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Slowing Down to Move Forward
My kids often joke that the three-toed sloth is my spirit animal. I’ve fallen into the trap far too often in my life that busyness = productivity when in fact busyness is often the enemy of productivity.
Bertrand Russell or John Lennon or someone else said, “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
In his essay In Praise of Idleness (1932), Mr. Russell does say, “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”
Mr. Russell isn’t advocating that we all lay around all the time and do nothing but eat BonBons and watch Netflix. He is, however, trying to help us understand (from 1932) that we’ve been sold the idea that success means constantly moving (the hustle culture), but progress often starts when we slow down and reassess where we’re going.
The Hustle Culture Myth
Somewhere along the way, like so many people, I started to measure my success by how many items were on my to do list and how full my calendar was. Long hours, little sleep, and constant activity have been the hallmark of my life for way too many years. I’ve worn them as a badge of honor, but I have begun to question my own narrative a lot recently.
Way back in 2007, I tracked what I was able to accomplish by hour on a spreadsheet. It was painfully obvious that after 8 hours of continuous work, my productivity dropped, but I convinced myself that it just meant I needed to work more hours to get the work done.
Another missive from Bertrand’s In Praise of Idleness, “A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief that efficiency is the supreme virtue, and that idleness is a vice.”
Not all activity is progress, and not all stillness is wasted time.
The Power of Strategic Pauses
In 1921, a 14-year-old boy named Philo Taylor Farnsworth was plowing a potato field in Rigby, Idaho, when inspiration struck. As he looked at the parallel lines of freshly tilled soil, he imagined a way to transmit images electronically by scanning them line by…
