There’s a joke in my family that the sloth is my spirit animal. My kids use it liberally, ironically because I’m almost never still. I wake up at the absurd hour of 4:00 am almost every day (even on weekends) and often don’t go to bed until after 10:00 pm.
Perhaps I’m one of those people who doesn’t need a lot of sleep, but my inability to remember things from one day to the next makes me think that it’s time to get serious about fixing my sleep.
I have a voluminous library (pun) of business books. Collecting business books that I’ll read someday is a hobby I’ve had for more than 2 decades. That’s resulted in a library numbering in the hundreds of books, many of which I have not yet read.
“Slow Productivity” is the first Cal Newport book I’ve read, and I’ve developed a serious literary crush. He has an incredible ability to take what many would consider a dull subject — business — and turn it into something fascinating.
What’s amazing about “Slow Productivity,” however, is the applicability to everyday life. There’s a phrase toward the beginning of the book that should resonate with all of us:
Haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience. — Cal Newport
Anthropologists do their very best at guessing what life was like before written history. If we were, indeed, a hunter/gatherer species for tens of thousands of years before more complex societies started forming around an agrarian lifestyle, then our modern age practice of “being on” all the time flies in the face of our genetic heritage.
I agree with the argument that Mr. Newport makes that we’ve “confuse[d] efficiency with frenzy” in most aspects of modern living. The highways packed with cars and highways packed with data bits have overrun what used to be common sense: slowing down is what we do. Periods of intense activity didn’t come close to outnumbering periods of leisure and rest.
Even worse, Western thinking has introduced an element of guilt, as in, we should feel guilty if we’re not making the most of every minute of every day.
Let me be clear: there are things that are a waste of time. Scrolling through social media for hours on end is a waste of time. Excessive sleep is also a waste of time. It’s impossible to accurately quantify where the line is between leisure and wasted time. A good rule of thumb is that leisure activities should refresh us, not serve as a mechanism to avoid dealing with something that needs to be done.
In my frenetic schedule, there are very few times when I allow myself to slow down. Somewhat paradoxically, it’s when I run that I give myself time to slow down, in a manner of speaking. It’s not that I run slow (though I am slowing down as I age), but when I run I choose not to plug in. I don’t listen to music or podcasts. When I run with others, we engage in conversation, running at a speed where we can (mostly) talk and run at the same time. When I’m alone, I let myself get lost in my thoughts or just admire the beauty of the world around me.
When we slow down, we have the opportunity to go deep on things. Those things might be relationship building, learning a new craft, or being present.
Of course, grace for ourselves and others is essential in the quest to slow down. There are seasons of life when it’s incredibly difficult to do. If you are raising a family and working to make ends meet, you may feel like there’s no room for slowing down.
Slowing down might look like taking 15 minutes to to disconnect, breathe, and be still. It might also look like spending 15 minutes tinkering with a hobby. It could mean taking a few minutes to call someone you haven’t talked to in a while or visiting with someone on their doorstep for a moment.
It’s important to remember that slowing down doesn’t have to look like living a monastic lifestyle where you spend hours a day in meditation. Slowing down means taking some time to be really intentional about something, rather than running around like the headless chicken of proverbial fame.
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