Go slow, to go fast [Part 2] - Practical applications
Go slow... to go fast.
I went from being biggest procrastinator to someone with calm and consistent discipline using that little mantra.
This is Part 2 (Part 1 is here) where I share practical applications to getting discipline and living your best life.
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Pop quiz.
It’s 10 pm and you have a deadline tomorrow at 8 am. You’ve been procrastinating hard on an assignment by watching YouTube. You’re now stressed and panicky. You feel an enormous amount of anxiety that’s amplifying your impulses for just a little more of your vice, while you think about all the work you desperately need to do, yet somehow dread (and the sleep you’ll have to sacrifice to do it).
What should you do?
A) Slap yourself in face, call yourself an idiot for wasting the whole damn day, wrap a belt around you and the chair so you stop getting up to grab junk food, and FORCE yourself to do the thing and be done.
B) So the opposite of that. Detach yourself from your current situation. Put your coat on, grab the dog, and go for night walk. Waste more time not doing the work....
C) Send your professor a corrupted/unopenable PDF file, in the hopes that'll buy you a day or two.
Answer to that in second (it's not C, unfortunately). But first a little context...
Last week I posted here a short post on the idea of “going slow to go fast”, as in, in life there are many ways in which trying to do things the ‘fast way’ often leads to mistakes, delays or poor performance; so in reality the ‘slow way’ would have in fact been the faster way. We’d do well to remember and repeat this mantra, or a similar one, in times where we find ourselves stressed and rushing.
The post did quite well with over 2k upvotes, and I later noted that I was amazed and pleased because it was a testament to the maturity of the people of this sub—such advice is nuanced and counter to more 'pop' and easy to digest notions of self-discipline that centers around just do it pep talks.
Anyway, one user noted that I didn’t fully tackle the practicality of such advice. Like it makes sense to check for the t-shirt tag when putting on a shirt in the dark (lest you put it on backwards), but how does this notion extend and apply to getting disciplined, i.e. ending procrastination and compulsions to check Reddit, YouTube etc, starting up on good habits and living out our best lives.
So that’s what I want to address in this post.
Quick note though; I’m no expert, though I play one on TV (aka I have 10+ years of addictions and struggles, and it’s only just recently that I’ve started getting my habits in order). These are just the result of my various brainstorms through the week—so please add some ideas in the comments!
Also I found I could split these into two camps: the obvious stuff we already know yet need to be reminded again and again, and the less obvious that we’ll probably resist at first because it goes against our instincts.
The obvious ones
Rushing things
We all know what it feels like to be super late for something, only to become more late because in our haste we forgot something important—the dang report you had to submit—and had to double back. The slow way is to just take a second to stop, calm your nerves, and think clearly about what's to come and what you'll need to pack.
So think about where else this logic applies. Perhaps you're writing an exam and time is super tight. You read the essay question fast, assuming you know what the question's about. Halfway through, you go back just to check something—then your heart sinks as you realize your assumption about the question was off. 15 minutes wasted.
Multitasking
This one’s a no brainer. I think there’s been one documented case of a lady in the mid-80s that managed to pull of multitasking for 54 minutes; the rest of the data shows we are all terrible at it and should just stop, or at least minimize it.
Example: eating while watching/listening to something on your phone. I do this (I’m always on an audiobook at lunch), we all do this, but we’d do well to just pause the thing once in a while and bring our attention to our eating. There’s so much happening with each mouthful—aromas, textures, tastes, temperatures, pleasures—that we’re missing out on by being distracted. I’m not saying we need to convert each meal into a one-pea-at-a-time meditation session—we often just have 20 minutes to eat plus try to sneak in a little entertainment—I’m saying it’s a great habit to plug into the present moment when we remember, and doing this while eating is particularly advantageous. This is called mindful eating, and is currently often recommended by Dietitians to curb compulsive eating.
Making assumptions
"Measure twice, cut once" This proverb stems from the fact that, as humans, we carry certain biases about being right. We assume the first time we measured something we did it correctly. Checking to see if we are indeed wrong would suck, so our ego resists it.
In carpentry, making bad assumptions means needlessly wasting a costly and beautiful plank of oak. In real life this could mean being lousy at arguing something because you assume you know what the other person is arguing. It’s crazy how often people are wrong about that; I see it on Reddit all the time.
Or it means making assumptions about ourselves and our abilities. We tell stories about ourselves. We extrapolate: I failed yesterday, so I’ll fail today, and probably tomorrow. Then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Step one to getting out of a rut is identifying our limiting beliefs, our faulty assumptions, and dismantling them piecemeal (best done with proper support and guidance). This takes works. It’s the ‘slow’ process. But it’s the fastest way to tangible healing of your mental health.
The less obvious ones
Recouping from procrastinating.
Let's go back to that question from the beginning. It’s 10pm and you have that deadline, while you’ve been procrastinating hard. You’re now stressed and panicking.
What do you do?
The fast way to get it done is to slap yourself in face, call yourself an idiot for wasting the whole damn day, wrap a belt around you and your chair so you stop getting up to grab junk food, and FORCE yourself to do the thing and be done.
The slow way is the opposite. Detach yourself from your current situation. Put your coat on, grab the dog, and go for night walk. Take the time to clear your head.
This is not time wasted; this is an investment.
When you get back, don’t force yourself to work. Again, this is the slow way here. Plug into your mental space. Observe your thoughts, feeling, emotions, cravings. Look at the resistance to work. Look at your motivation levels, or lack thereof. Allow for compassion… the slowest, most unproductive emotion of them all. It’s ok. Again, it’s an investment that will pay off. Wait. Wait some more.
When, and only when, you reach that tipping point where you sort of ‘feel’ like started, then you can get to it.
Keep it slow, smooth and steady. It'll get done. It always gets done.
Dealing with depression:
The good Lord knows how well I know depression.
I know it through experience: a decade and counting and now 8 years with it diagnosed—yet I know it because I’ve gotten pretty dang good at looking at it dispassionately; at using mindfulness to manage it and let it run its course.
Before I ever sought help, I tried to do it the fast way. I tried to fight it, to remind myself of all the way I was privileged and that I should be grateful and that people had it worst. I tried to not let it get to me, to ignore it while I was at work, swatting at it like an annoying fly, trying to be productive. That never worked, of course, and my ruminations and self-judgements just made it worst.
Now I have the slow way. I stop. I observe. I look at it like it’s a random dark rain cloud that saunters in on a sunny day for no apparent reason—which is often the case. My observing has no effect on the cloud. And I’m not being productive while I do nothing but look at something uncomfortable.
It is what it is. Sometimes the depression passes fast enough, sometimes not so much. Managing depression eats up a lot of my time, there’s no way around it, no cure really, but that’s the ‘fastest’, most time efficient way I’ve found so far.
Starting off your day – planning your day
The fast way to start off your day is to just start. You know all there is to do, so why bother planning it out, making a list, or TimeBoxing things, etc.
It’s not so much a rhetorical question. Why bother?
My answer is: Because empirical data shows you fricken should bother, dummy.
Time planning is not time wasted.
I’ll drop in a little plug at this point. I’ve been furiously working on an online course centered on setting yourself up to have what I call “Solid Work Sessions” which is basically a chunk of time where you get things done with focus and effectiveness. Most of us have countless ‘derailed’ work sessions in our past, and I’ve identified the few emotions that do the derailing, and what are the antidotes (part of it is clever planning). If this piques your interests, be sure to get on my email list - simond.me).
Starting off your work session
Again, the fastest way is to just get started when you sit down, even if you have a clearly defined plan or set of tasks to accomplish. But this leads to complacency—the feeling that nothing bad could ever happen—and in that lies EPIC vulnerability to rationalizing a little vice (bah, I should check Insta for a second… get it out of my system…) and down the rabbit hole we go, until your entire work session is just a jittery mess of compulsions and binging.
The slow way is to sit down carefully. Slowly. Diligently.
The slow way is to be mindful of what’s going on inside. Patient. To not force yourself to start. To observe the emotions… overwhelm, resistance, regret, stress… even a sense of urgency and resolve to get going can and should be observed patiently. The best way to get to work is with a quieted mind. To just enter into it without force, coercion or even ephemeral blasts of inspiration.
Starting up on good habits
The same concepts applies to a larger scale. The compulsion is to draw out a vision of who we want to be, and the lifestyle we wish to take on, then we decide to go all out on full speed. Like a speeding train, all it takes a half-eaten chicken nugget on the track for it to derail into a fiery inferno. The fast way is no good.
Better to start slow. Lift that dumbbell at the gym because you feel like lifting it. This doesn’t mean you don’t show up. This doesn’t mean to don’t to lite the pilot light—things won’t ever take off unless you give it an initial nudge.
u/andrewranzinger wrote an epic post about this, about how, in his words, “high performers are successful as a result of consistent action, not intense effort”. In my words, high performers do what they do because they show up and wait, not because they force themselves to crush it.
If art is your thing, you still have to sit in front of the canvas. You still have to prep the paints and hold the brush. But only move the brush when the creativity Muse is with you, guiding you along. Having a gotta get it done rough mentality will only scare her away.
This is the slow way, and achieving your biggest dreams in the shortest amount of time requires it.
Cultivating mental health
There is so much you can do to cultivate mental health, but all of it takes time. All of it does not have clear and apparent/immediate/direct benefits. From less tangible things like loving yourself, offering yourself forgiveness and self-compassion... to practices that straight serve zero purpose other than to give us a little boost of satisfaction, these things are slow, but they are not a waste.
An example I'll end on is from u/Impossible_Swing_304. He suggest the ‘Mind-hack’ of keeping a "Have done" list:
Instead of keeping a to do list, keep a HAVE DONE list. By seeing everything that you’ve done, it will make you more motivated to work even Harder, because you can see the results of your hard work right in front of you!
I love that one, because it encapsulates perfectly everything I'm trying so hard to get at. A 'Have Done' list is so ridiculously 'useless' from a productivity point of view... what could be the benefit to using precious time to note your small wins after you do it?? Yet at the same time it's pure genius.
So, one last time: Go slow.... to go fast.
- Simon ㋛