I’ve been hiking lately, walking a lot, mostly on mountains.
I live not too far from the Alps, and there is a never ending choice of trails, peaks, and alpine refuges with great food and views.
Walking is a slow practice, especially with kids. If you rush, your vision tunnels to just the path in front of you, and only to a few steps ahead. You might get there a little sooner, but it feels actually longer, and you miss the whole point.
Instead, if you take your time and enjoy the journey, that’s when you see the switchbacks, the shortcut through the rocks, the spots where you need to push and those where you can rest for a minute or three. And the context you’re in, the views, the smells, the silence.
Pause Before You Start, And When It’s Helpful
When you’re at the base of the mountain, or when you are at the beginning of a large project, or even at the start of the day, just before you get on Slack and in meetings, take a minute.
Pause before you dive in, not to overthink your situation, or to plan ahead every little detail, but just to breathe and to look, really look, at the objective.
Before a big or small decision, before sending that email, before committing to a direction, take your time. Sleep on it. Go for a walk. It feels like a waste of time, but in the long run it’s not, I promise.
That’s my theory anyway. Sometimes I follow it, often I don’t. Guilty as charged.
Don’t Stall
Now let’s be clear: there’s a difference between moving slowly and being stuck.
Moving slowly is deliberate, and most importantly, it is still “moving”. You keep progressing, just with more focus and attention. You’re gathering information, testing ideas, letting patterns emerge.
Stalling is avoiding. You circle the same questions without new information, you insist on being “thorough” beyond reason, you prepare to jump but never quite do.
You know you’re stalled when you keep revisiting the same points without progress. You know you’re moving slowly when each pause teaches you something new or lets you make a step forward.
But It’s Tricky To Not Stall
If you’re not used to slowing down, slow and stuck feel similar from the inside. From the outside, they both can pass as thoughtfulness and deliberation.
After all, they both involve not making quick progress, so you might not realise which one it is until hours, or even days and weeks later. The difference only becomes clear in hindsight.
Yet, for some reason, the default options for a lot of humans (including myself, and most people I know) are to either rush like there’s no tomorrow and zombies behind you, or to sit back and essentially wait for something, God knows what, to happen.
Deliberate, slow progress is tiring, so the path of least resistance is to pretend you’re taking things slow, while actually not “taking things” at all.
Speeding Up
Now, slowness isn’t always the answer. Sometimes going fast is exactly right: when you’re learning by doing, when the cost of waiting exceeds the cost of getting it wrong, when you’re in a reactive situation where you need to act.
If you’re the pilot of a plane with an engine failure, you absolutely want to act fast and not pause to think too much. But you also need to avoid panic and confusion. To go fast, you need training. You train by going slow, then ramping it up. Remember what special forces say about training: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”
Building the Practice
As I said, I’m far from having this mastered. I’m still looking for ways to slow down, especially on days when everything is busy and rushed because of things outside of my control.
What helps is creating friction, not removing it. Blocking time that stays mostly empty. Not optimising every process. Leaving room to think “is this still the right thing?” before I do it. Ending the day deliberately instead of just stopping when I’m too tired to continue.
None of this is revolutionary. But it works for me, most days, and on the days it doesn’t at least I know what I’m missing.
The work and life commitments will always expand to fill all available time, and the urgency will always feel real.
But as Lao Tsu said, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” The trees grow. The seasons turn. The work gets done. Just not faster than they should.