The art of slowing down
Originally posted on Medium on January 29, 2026
Time is of the essence. True. But also, says who?
We’re taught from a young age that speed is king. Tests are timed. Homework has deadlines. We’re measured by our ability to work within a designated timeblock. And rightfully so.
Clearly, you can’t take forever to complete an assignment. Teammates rely on you in group projects (everyone’s favorite, I know). We all heard it: Time is money. Time is valuable. You can never get time back. All of that is true. And yet, something about it has always felt incomplete.
That begs the question though: Why are we arbitrarily assigning deadlines to the soul? By rewarding speed and inventing deadlines that don’t actually exist, we end up rushing through life itself.
I’m more than guilty of it. I’ve always prided myself on efficiency. Optimizing processes, eliminating redundancies, and 10x-ing productivity has taken me places. Promotions. Salary increases. Credibility. Trust from the powers-that-be in corporate environments. Speed isn’t bad; it’s often necessary.
And this isn’t an indictment of speed. Speed matters. Efficiency is necessary. Some things should and must move quickly.
But not all things operate on the same time scale. And not all things should.
Over the past few months, my father was diagnosed with cancer. I came home to be with my family, and in complete honesty, it was a rough transition. The pace of life wasn’t mine. I thrive in fast-paced environments. I like the hustle and bustle. I like speed. I like momentum. I like progress you can measure.
And then there’s home. Some things you can never replace. Time IS valuable, but speed is not always its best measure.
Ever since I got here, my mom somehow convinces me to go grocery shopping with her almost every day. (Seriously, someone tell her we can trim this to twice a week.) From a purely “efficient” perspective, could I be doing something more productive? 1000%.
But it’s not purely about buying groceries. It’s not time = buying groceries.
For my mom, that hour is a break from a heavy reality. It’s a reminder of having her kid back in the house. A bit of normalcy in the middle of uncertainty.
For me, it’s about time as load-bearing support. As following her throught he aisles soo she doesn’t have too rush, giving her a brief sense of agency and freedom — someone is finally waiting on her for once. Time as carrying the bags so she doesn’t have to.
How do you quantify that? It’s not a clean exchange of inputs and outputs. There’s no KPI for emotional relief, is there. No metric for presence. No efficiency ratio for simply being there.
The value of time differs from person to person, and honestly, it differs from day to day, even for me. Some experiences don’t want or need to be optimized. They need to actually be experienced — felt. They want to be honored.
These are the moments and experiences that remind me that while speed is important, speed isn’t everything. And why it matters that we remember this now. We’re building machines optimized for speed, in a work that rewards speed. They can generate content faster than we can read (or use) it. They can optimize processes we haven’t even named yet.
But they can’t understand why my mom needs to go to the grocery story daily. They can’t feel the weight of the groceries I carry back for her. They can optimize for efficiency, but they can’t optimize for meaning. In the age of AI, our competitive advantage isn’t doing things faster. It’s knowing what things should and shouldn’t be rushed. It’s understanding that creativity, connection, and meaning operate on different timescales than productivity.
For a while, this felt like an internal contradiction and I was wondering if there’s any rationale for the different time-scales. How can someone like me crave speed, thrive in fast-paced environments, understand that not everything should be optimized… yet still default to rushing through life?
Turns out, our brains have multiple systems timing systems, or internal “clocks“, that it uses to measure different aspects of our lives.
Circadian clock: The “master”, physiological clock of our bodies. This is governed by a region in the hypothalamus, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) and is the system that governs our 24-hour sleep-wake cycle.
“Corporate” clock: This is the “fast” clock that handles precision, reaction times, efficiency, productivity. Perfect for the hustle of corporate life.
“Experiential” clock: This is the “slow” clock that governs memory, emotion, and presence. Perfect for the moments and times that truly matter in life.
So the discrepancy I felt wasn’t a flaw. I was simply trying to live by one clock while measuring myself by another. I had everything backwards, which is honestly just part of being human.
But these past few months have been a recalibration. A reminder that I can be productive when I need to be and that I don’t have to rush when I shouldn’t.
The real challenge isn’t managing time. It’s choosing which clock to live by in any given moment. Speed definitely has its place. But so does the slower clock.
The one that reminds us why time actually matters in the first place. ❤️