Slowing down to speed up
Making way for the consequential
I've been in a busy season of life, particularly at work. In a world that demands speed, it's easy to steadily spiral into a black hole of busyness, taking on more and more. When there's a vision to sprint towards, everything seems urgent and important —doing all the things seems like the only option. Feeling behind becomes inevitable.
While I've found myself in similar periods of high intensity in the past, the added element this time around has been operating at a startup where there's inevitably limited time or resources. The need for velocity hits different when you're working at a startup which, unlike established companies, is default dead.
Being busy is a state that I used to aspire towards. I prided myself on chipping away at my to do lists, adding to the list as projects were underway. After all, busyness indicates progress and significance, right? Well, not necessarily. When you're in the throes of executing on a project, expanding scope is the easier choice — cutting scope is the much harder route. The challenging thing to identify is at what point is a project viable enough for you to get disciplined around managing scope creep and seal the entrance to the black hole?
It all begins with the initial kindling of a fire: building a new project, experimenting with a new hobby, starting a new relationship. A period when welcoming in the unknown chaos is necessary - you're creating something out of nothing after all. The early days of new pursuits involve dancing with the chaos to ignite those first few sparks as quickly as possible.
If your early attempts are fruitful, the first few flames roar to life just in time for the state of disorder to settle in as a norm. For me, this manifests as easing up on my boundaries in exchange for diving deeper into a project — right when it's time to uphold my daily practices that enable me to be more me: prioritizing sleep, working out, getting outside, and connecting with my community.
In these moments, it feels like there's not enough time to indulge in the activities that recharge me when in actuality, the exact thing I need to do is get up and go for a run or log off and get 8 hours of sleep. It’s the reset I need so I can come back to the work clearheaded, energized, and ready to take on the challenges that seemed so complex yesterday and reassess what really needs to get done.
When I'm so head's down on one thing for an extended period of time, it's easy to find myself getting stuck — there's a lack of creative energy flowing towards the problem. Ironically, it’s often hard to even fathom looking outside the box because how could the answer possibly lay beyond the parameters of where I've been thinking through all potential scenarios?
Yet, when I’ve fought the urge to stay the course and instead slowed down to recalibrate, the answers I was seeking have materialized and taken shape in unexpected ways. On a run. In the shower. Talking to a friend. At the very least, perspective sets in and the all-consuming thing no longer seems so overwhelming to tackle. This is why shower thoughts can be so powerful — it’s the one place we’re free from all external inputs and our minds can meander toward the edges of what’s most alive in our thoughts.
When things are moving quickly, it's easy to look forward rather than inward. The easy decision is to plow forward rather than free up capacity to give our brains space to allow ideas to bloom and flourish. By giving myself permission to step back, pause, and cultivate stillness, I'm giving myself an opportunity to connect with my intuition.
By moving in haste, I was foregoing access to myself...I never gave my intuition the chance to float up to the top of my awareness. I was moving so fast that my gut feelings were being squashed by thoughts about where I wasn’t, where I needed to be, what I needed to do. The future was distracting me from the present, and in doing so, it was severing my connection to myself…Those who move slowly have a deeper sense of connection to themselves—they have access to their internal signal: their intuition.
— Isabel, on slowness, taste, and living well
Sure, it's not always possible to move with precise intentionality in times of chaos, but the most effective people and leaders I know and respect operate as the eye of the storm. They remain clear headed regardless of what’s thrown their way, disentangling their egos from their original ideas — willing to challenge the conventional and welcome others’ perspectives. Ultimately, it's about strengthening the muscle to say no to the inconsequential and be relentless about fueling the right fires when everything around you seems to be ablaze.
Many of my most productive and balanced seasons of life have followed a period of time when I made the intentional effort to slow down, reflect, and integrate. In the last few years, January's proven to be a transformative month for me following my annual recalibration think week, a yearly ritual where I take the time to reflect on recurring themes that have emerged and I begin to connect the strands of seemingly disparate ideas.
This next season is about getting comfortable with hyper focus on the consequential to maintain velocity on the things that matter while surrendering control of the smaller fires, allowing them to smolder and fertilize the ground for more meaningful ideas to take root.