentless dedication to subtraction over addition. Taking your time means giving the most expansive amount of time possible to your most important work. The time scales (and time types) will look different for each of us, but the key is to unapologetically prioritize important and meaningful work over busyness. Focusing on quality means prioritizing doing well over doing more. Doing two or three or four things well is both more rewarding and more productive than having many things simply done. Value over volume. The alternative is frenetic mediocrity and the uninspiring feelings of “meh” and “blah.”

Doing less doesn’t always seem possible, especially when it comes to work. But how about slowing down in other ways? Here are a few things I like to do to promote some slowness in my life:

• Take a walk after dinner. I wish I could do this more often.
• Cook a meal rather than having something delivered. This is my all-time favorite way to slow down.
• Read a book before bed (I usually read by listening to audio books while working out so reading a paper book before bed is very slowing for me!).
• When I have some time – even just a minute – between meetings, I practice box breathing. This effectively slows my mind down and helps keep my stress levels manageable.

What do you do to slow down? Have you found success in doing less, taking your time, or focusing on quality over quantity? Let me know if you have any ideas to promote slowness.

Go deeper:

• Watch this TED talk from Adam Grant about how to stop languishing.
• Read Leidy Klotz’s amazing book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less
• I haven’t read it yet, but I plan on reading In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore.
• Another great read is Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
• Support slow culture by learning about the various global slow movements, from slow food and fashion to slow cinema and parenting.

See you next Saturday,

Scott McLarty
Head of School