Work Smarter Not Harder: 7 Ways to Embrace Slow Work

By now you’ve probably heard of slow living, a movement and life philosophy dedicated to a more thoughtful and sustainable pace of living.

Within the slow living movement more generally, there are many sub-categories in every area of life from slow food, slow fashion, and slow parenting to slow money and slow work.

While slow living has become a pretty trendy concept and is connected in many people’s minds with a certain Instagram aesthetic (think linen, neutral colors, straw market baskets, and hand-thrown pottery), there’s actually a lot more to the slow living movement than meets the eye.

What Is Slow Living?

At the heart of it, slow living is all about being more present in the moment, living in a way that respects the natural world, including the changing seasons and the impact these have on our bodies, as well as our bodies’ need for rest.

It’s about simplifying and leaning into peace instead of hustle.

It’s about doing less, but better. This might mean buying fewer items of clothing but spending a bit more when we do on something that’s ethically made and made to last. It might mean taking longer over our meals and not seeing them as a means to an end, but as something to savor and enjoy.

Slow living blogger and author of Chasing Slow, Erin Loechner, wrote one of my favorite explanations of slow living:

“Slow living is for connection, for community. For looking a crossing guard in the eye when we thank them. For making the time to help the woman in aisle nine find the olives. For having the space in our day to welcome an impromptu visit from neighbors, for having the space in our mind to open the door wide even though the hallway’s a mess. It is thinking about the way we live, and asking ourselves why.”

Slow Living Puts Values First

To me, slow living is about being guided by our values and putting these first, rather than being guided by pure convenience, speed, or profit.

Slow living invites us to create a life that feels good from the inside, rather than one that just looks good according to external measures of success.

To live slowly means saying I’d rather have these few good things and appreciate them deeply, than try to have all the things and live in a state of perpetual striving and dissatisfaction.

Slow Living Encourages Us to Find Our "Enough"—In a Good Way!

It’s about cultivating an awareness of what “enough” means to us.

So, how does this approach to life affect the way we work?

Won’t slowing down and opting out of hustle culture have a negative impact on our productivity—and, ultimately, on our impact in the world?

The short answer is no, and there’s a lot of interesting research on how rest improves our creative thinking, problem-solving, and productivity to prove it.

What Is Slow Work?

If slow living more generally is about being intentional about our actions, slow work is all about applying this same intentional approach to our working lives.

Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, describes his take on slow work (which he refers to as "essentialism") as “learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of your life.”

Advocates of slow work claim that working more (longer hours, fewer breaks, multitasking between many different projects) doesn’t necessarily mean working better. In fact, the slow work approach encourages us to work smarter, not harder. 

Put simply, slow work is about acknowledging that you won’t be able to do all things well, and therefore choosing to saying “no” to most things so that you can do a great job on just a few things that really align with your top priorities.

Rather than letting external pressures, and other people’s priorities, shape how we spend our time and energy, we need to decide what matters for ourselves.

As Greg McKeown writes in Essentialism, “The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.”

Why Hustle Culture Isn’t Sustainable

As an intern at a large environmental charity almost a decade ago, I was struck by something the director of the charity said to me when onboarding me into the team on my first day:

“Our working hours are between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM. I expect everyone to take a proper lunch break and not to eat at their desks, and if you regularly work late it tells me that you’ve got too much work or there’s a problem with productivity and focus.”

Unfortunately, his attitude felt radical at the time, and a decade later still feels outside of the norm. 

The truth is this—when you try to do too much and rarely take time off work, you’re headed towards major burnout.

The Science Behind Too Much Hustle 

According to the Sleep Foundation, studies suggest that roughly 19 percent of U.S. adults aren’t getting enough sleep on a regular basis; sleep deprivation has serious consequences for our health, mood, cognitive performance, and memory. 

In his book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Silicon Valley consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that leisure and rest are vital components of doing good work, and he challenges modern society’s assumption that a 40+ hour workweek is optimal for productivity.

“Today’s workplace respects overwork, even though it’s counterproductive, and treats four-hour days as ‘contemptibly slack,’” he writes, “even though they produce superior results.” 

Indeed, numerous studies have shown that the most prolific creators often have peak output at around four hours of what Alex Soojung-Kim Pang calls “deep work.”

The rest of the working day can either be spent resting and recharging to prepare for the next session of high-impact deep work, or crammed with non-essential tasks that keep us busy but don’t actually have an impact beyond tiring us out.

He argues that our modern work culture is in danger of losing an understanding of what good work means because we value the amount of time spent on a task over the actual quality of the output.

Time Rarely Equates to Productivity

One study that Alex Soojung-Kim Pang cites is particularly interesting. Research done in the 1950s that compared the number of hours academic scientists spent in the office against the number of articles they produced revealed that working longer hours past a certain point not only doesn't increase productivity, but actually negatively impacts it.

Those spending an average of 10 to 20 hours each week at work produced the highest number of articles, while scientists who spent 25 hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent just five hours at work.

Meanwhile, scientists working 35 hours a week were half as productive as their colleagues who spent 20 hours at work a week. 

Obviously, how we measure success and the quality, effectiveness, and impact of our work will vary hugely from person to person, depending on our goals, values, and line of work.

But one thing is clear from research like this: past a certain point, the amount of time we spend at work does not equal quality or productivity, and as counter-intuitive as it might seem at first, rest can increase our output in the long run.

Despite all the evidence to support it, though, the ideas that rest makes us more productive and focusing on fewer things actually increases our impact can feel like lofty ideals. They're easier said than done in a culture addicted to hustle.

This culture has normalized treating humans like machines, and where presenteeism (appearing to work long hours and working even when sick or supposedly on vacation in order to look good in front of your colleagues) is rife. 

How Can We Change Long-Held Work Hustle Beliefs? The Power of Influence

It’s up to those of us who have the power to influence our work cultures and put pressure on the industries and leaders we’re in contact with to speak up for the importance of rest and advocate for cultural and policy changes.

If we don’t do it for ourselves, we need to do it for the single moms working two or three jobs to get food on the table for their families.

This includes policies like paid parental leave, healthcare access, child benefits, living wages, pay increases, and mental health support for challenging and vital roles.

This also means making cultural changes that we can all influence—like normalizing taking vacation, referring to our family commitments at work, and not replying to work emails when we’re off sick or on leave.

Setting and adhering to these boundaries won’t just have a positive impact on our own lives, but will also have a ripple effect, inspiring others who come into contact with us to do the same. 

Work Smarter, Not Harder: 7 Steps to Embrace Slow Work

Okay, so maybe you can get behind the idea of slow work, but how do we actually take this lovely-sounding theory and put it into practice in our working lives?

Here are some pointers to get started.

1. Define Success On Your Own Terms

As long as you rely on external markers of success dreamed up by other people, rather than choosing and defining what success actually means to you, your work will leave you feeling empty and you won’t know how to discern between “the vital few and the trivial many,” as Greg McKeown puts it.

Instead of spreading yourself thin, chasing the next shiny idea that comes along, decide what actually matters to you and how you’ll measure achievements so that you can pause to acknowledge and celebrate when they happen.

2. Clarify Your Top Priorities

Acknowledge that you cannot do it all, even if you "can"—do you know what I mean?

You can choose between spreading yourself thin and doing a mediocre or poor job on many things or going big by committing to just a few vital things.

As Greg McKeown explains in Essentialism, “as much as we’d like to, we simply cannot have it all.” We may as well choose what matters most to us. 

Sometimes, it can feel as though we don’t have the power to focus on just one or two things, but we can learn to push back against this with a little intentionality.

If, for example, your boss asks you to take on other tasks while you’re working on something already, politely tell them what you’re working on and make it clear that you’d need to pause that to work on the other things they want you to do.

Ask them to clarify their top priority in terms of your workload, and see if you can reach a mutually comfortable understanding of the wisest way for you to use your time.

3. Stop Multitasking

Research shows that multitasking has a terrible impact on our work, negatively impacting productivity by 40% percent, according to molecular biologist John Medina.

We often multitask when we have too many different tasks on our plate, or haven’t clearly defined our top priority, so clarity is vital.

4. Plan Thinking Time In Your Schedule

Greg McKeown is a big advocate for scheduling in time to think. His work shows how rare it is for people to do this, but how effective it can be when trying to solve problems.

“No matter how busy you think you are, you can carve time and space to think out of your workday,” he writes in Essentialism.

“Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, for example, schedules up to two hours of blank space on his calendar every day… At first, it felt like an indulgence, a waste of time. But eventually, he found it to be his single most valuable productivity tool. He sees it as the primary way he can ensure he is in charge of his own day, instead of being at the mercy of it.”

5. Identify Your Real Top Needle Movers

When you ask yourself which items on your to-do list will actually have the biggest impact, you’d be surprised how many unnecessary and distracting things you can prune off that list to help you focus on doing just a few things, and doing them well. 

One example of this is the slow content movement in marketing, which encourages people to think about putting more time into creating one thoughtfully crafted long-form piece of content like a blog post that can gain evergreen search traffic over time.

This is vastly different than the swiftness of social media posts—that may get a flurry of attention, but then quickly get buried in people’s newsfeeds.

Ask yourself where your energy is best spent, and do a few select things really well.

6. Set Boundaries

Being really clear about when your working hours are—and, on an even more granular level, when you’re in your inbox answering emails versus when you’re in the flow of a project doing the deep work—will not only help you to be more intentional about your working time, but it will also help those around you to respect your time.

Use these scripts for out-of-office messages to set professional boundaries, and follow these steps to setting clear boundaries with your colleagues from the moment you first interview for a job.

7. Use All Your Vacation Days

This one may sound like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how hard many people find it to actually take the paid leave that they’re entitled to.

As a Brit working in the U.S. for several years, I was shocked to discover that my full-time job only entitled me to 15 days of paid leave a year (including sick and personal days), compared to the 28 days of paid holiday time (not including sick days) that all full-time workers are given as standard in the UK.

On top of that, my American colleagues didn’t habitually take all of their available holiday days.

I wish this didn’t need saying, but it’s not lazy to take all the holiday time you’re entitled to—it will make you a healthier, happier, more productive, and creative worker.

Why Slow Work is the Future

One of the most exciting things about slow work is the potential impact it could have on the diversity and inclusiveness of our workplaces.

Only when we slow down enough in the workplace can we really start to value the unique contributions different people can make in a diverse workplace.

We need to slow down in order to:

Valuing the ability to muscle through illness and other challenges facilitates the progression of people have the luxury of “pushing through,” or pulling late nights regularly at work, to the exclusion of people who are unable (or less able) to do this.

It also fails to acknowledge that each and every one of us needs to care for our health and happiness beyond the workplace, regardless of how physically fit and able we appear to be.

Whether we call it slow work, Essentialism, or something else entirely, the basic principle remains the same: slowing down and being intentional about our working time, keeping the bigger picture impact we want to have in mind, and letting our values guide our work, is the best way to do good work, not just busywork.

Slow Living Resources

Interested in learning more about slow living? Here are a few resources mentioned through this piece as well as some other resources you might enjoy. 

Slow Living Books 

Slow Living Blogs