Slow down and be more productive!

Posted on: 26 February 2021 by Mohammad Abdul Mateen, Mechanical Engineering student & LinkedIn Learning Student Champion in Hints, tips and advice

It is all a matter of missing a minute in our speedy life? Currently, we are living at the pace of life and the state of impatiently, but not an emergency because we feel the pressure to always be doing something whether it is really needed to be done at that moment.

This pace of life is incessantly increasing yet instead of improving our productivity and creativity, it has increased the stress level and causes us to make more mistakes.  

We all work daily from morning till evening and we have multiple tasks and meeting back-to-back on the daily basis. Most often when we move from one task to another, we rush and make mistakes because we try to finish and get the job done.  Do this rushing and speed make us more productive and creative? And what if I told you that the slow is faster than fast? 

Most recently I have watched a course on LinkedIn Learning, which is presented by Dave Crenshaw, who is an author and leadership coach specialising in productive leadership. In this course, I learned how to slow down and be more productive.  

By slowing down does not mean you are slow and maybe behind your colleagues, but slowing downing makes you more productive, provide less stress, save your time, and improve your relationship within and out of the workplace. It is always a matter of 60 seconds which most of us think is nothing or too little, but it is a lot.  

When you are working on a long task, breakdown your tasks, for example instead of working one full hour task or meeting, work for 50 minutes or two 25 minutes slot and these 10 minutes and 5 minutes respectively will give you breath and restore your missing minute. You can also ask others for help to have a meeting and appointment for 25 minutes or 50 minutes instead of half and a full hour and this will give you room to breathe, take care of your basic necessities and restore the missing minute.  

Every time you catch yourself in rush, you make mistakes. Remember the last time when you were rushing to finish a task or an email someone about what mistakes you made? What was the outcome? And what was the quality of the work you did? How did others react to that rush? You did the task again?

Now think about what you could have done better by slowing down. Once Napoleon said to his valet, “dress me slowly I am in a hurry” which means he was in hurry and wants to get things done properly.  

We all have the moment when we find someone hurries us in some task that they have done, or they need help with. We do not think before responding and later we find ourselves trapped between two tasks.  For example, a colleague asks you that his car is breakdown and want you to drive to the city centre with him to post some important letters and you agree to drive with him. When you get to the city centre, your colleague tells you that he forgot one important letter in the office and your first response is, that is fine. On the way back you stuck in the traffic and now when you come back to the office you realise you need to finish a very important task to submit in the next half an hour. What can you do now, drive to the post office or finish and submit the task? The best way to respond is to slow down find the missing minute and then make a commitment. 

I have talked about the missing minute in the article and now I tell you how to find that missing minute in your life. Open the countdown timer on your device without closing your eyes look at the timer and do nothing for 1 minute. ………… Now consider you feeling how this 1 minute felt to you. Imagine that 60 seconds of time has started to feel like forever. This practice once or twice a day will help you to recalibrate your brain and body to a healthier sense of time.   

Watch Dave's full course here.