How slowing down makes you faster
Sounds like an oxymoron ? It’s not. If you are anything like me, you want things to move forwards – whether at work or at home, with the kids, the partner, the holidays etc. You have or come across a new idea for making things better, more exciting, more fun (or less stressed, less restrictive, less busy etc) and you want to make them happen, move them forwards and so you embark on making them happen. You become busy doing what it takes. Inevitably, there will be obstacles which slow you down, things you did not foresee and so your progress is not as fast and linear as you might have expected or hoped for.
Lots of us at this stage tend to work harder, put in a little bit extra, it may speed things up. With the next roadblock and challenge coming along we might even get frustrated with progress being such hard work and taking so much longer than expected. Slightly irritated we keep pushing on. At this stage we are working totally IN the “project” and we continue to resort to work harder and faster, especially when faced with unexpected obstacles that hold us up. It is exhausting, we are carried along by the momentum, much like being caught in a wave at the seaside.
We could really do with a break now, but we don’t allow ourselves the rest because we are already behind schedule (whose schedule ?) and slowing down now, would just make us feel worse and delay the completion of whatever it is we are doing.
Well, would it ?
Astonishingly, the opposite seems to be true. Slowing down actually makes you faster. But how ? you may ask yourself.
By regularly taking time to work OUT of the “project” and thinking and reflecting about the progress achieved to date, the challenges at hand and not only the goal but the purpose of the specific goal. By slowing down and looking in, we often see new possibilities, new solutions and sometimes new directions leading to changed goals. It is like taking a metaview, floating above the day-to-day work and respective issues and looking at the whole project, if not our whole life. Amazing insights emerge from this perspective, many of which can save lots of time and dare I say energy.
You might realize that circumstances have changed and the specific goal you had set for yourself is no longer worth achieving. Instead of noticing this at the end of all your hard work, you could modify your goal early on. You might realize that there are more resources in unrelated areas that you would not have utilized, being too busy pushing the current project/s forward. You may realize, what was meant to be a new and exciting fun idea/project has stopped being fun altogether. Slowing down and reflecting will allow one to explore new ways of injecting more enjoyment into work, creating effectiveness without having to labor harder or faster.
Allow yourself to slow down and reflect regularly trusting that it will pay off and get you to what really matters. Life is too short, for one to be ineffective.
Entries RSS