There seem to be a lot of people who just assume that “faster” means “better.”

“There’s this thing that used to take me 1 hour. Now, thanks to this magical tool, I can do it in 10 minutes.”

This perspective can be problematic when you’ve not fully internalized the purpose (and related impact) of a process.

For example, if I could write an essay like this one in two minutes instead of an hour or two (even if the output was the exact same essay!), it would in many cases be worse for me. Because I wouldn’t have got to spend an hour or two really thinking about the topic. Because I wouldn’t struggle through manual re-writes, through editing, through deleting, through re-organizing. I would lose out on the benefits of the process.

Now you may be thinking: “What’s so bad about losing out on the process? Are you saying we should not make anything more efficient? I do not see you going out to the well to get your water.”

My answer to that is… It depends.

It depends upon how you see the purpose of what you’re doing.

If you are writing and you see the purpose of your writing as simply generating an end-result one time, then I think you’re right to not really worry about the process. Automate it. Use the faucet.

But what if you see writing as a multi-purposed practice, one where a large proportion of the benefit comes internally? One that impacts how you think, how you generate ideas, and how you make sense of the world? Well then, of course, you would pay close attention to the process. You would be skeptical of “automating steps in the process” for fear of losing out on many of the benefits you actually care about—all those improvements to how you think and understand.

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I would like to make the more general case that process is underrated. In a world where more and more tools are promising to help you go faster, I would encourage people to think more deeply, once again, about what it actually means to go faster.

I propose the bottleneck to going faster, in many cases, is not your typing speed. It’s your thinking speed. And, more precisely, it’s your ability to think clearly about what’s actually important and make good decisions with that information.

Many of today’s most popular tools are designed, more or less, to help you ‘type faster’. And some are pretty good at that; at helping you generate copy, create a website, research customers, and so on.

But it’s not without cost. It’s not without skipping over “the process.”

Which makes me wonder: how many activities are like this? Surely it is not only writing where the process drives a huge proportion of the benefit. And if many other activities are like this, what are the downstream consequences? Does the world receive less unique ideas? Less clear thinking? Less good solutions?

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Designing slow tools doesn’t mean reverting back to the proverbial pen and paper setup for everything (though I do quite like pen and paper).

Good quality running shoes, for instance, enrich the activity of running but do not eliminate the process. It takes a long time to run a marathon no matter what shoes you’re wearing, and wearing nice running shoes is a lot better than wearing hiking boots. But if there was some advanced teleporter technology that allowed me to complete a marathon in 10 seconds, I would say no. That would skip the process.

How do we build technology that is more like good running shoes and less like a teleporter? And what would that look like across all kinds of relevant activities?

  • Tools that help you create better plans (instead of just creating plans faster)

  • Tools that help you set better goals (instead of deciding the goals for you)

  • Tools that give you useful feedback (instead of doing the things for you)

  • Tools that make doing something more enjoyable (instead of just more productive)

In some cases, perhaps the best approach is to not create any tools at all.

If you know of (or are building!) tools that you think fit this description, email us and let us know.

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