Slowing Down

February 9, 2026

A day is a remarkably long time. It can be easy to forget that. Sometimes I like to take a minute and stare at a clock, feeling the eternity of each second.

But more often than not, I find myself at the end of a day, questioning how I managed to spend all of those hours occupied with something.

This is a common idea in regards to “wasting time”: for example, you might wake up on a saturday morning and decide to watch an episode of anime, and then one thing leads to another and it’s already past midnight and you should really be getting to bed. I’ll ignore this topic because it is an unrelated problem¹. For the sake of this post², we assume that you equally value everything you spend your time on.

Auto-Pilot

We are in the cockpit but we aren’t controlling all the inputs. There are too many inputs to control.

When’s the last time you thought about the mechanics of

• Brushing your teeth?
• Washing your hands?
• Backing out your car?
• Typing a sentence with a keyboard?
• Executing a series of vim motions?

Sure, you probably chose to initiate these actions, but once they were initiated, you weren’t commanding all of the fine-grained actions that your body performed to make the action happen.

You can think of your behavior as a network of roads that’s repeatedly being groomed every time you travel across it. You build a habit/skill/routine by repeatedly grooming the same path. Every time it is groomed, the path becomes clearer, easier to follow. Some paths are inherently harder to groom, and some paths are still hard to follow even once they are groomed many times over³. By living, you end up with a network of paths. You only have so much capacity for grooming each day, so you spend most of your time traveling (and re-grooming) paths you have already taken.

This idea applies to higher-order actions too. You back out your car automatically (on auto-pilot), but, even if you aren’t thinking about it, you automatically drive to work too. Automatic actions (groomed path segments) compose (and become groomed trails).

Where’d the cheese time go? (I don’t know)

When you repeatedly do laps on an especially high-order highly-groomed path, it can be easy to spend a lot of time without realizing it. The loop becomes so well-groomed that it can be hard to escape.

For example:

• competitive programming competitor starts coding before groking the problem, starts debugging, doesn’t realize that their solution is ill-founded until they have a rejected submission. repeat.
• ambitious young basketball athlete is clearly giving 101% but is hyper-charged, spazing around the court and racking up fouls
• guitar student repeatedly tries – and fails – to play the same three second lick (as opposed to struggling through a longer passage)

Tension / Speed

It’s hard to ignore that all of the above examples have a commonality of assumed effort/tension. The person in question clearly wants something, but they are “trying too hard” to have it, which is messing them up.

They need to alter the course of the path they’ve been following. Changing it entirely is hard/impossible but also unnecessary. It’s most likely that they just have to change a few parts of the path, by adding/removing a some segments, then stitch it together again. Doing so requires effort and practice (re-grooming). Which is against instinct to do when we are tense. And the tension is often the result of trying to move too fast (hence “slow is smoothe; smoothe is fast”; “you’ve gotta break it down, slow it down, before you throw it down”). The obvious irony is that, by trying to move fast (by trying to value time), our instinct is to tense up and lean into these well-groomed paths, however most of the time the most well-groomed path isn’t the fastest one to follow; they often lead us in circles.

Go

You can’t escape the path-grooming paradigm, so don’t try to fight it. You will always be following paths and will never have capacity to off-road all the time. But you do have just enough capacity to off-road a small percentage of the time. Strive to study your trail network, to groom intersections, to expand your grooming kit, and to remind yourself that too much tension is ineffective, not just exhausting.

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