Alligator Energy 🐊⚡️

Or, How to Weaponize Slowness

Weaponizing Slowness

For years in the startup community, or the working world in general, doing things fast has been given a preference over doing slow work. As a person who does work slowly and more methodically, you may feel that the world is against you. However, doing slow work actually works to your benefit in more cases.

Frantic Energy vs Focussed Work

One have a limited amount of continuous energy to do/accomplish things throughout the day. You can either focus it on a single task and finish it end-to-end or push several half-finished tasks which may break when being put to the test. So, it’s better to focus your energy on one task and finishing it rather than frantically burning through your tasklist and ending up not finishing anything to completion.

This doesn't mean the philosophy of parallel work doesn't work. You just have to be more deliberate about trying to bring things to completion and even waiting a day or two to maybe come back to that task later on.

Brute Forcing vs Thinking About Solution

Classical Hard Work thinking elucidates that continuously working hard on a problem without taking a break means that you will find the solution. However, the best/most optimum solution always ends up coming out during the downtime.

That's why the trope of one end up realising the source of the bug or the solution of the problem when in the shower. The downtime ironically make your brain work faster.

Hence, it's better to find the door rather than bang your head against the wall to leave the room.

Alligator Energy

Moving slow also means you end up collecting a lot of latent energy. Energy which you can use to move forward in a large jump, accomplishing multiple things in one go (like an alligator).

Another place where I personally notice this is when we are completing a large number of tasks which look like they aren’t accomplishing anything, but when all of the jigsaw pieces fall in place, we finally see the big picture being completed.

In other words, "Move slow and preserve things".

dang (HN) on Alligator Energy

Writing is thinking, so let me know what your thoughts on this article are, and whether you think differently on any point :)

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Cover Photo by Appolinary Kalashnikova on Unsplash