I am toying around the idea of slowing down on purpose, taking time to not rush things but to do them slowly, to tell the brain, hey I am not in a rush, I want to do it slowly, I am not eager to rush on to the next thing. Whatever I can do by 5 pm, it will be enough, there is tomorrow always.
The rushness is a weird phenomenon, we are bossed by the productivity idea, to be always busy, to always jump from one task to the next. But overall, what matters are a few key projects we are working on, everything else is just nice to have but not essential. Cal Newport coined the term “slow productivity” which is I think the most important idea in the 21 century.
Slow productivity follows the idea of slowness, it does not matter how much effort you put in today, as long as you give it full attention, even if it’s just an hour, you will move mountains in 5 years. The key is to figure out what will be relevant in 5 years, so you can focus on it. And what will be relevant in the next 5 years? The easiest way to find that out is to look at what did not change in the last 5 years. What is still relevant today that you could have mastered by today?
Fundamentals are what will never go out of style, people are looking for new and esoteric things when in reality all you have to do is focus on the fundamentals, master that and there is nothing stopping you from becoming an expert at pretty much everything.
Is software engineering relevant today? Master fundamentals of it (data structure and algorithms). Is open source still relevant? Start a new open-source project and focus on it for the next 5 years. Is Java still relevant today? Master the Java programming language.
The process of working on something slowly but with a focus on the next 5 years is what matters, everything else is just busy work that will not matter in the next 5 years.