Slow Down. Think. Maybe Even Do the Work Yourself.
There seems to be an unspoken rule in modern work culture:
Everything must happen faster.
Emails must be answered immediately.
Projects must be delivered yesterday.
Strategies must be produced before anyone has had time to think.
If you take your time, people start to worry. If you pause to reflect, someone inevitably asks whether you’re “still working on it.”
Apparently the highest professional virtue in 2026 is speed.
Not thoughtfulness.
Not craftsmanship.
Not even usefulness.
Just speed.
If you cannot move quickly enough yourself, don’t worry - there is now an entire industry ready to promise that artificial intelligence will do it for you.
Faster emails.
Faster reports.
Faster presentations.
Faster thinking.
Clearly the main problem with human civilisation was that we were thinking too slowly.
The Cult of Speed
Speed used to matter in situations where time genuinely mattered.
Emergency medicine.
Disaster response.
Firefighting.
Wait! Most of the modern economy is not an emergency. Right? Why do we behave as if every Slack message, every email, or every WhatsApp ping is a life-or-death situation?
People apologise for replying after three hours. Meetings are scheduled within minutes of a question being asked. Documents are rushed out simply so something - anything - exists.
Speed has quietly stopped being a tool and turned into a cultural obsession.
The faster you move, the more productive you appear. The fact that the output may be mediocre is treated as a secondary issue and so we produce an endless stream of quickly assembled slide decks, shallow reports, and forgettable content.
Not because it is good, but because it is fast.
The Performance of Busyness
Speed alone, however, is not enough. Modern work culture also demands visible effort.
Working long hours has become a peculiar badge of honour. People proudly announce how late they worked. How many emails they answered. How little they slept.
This is usually presented as dedication. In reality, it is often just poor boundaries combined with a workplace culture that mistakes exhaustion for commitment.
Tired people do not produce brilliant work. They produce tired work.
Sadly, because many organisations reward visible activity rather than thoughtful outcomes, the theatre of busyness continues.
Calendars fill up.
Messages multiply.
Everyone looks busy.
Yet somehow, very little improves.
The AI Productivity Fantasy
We now arrive at the latest chapter in this story: AI. AI tools are genuinely impressive. They can help with research, editing, coding, brainstorming, and plenty of other tasks.
The way they are being used says a lot about the culture they are entering, though.
Instead of asking how AI might help us think better, the dominant question seems to be: “How can we produce even more stuff even faster?”
People proudly demonstrate how they generated an entire strategy in five minutes. How they produced twenty social media posts before breakfast. How they automated half their communication.
Wonderful.
Quick question: If everyone is doing this, what exactly are we adding to the world?
Mostly more noise.
The internet was already drowning in average content. Now we are simply generating it at industrial scale.
The Efficiency Trap
The obsession with speed and automation hides a rather uncomfortable question.
Efficient at what? Efficiency is only valuable if the thing being produced actually deserves to exist.
Producing mediocrity faster does not make it valuable - it just increases the volume of mediocrity. Many AI-generated outputs share the same strange characteristic. They look polished and sound professional, but they feel oddly empty.
Real insight rarely emerges from speed. It comes from thinking.
From reading widely.
From conversations.
From sitting with an idea long enough for it to mature.
None of which are particularly compatible with the demand to produce everything instantly.
The Radical Idea of Slowing Down
Here's a mildly rebellious thought: What if we simply slowed down?
Not in the sense of becoming lazy or inefficient, but in the sense of caring about what we produce.
Instead of asking “How quickly can we deliver this?” we might ask “Is this actually worth delivering?”. Instead of wondering “How can we produce more content?” we might wonder “Does the world really need another piece of content?”
This shift alone would eliminate an astonishing amount of pointless output. It would also free up something that modern work culture seems to fear deeply:
Time to think.
Doing the Work Yourself
Another uncomfortable idea is that not everything should be automated.
Yes, AI can help, but sometimes the process of doing something manually is precisely where the value lies.
Writing forces you to clarify your thinking.
Research forces you to question assumptions.
Design forces you to consider how things actually work.
Outsourcing all of that thinking to tools may produce faster outputs, but it also produces shallower ones.
The craft quietly disappears and with it, much of the meaning of the work.
A Small Rebellion
Perhaps the most radical act in modern knowledge work is surprisingly simple.
Slow down.
Take the time to think before producing.
Protect quiet space where ideas can actually develop.
Resist the urge to generate something instantly just because a tool allows you to.
Occasionally even do the work yourself.
Not because technology is bad, but because thought still matters and also because the world probably does not need another perfectly formatted piece of content that nobody actually wanted in the first place.