Please see below selected recent slowness-related change.
See also:
March 2024
- In Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport argued that knowledge workers need to slow down. His philosophy is based on three principles: do fewer things; work at a natural pace; and obsess over quality. He encourages deep focus, away from the noise of social media and performative busyness and his work builds on e.g. Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slowness. While Newport acknowledges the difficulty of juggling workloads with caring responsibilities, the FT added that time is also a feminist issue (a fact underlined by Katrine Marçal’s Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, which argued that the economist was able to devote time to his work because he didn’t have to think about domestic chores).
- An antidote to speed and convenience, younger audiences are reportedly earning for slower-paced traditions. Recognising this, Ele.me launched a tea campaign for office workers, rooted in ceremony. Leveraging the traditional Chinese solar term Yushui, a time typically associated with new life and tea-drinking, the brand offered discounts on selected drinks and invited workers to share their favourite milk teas.
January 2024
- The slower gap between the busy times in our lives is known to some as “wintering”, which allows us to think about how we might use all of our time better and be more aware of mortality, and the cycles of our lives. It's hard to have a period of renewal without a period of fallow. Wintering is a vital time of rest and renewal. Most of us don’t have the chance to do that full-time, but there are ways we can winter in small ways. As Katherine May writes: “Doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, getting enough sleep, resting - are radical acts these days, but essential.”
December 2022
June 2023
- In his book Laziness Does Not Exist (2021), the social psychologist Devon Price wrote personally about burnout, and explained that laziness is not a deficit or something we need to fix or overcome with caffeine or longer work hours, but is actually a sign that we probably need to slow down.
July 2022
- The antithesis of busyness or multitasking, the slow work movement encourages people to redefine productivity and embrace creativity and fulfilment instead. Post-pandemic, workers seemed resistant to a wholesale move back into offices, while four-day workweeks, five-hour workdays and anti-meeting sentiment are taking hold (slowly).
June 2022
- A TikTok-based entrepreneur advanced the idea that slower career advancement gives you extra time and energy to channel into what’s most rewarding for you. She is part of an influential group of young people critiquing of the idea that simply working more makes you a better employee.
- Further reading:
January 2022
- Things move fast online, so fast that updates, posts, news alerts and emails easily blur into sensory overload. But what if the internet could be harnessed to create a slower, more deliberate experience? That’s the idea behind Pony Messenger, an online service that allows users to compose and receive messages by scheduling once-a-day sends and deliveries, as described in The Atlantic,
October 2020
- Leading effectively - especially during a crisis - takes patience. If you can’t retain your composure in the face of frustration or adversity, you won’t be able to keep others calm. When your direct reports show signs of strain, you need to support them, not get irritated. Solutions to new challenges usually take time to put into practice. To learn more about how patience affects a leader’s influence on direct reports during challenging times, HBR reported how a Georgia Tech professor surveyed 578 full-time U.S. working professionals from a wide range of industries during the COVID-19 lockdown. He asked about their immediate supervisor’s leadership behaviours and level of patience and had them self-report their own levels of creativity, productivity, and collaboration. Their responses revealed that patience had a powerful effect: When leaders demonstrated it (meaning their employees’ ratings put them in the highest quartile), their reports’ self-reported creativity and collaboration increased by an average of 16% and their productivity by 13%.
- The president of Kenyon College argued that the circumstances of the year 2020 naturally pushed us toward slower thinking. Quarantine and physical distancing have disrupted our normal ways of life. Anxiety induced by the pandemic, economic dislocation, and the social upheaval, as well as the trauma of loss of friends and family, have taken a physical toll on our brains and bodies. We have a great deal of unlearning to do: unlearning patterns of our own daily activity, unlearning social inscribed systemic injustice, unlearning the impact of trauma. The difficulty of unlearning is not to be understated, but discomfort and unease could be embraced as a sign of the regenerative nature of slow-thinking, and not interpreted as a personal failing.
August 2020
- Jason Farman explored slowness in Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World - a part-philosophical, part-poetic effort to reclaim waiting “not as a burden, but as an important feature of human connection, intimacy, and learning.” Maria Popova notes that Farman chronicled some of the landmark technologies that have shaped our relationship with waiting - from aboriginal message sticks to the postage stamp to the buffering icon to Japan’s mobile messaging system deployed in the wake of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami - to explore how we can allay the "durational restlessness" of our lives.
December 2019
- The corporate obsession with speed is a problem. Some businesses fetishise saving time, even though it can lead to bad design and costly errors.
September 2019
- Slowing down can be (mis)construed as being lazy. Laziness seems to bar us from living successfully or from thinking in any way well of ourselves. But, to consider the matter from another perspective, it might be that at points the real threat to our happiness and self-development lies not in our failure to be busy, but in the very opposite scenario: in our inability to be ‘lazy’ enough. Outwardly idling does not have to mean that we are neglecting to be fruitful. It may look to the world as if we are accomplishing nothing at all but, below the surface, a lot may be going on that’s both important and in its own way very arduous. When we’re busy with routines and administration, we’re focused on those elements that sit at the front of our minds: we’re executing plans rather than reflecting on their value and ultimate purpose.
- We live in a world of scarce understanding and abundant information. We complain that we never have any free time yet we seek distraction. If work can’t distract us, we distract ourselves. We crave perpetual stimulation and motion. We’re so busy that our free time comes in short bursts, just long enough for us to read the gist and assume we understand. If we are to synthesise learning and understanding we need time to think and to slow down. The modern storm of bits and stimulation, relents only when we sleep. Lost in all of this is the art of stillness.
- Carl Honore's In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed explores why we’re always in such a rush, what if anything is the cure for time-sickness, and whether it’s desirable to slow down.
July 2019
- Today, many people are busier than ever. They have little time to do anything well,including the vital process of thinking things through. For many people, clear thinking is an increasingly rare commodity. People don’t always get around to the necessary steps of thoughtfully weighing their options, building expertise and reaching their own reasoned conclusions to solve problems and make decisions. We tend to rush to conclusions, accept misinformation, fail to see nuance or trust shallow assumptions. However, perhaps we should pause to ponder, as the effectiveness of thought processes often depend on how well we sort evidence, reflect upon it and challenge our conclusions.
June 2019
- For The School of Life, laziness feels like a sin against the bustling activity of modernity; it seems to bar us from living successfully or from thinking in any way well of ourselves. But, to consider the matter from another perspective, it might be that at points the real threat to our happiness and self-development lies not in our failure to be busy, but in the very opposite scenario: in our inability to be ‘lazy’ enough. When we’re busy with routines and administration, we’re focused on those elements that sit at the front of our minds: we’re executing plans rather than reflecting on their value and ultimate purpose. But it is to the deeper, less accessible zones of our inner lives that we have to turn in order to understand the foundations of our problems and arrive at decisions and conclusions that can govern our overall path.
November 2018
- Allowing ideas to form by slow thinking is the best way to foster the inventiveness that helps make art so impactful, argued Quartz.
September 2018
- The BBC is slowing down radio programming. Radio 3 will soon be broadcasting the sound of herded cows, a forest hike, and other meditative audio works.
August 2018
- Software should encourage us to stop and think, claimed Quartz, pointing to a WIRED warning that, from impulse buys to knee-jerk reactions, we’re using technology to make the world more haphazard, and that we should be using it to slow us down, not speed us up.
- Slowness as a movement is about the idea that to be fast, you first have to be slow and get things right. The seeming acceleration of just about every facet of modern life seems to be such that if you blink you miss something.
- A growing number of people are deciding to opt out, downshift or otherwise "go with the slow" in order to take back their time. There is even a growing slow food movement and a renewed interest in handcraft movements.
- It has also been argued that procrastination and delay improve the quality of knowledge, collaboration and understanding.
Topics
Levels
Timelines
Spaces
Signifiers