(“The Happy Snail”; courtesy of ruslou)
1. “Slow” is a state of mind. Compare the following:
Busy v. Engaged
Hurried v. Calm
Stressed v. Tranquil
Putting out Fires v. Prevention
Impatience v. Patience
Quantity v. Quality
2. The Slow Food Movement essentially challenges each of us to use local ingredients harvested and put together in a socially and environmentally responsible way. Instead of frequenting fast food establishments, give more attention to where your food comes from, take more care in how it is prepared, and be more thoughtful of the time spent enjoying your meals.
Follow the Slow Food Manifesto: “May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.”
3. Eat slowly. It takes 20 minutes for our stomach to tell our brains that we are full, and if we eat too fast, we tend to eat more than we need to. Every time that you put food in your mouth, put your fork or other eating utensil down and let go of it. Do not pick it up again until you have thoroughly chewed your food and have swallowed it.
4. Instead of multi-tasking–which is stressful and not very productive–do everything with one-pointed attention. In the words of Buddha: “When you are walking, walk. When you are sitting, sit. Don’t wobble.”
5. Create your own “Slow Manifesto”.
6. Get enough sleep. When you’re tired your ability to think and your eye-hand coordination decrease, which means you’re less productive and more likely to make mistakes. In addition, studies show that people who do not get enough sleep are more than twice as likely to die of heart disease.
7. Create a morning ritual that will allow you to begin your day in a calm, unhurried manner, setting the tone for the rest of the day.
8. Take a hike, whether it’s an overnight trip or a half-day excursion through nature.
9. Live by the motto: “A time for everything and everything in its time”.
10. Prioritize. Instead of trying to do it all decide what are the most important things for you to accomplish.
11. Cultivate an abundance mentality. A lot of our rushing about is caused by the fear that if we don’t hurry up, someone else is going to beat us to what we want and we will have to do without. If we change our frame of mind from scarcity to the knowledge that there is more than enough for all, we will naturally slow down.
12. Making the time to take care of your body now is a better strategy than waiting to have to take time off to deal with illness.
13. Spend a day baking pies, tarts, cupcakes, and muffins.
14. When someone is talking to you, give them your full attention. Instead of rehearsing in your head what you’re going to say next, concentrate on what they’re saying. One of the best ways to connect with others is by truly listening to them.
15. Cultivate mindfulness:
“When we do things with only a part of the mind, we are just skimming the surface of life. Nothing sinks in; nothing has real impact. It leads to an empty feeling inside. Unfortunately, it is this very emptiness that drives us to pack in even more, seeking desperately to fill the void in our hearts. What we need to do is just the opposite: to slow down and live completely in the present. Then every moment will be full.” — Eknath Easwaran
16. Set an egg timer to go off after every forty minutes of sitting at your desk working. When the timer goes off, get up, stretch, drink water, take a breathing break, and close your eyes for a couple of minutes.
17. Schedule creativity breaks. Creativity experts agree that taking time for incubation is a vital step in the creative process. After a period of intense concentration, Albert Einstein would take a nap or find another way to detach from whatever he was working on. He described that during these mental breaks his unconscious mind would go on thinking about the challenge and surprise him with an insight when he least expected it.
18. Take time off for leisure. Carl Honoré, author of the best-selling book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed
19. Read The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations
20. Consider using your cellphone only for the reasons it was originally intended: safety, security, and emergencies.
21. Move at your own rhythm. We are all familiar with Henry David Thoreau’s famous quote: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
22. Join a civic group devoted to slowing down, such as:
- The Deceleration of Time, a civic group based Austria.
- The Art of Slow Living, an Italian civic group.
- The Long Now Foundation, a group based in San Francisco, California, established to provide an alternative to a “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking.
- Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit group based in Seattle, Washington, is leading a national campaign to address time famine by using conferences and teach-ins to wean people off their need to be busy.
- Slow Food USA is a nonprofit group that offers an alternative to fast-food eating and industrial food production. It encourages members to plan communal meals and use farmer’s markets. It has at least 80,000 members in 100 countries.
23. Become a citizen of Slowplanet, a web site that Carl Honoré and Geir Berthelsen, a Norwegian motivational speaker, have set up together. Its goal is to be a hub for all things slow, from slow travel to slow shopping to slow design. They advocate the following:
“Slow is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace; it’s about working, playing and living better by doing everything at the right speed.”
24. Work smarter, not faster or harder.
25. Practice random acts of slowness.
26. Join a time bank, such as TimeBanks, USA: For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you.
27. The Sloth Club advocates the shift from the culture of ‘more, faster and tougher’ to that of ‘less, slower and non-violent’.
28. Know when to change gears: when to stop, watch, and listen, and when to shift into action.
29. Catch the sunset.
30. Create a ritual for the end of the day so that you go to bed each night in a calm and relaxed state.
31. Simplify your life so that you don’t try to fill your time with more than you can do. Follow my 100 Tips to Simplify Your Life.
32. Slow down to appreciate beauty. In an experiment conducted by the The Washington Post, internationally acclaimed violin virtuoso Joshua Bell held an impromptu concert at a Washington, DC subway station during the middle of the morning rush hour. The performance lasted for 45 minutes, during which 1,097 people passed by one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written, on one of the most valuable violins ever made. Seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, completely oblivious. Would you have stopped? You can watch a 2 and a half minute YouTube video of the experiment here.
33. Make a commitment to slow down:
“I hereby pledge to slow down for the benefit of my health, my happiness, my well being, my family, my creativity, my community, and the environment.”
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