Slow Tools
The article discusses the potential downsides of prioritizing speed over process in various activities, particularly writing. It argues that the benefits of engaging deeply in a process can be overlooked when tools are designed to make tasks faster. The author advocates for the creation of tools that enhance the quality of the process rather than just its speed.
- ▪Many people equate faster with better, which can be problematic.
- ▪The author suggests that the true bottleneck to speed is often not typing speed, but thinking speed.
- ▪Tools should be designed to enrich the process rather than eliminate it.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Quarter--mile.
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