How I Finally Learned to Slow Down

I've always struggled with "doing less". So I took a different route.

Welcome to Making Time. What makes a life feel vivid rather than rushed? These are my reflections from rural Oregon on attention, ritual, and making things by hand. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

Years ago, we all took one of those tests at work that purports to find your greatest strengths.

In fact, we’ve done a few of these. They’ve all been my idea, because the premise makes a lot of sense to me. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, find what you’re naturally good at and do more of that. Not only is it a better way to serve others, but it usually makes you happier too.

This particular test is supposed to identify your top five strengths. I answered each question as honestly as I could, hit submit, and waited for the praise to rush in.

But when I saw my top strength, I deflated immediately. According to this test, my greatest strength was this: ambition.

It’s not that I felt it wasn’t true. In fact, it confirmed all my worst fears about myself. I wasn’t actually that good at anything, I was just a striver.

The problem with striving

I knew that my ambition had helped me gain a lot throughout life. I am not terribly money motivated, but I am very achievement-oriented. Run a marathon? Why not. Write a book? Sure, I can do that. I’ll art direct it too. All while running a small business.

Oliver Burkeman calls this type of personality an “insecure overachiever.” Accomplishing things is my way of self-soothing, of putting things in place, of feeling I have some control. It’s also long been the locus of my self-worth.

But I also knew that it did little to actually alleviate the anxiety of life as a human. In fact, all it did was create ever higher standards that I could never quite meet.

That’s the thing about strengths. They’re helpful until they’re not. Sometimes, you learn to lean so hard into them that they seem to flip like magnetic poles and turn into your greatest weakness.

My neurosis about not meeting my own unrelenting standards bothered me. But what I hated even more was this feeling that I was always in a tremendous rush.

When you feel like you’re never doing enough, you start to feel that every activity must be finished as quickly as possible so you can move to the next thing. Everything is a checkbox. You skate along the surface of life, marking things off a list and moving on, never stopping to feel anything.

Maybe “not feeling things” is part of the point. But it is a frenzied and joyless way to live.

I felt that I was never giving anything the attention it deserved. Working in the garden on a sunny afternoon was pleasant, but also felt like a chore I needed to finish so that I could do ten other tasks before the weekend ended. No matter how much I told myself, “Just slow down!”, there was another voice with a, “But…” to counter it.

I wanted to be mindful. I wanted to feel like I was caring deeply for my world, and putting my heart into a smaller number of activities instead of trying to do everything.

Over and over, I would try to pare down my to-do list. I’d try to convince myself not to push so hard, that I just needed to accept that I couldn’t do everything that I wanted to do in my limited time on earth. This helped to an extent, but I’d still find myself sneakily adding more into my days. I’d still be working on one project, and fretting about the next. It’s hard to undo a lifetime of habit, especially a highly rewarded one like Getting Stuff Done.

The other way to “do less”

So if I couldn’t bring myself to do less, what if I approached it from a completely different angle?

What if, instead of trying to mold myself into someone less insecure and ambitious, I simply tried to pay attention to each and every activity in my daily life?

With this approach, I’d stop multitasking all the time, and focus only on what I’m doing. Instead of catching up on email or texting someone back while I gobble down my breakfast, I’d just sit by the window and enjoy my food. I’d notice the taste of the porridge and fruit, sip my milky morning tea, and just be open to that moment.

When pulling weeds in the garden, I’d sink into the feeling of caring for a little place on earth, of creating something through dedication and care. I’d feel the stems in my hands, the smell of fresh soil, the progress of the little seedlings. I’d let myself, in that very moment, go deep.

The slow life is a life of caring

What I discovered was twofold.

First, if you approach even some of your everyday activities with care like this, you no longer need to think about “slowing down.” It takes care of itself. If you are committed to this, even some of the time, you will not be able to accomplish as much, so tasks will naturally just have to fall off your plate.

You no longer feel in control of how much you can get done. It feels like you’ve discovered a natural barrier, a way of organically filtering yourself. At the end of the day, instead of chasing a feeling of pride in having ticked off 20 items, you feel the sense that you put yourself into each one. If there’s more to do, there’s more to do.

Second, it is far more enjoyable. You notice things that were a blur before. You actually get better at things and gain skills through paying attention. You find that there is pleasure to be taken all around you, every day, in nearly every activity. What once felt like work starts to feel like play.

This goes for people and other creatures too. By giving them the attention they need, you not only build stronger bonds, but get to feel the pleasure of loving someone.

If you feel too busy for this approach to life, you may need it even more. It can feel impossible to dedicate your full attention to every single part of your day, from doing the dishes to commuting to work to dealing with the laundry. I’ll be the first to admit that I still find myself rushing and list-making in my head constantly.

But just because I can’t do it all the time, or do it perfectly, doesn’t mean I can’t practice. The more I try, the more natural it becomes, and the more deeply that sense of care goes.

Thanks for reading Making Time. If you’re new here, you can subscribe for free to receive new posts a few times a month.