Slow living as a product designer in a hurry-up culture
How the week feels as a product designer, what it means slow living, why, and how I am doing it in some areas of my life.
It may sound counterintuitive to talk about slow living in an era of the glamorization of busyness— especially in the tech industry.
But, as a product designer working remotely and, lately, in fast-paced growth environments, slow living seems aligned with the core of the design, which is intentional. It is about being present for each part of the day.
The goal of this article is to explore those subjects:
- The two typical weeks as a product designer
- Why slowing down?
- What does it mean ‘slow living’?
- How I am slow living as a product designer
- And in other 4 areas of my life
And the purpose of sharing it is that I believe attention can be contagious. By talking about it, one can start paying attention to some of the same things. It reminds me of the speech David Foster gave in 2005 on "This is the water", where the point of the parable he starts with is that the "most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about".
Two typical weeks as a product designer
I’m currently a product designer at Bunny Studio and I work in a squad with cross-functional members and no product manager (PM). This has been a new experience for me, and I got excited since I learned about it in the job interview.
I assumed some of the PM's responsibilities and I started seeing the challenges, especially in my agenda. During the week I have at least one alignment with the Head of Product, the Operations team, and the Marketing person. I frequently align with the engineerings that are working on the projects and the UI designers. If there is research involved, I also align with the UX Researcher.
Having said that, in my personal experience, I feel that I have those two typical weeks:
1.It is like breaststroke swimming: even though it is the slowest competitive stroke, it uses the most energy. It feels like I move with my tasks mindfully. I take my head out of the water, looking beyond, and go to another focus time under the water, thinking deeply.
2. It is like the Cheese Rolling tradition: a surprising run down the hill. A treadmill of busyness. Many things are going on at the same time and I barely feel control of my speed. My tactic is to stay up and make sense of any information that comes fast.
— Thursday already? I think when I see the week is almost over.
This second one is fun sometimes — when looking back —as our brain is wired for novelty. Any random ping of a new message can trigger a feeling of something new coming, mixed with busyness and productivity.
But, it does not mean I'm accomplishing more because I'm going faster or multitasking. When this happens my attention and cognitive bandwidth narrow, like in a tunnel, and I feel exhausted at the end, that's what the behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir call "tunneling". I'll explore more on this below…
Why slowing down?
Being busy can feel good, but it can lead to a false reward. Feeling productive is not the same as actually being productive. When we enter the "tunneling" mode, we focus on immediate responses, often on low-value tasks that jump in rather than the big projects or long-term strategic thinking.
It seems like we are averse to idleness, and it is funny to think that one study found that people preferred giving themselves electric shocks instead of doing nothing.
When I was reading books about 'doing nothing', I realized that reading, especially books related to other subjects rather than product or business, is one of my ways of doing nothing. It recharges me.
“If we aren’t achieving anything, does that mean we’re failing? The logic is unsustainable, and once we link feeling successful with being busy, finding contentment with our life becomes more of a challenge” —Melanie Barnes, author of Seeking slow
If you are reading this article you are probably a privileged person that can maybe think of slowing down and I'm aware that unfortunately, this is not everyone that can afford it. Going back to the concept of tunneling (that relates to scarcity), it was first mentioned in research on poverty.
Trying to understand what leads poor people to make bad choices, a professor of behavioral economics, Anandi Mani, and her colleagues found that the scarcity creates such a tax on mental bandwidth that the sugar cane farmers’ IQ tests dropped 13 points between flush and scarce times.
"There is a direct parallel between scarcity of money and scarcity of time. We don't give ourselves space or introspection to think about what might be more meaningful to do." — Mani
Another research, where participants were playing online being either the "rich" or the "poor" one in a number of guesses. The "poor" ones ended up being more accurate or careful with their resources but narrowed their bandwidth to such a point that they were unable to strategize about the future, making disastrous choices such as borrowing at exorbitant rates, which can reinforce their conditions of poverty.
And what if we just try to think faster? The Management consultant Tom DeMarco wrote in his book, that our thinking rate is fixed. Even if we try to think faster, we can't and we are likely to make worse decisions.
In summary:
- Being busy can feel good, but it can lead to a false reward
- Feeling stressed and pressed for time our attention and cognitive bandwidth narrow as in a tunnel
- Our thinking rate is fixed and can only cloud our judgment
- More decisions don’t matter if they are poor decisions
- Under pressure the quality of decisions plummets, we don’t think ahead
- We are less likely to subtract when under “cognitive load” — Why people forget that less is often more
What does it mean 'slow living'?
Slow living isn’t about doing everything slowly. In the book ‘Seeking Slow’, the author describes it as a lifestyle that encourages a slower rhythm and values a mindful approach:
“It is about intentionaly doing things and being present for each part of our day. By choosing quality over quantity, we gain more opportunity to savor the simple pleasures and experience those moments wholeheatdely” — Melanie Barnes, author of Seeking slow
Here are some readings related to slow or mindful living:
How am I slow living as a product designer?
Being a product designer with some PM responsibilities allows me to have more access to different areas, more vision of the strategy, and impacting the end-to-end product development process.
But, it also leads me to that challenge in my agenda, with less slack time…
And it relates to the tunneling point mentioned at the beginning of this article. Below I share some things I’m doing to manage it.
1. Making things visible
The author of the GTD framework uncovers a space mechanism on how to get more space in our heads. He says we don't need more time, we need more space and the golden good is to be more present.
"You didn’t evolve to remember, remind, prioritise, or manage relationships, with more than four things” — David Allen
To open space in my mind, I write things down, otherwise, they keep coming back in my mind hijacking my attention.
If I have pending things in my mind and I'm far from the computer, I write on my phone using the Google Keep app, then I sent it to my note-taking tool.
2. Processing
Weekly, and sometimes daily, I review the list written in step 1, then process following the framework:
- Do it now: if less than 5 minutes
- Schedule for later: if I want to remember about it another time
- Delegate: who can help me with it? Or who will do better than me?
- Eliminate: if I can.
To make things actionable I find it important to separate tasks from projects.
A task is something small to do. A project is usually a series of tasks. If this is not clearly defined, I'll probably procrastinate.
In this example, I have a project:
— Organize my note-taking system
If I only put it as a task, it can be a problem. "Organize" is too broad. By looking at it I could feel discouraged due to the lack of definition.
As it is a big project, I break it into small tasks to help me to start right now, for example:
—(project) Organize my note-taking system
— (actionable task 1) Write down the areas I use daily
— (actionable task 2) Write down the areas I believe are important to get organized first
— (actionable task 3) Organize at least 3 areas that I use daily
And that's how it goes.
3. Prioritizing and sharing
Each week I list 3 big rocks to accomplish that week. I learned that unplanned things will emerge during the week so having the 3 most important things upfront, helps me to be mindful of the trade-offs when pursuing new things.
At work, we publish our weekly goals every Monday and it helps me to stay committed to them and give visibility.
4. Reviewing
The next week I go back to what I've accomplished in the previous week and it is a moment where I see the big picture, the achievements, and reflect on the misses. Then I plan the following week.
I recently put a "Wrap up" time of 15 minutes at the end of my day to make a brain dump and review my notes of the day. This helps me stay with fewer pending topics in my head and organize the notes I took during the day.
Resisting the trap of multitasking
Women are famously known for multitasking but it does not mean we are good at it. Scientific studies show no differences between males and females, and humans seem not to be multitaskers.
Curiosity: the word "multitask" was actually invented by IBM in 1965 to describe the capability of the IBM system. Only later we started using it for humans.
It is worrisome that this behavior is encouraged in women, as it has a terrible effect on attention and misleads us into thinking we are doing more than we are doing. Productivity can be reduced by as much as 40% by the mental blocks created when switching tasks, according to Meyer.
“People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even — they’re even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they’re actually worse at it. So they’re pretty much mental wrecks. “ — Clifford Nass — A psychology professor at Stanford University
To avoid this trap, I like to set blocks of time in my calendar to align the expectations of the activities I aim to do at a given time, such as a time only for Product Sign-off. If two engineerings share on Slack their finished work for product sign-off and I have another project to work on, I know what there are two blocks of time for "Product sign-off" in my agenda, so I continue what I’m doing knowing that the time for that activity will come.
It reinforces to my mind that there is no need to jump on it right away and start switching contexts.
Those blocks of time are not set in stone, though. Depending on the urgency of the projects I open exceptions. The idea is to have the rule to guide me, otherwise, the exceptions become the rule and it gets messy.
I also set generic blocks for "Focus time", to avoid that people schedule meetings at that time.
There is one expectation that sometimes I like to multitask that is when I'm cleaning the house. The tasks are repetitive, more body-related, and do not involve risks to others, so sometimes I listen to a podcast or audiobook while cleaning.
Time-boxing activities
To time-box an activity helps me to focus and be more efficient. It is basically the Pomodoro Technique, and sometimes I just guess an estimation of how much time I’d like to invest in that task, and then I put a timer.
Respecting the time-off
Weekends and some parts of my day are reserved for things not related to work. Besides that, I was lucky enough to join Bunny Studio in a moment where they were experimenting with a 4 day work week (4DWW), being Fridays our chosen day off.
It can be difficult to not work on Fridays, as I was used to it. But the company aligns the expectation of what this time is for, encouraging people to study and feeling comfortable by doing nothing as well.
The initiative started in Q3 of 2020 and is called "push, learn and play", where we can choose to work (push), learn (study) or have fun, do household chores, or do nothing (play).
"The goal is keeping up a fast-paced working environment, ambitious goal setting, and reaching our ambitious objectives whilst working 20% less time" — Bunny Studio
This has been of such importance that I usually feel recharged on Mondays and excited that I'll have 3 days off.
A curious thing about working fewer days is that, before I knew what a PM (Product Manager) was, I met my husband, Cali, that was working as a PM 3 times a week in a startup. I thought it was bold, as nobody at the company was doing the same. They agreed on this experiment once he suggested it in the interview process. The team he was part of had about 4 - 6 people that worked 5 times a week.
Team leaders at the company used to tell him that he could do his work as a person who was working 5 times a week. Even so, once in a while, they would ask him if he would like to work for the whole week. I wondered why if he already achieves that 3 times a week. But the idea could be that if achieved that in 3 days, imagine in 5 days?
I guess that's how I think when I want to extend my work. But there's always going to have more work to do, no matter if it is from Monday to Friday, or Monday to Wednesday. We could extend it every day.
That's why I guess it mattered more how he positioned himself according to his beliefs and priorities, that was to work for 3 days a week. And he continued working like that for 2 years and left the company when we decided to travel abroad.
I got inspired by his attitude and noticed that if I don’t respect my time off, nobody will. Since then, before I join a company I align the expectations of the importance of my routine and the time I prefer to work.
It is an uncomfortable conversation for me as people usually start at 9 am or 10 am so I explain that I prefer to start at 7:30 am or 8 am, and this means I won’t work until late at night. In my experience, the companies respect it, some even appreciate the openness and manage to fit the meetings within that time.
This short summary of the book 'The art of saying no' is a helpful resource to learn how to say no, something I still struggle with sometimes.
Having a routine*
*Below I'll treat habits, routines, and rituals interchangeably for the sake of simplicity.
I noticed that without a routine, I become more passive in life, waiting for the right moment and motivation to do things important for me. I realized it rarely happens so I started loving routines.
Cali and I follow the same routine. From Monday to Monday we wake up at 4:15 am. (We started waking up at 6 am, but it has been over 2 years since we changed to earlier.)
The small and intentional habits that follow when we wake up are the foundation to keep us accountable for what we value, like our relationship, things related to our physical and mental health.
Here is an overview of my week:
The time for lunch can vary sometimes due to meetings that coincide with it. And grocery shopping can happen at lunchtime sometimes.
Morning routine, before sitting in front of the computer:
- Make the bed: it sounds obvious but we don't skip it. This works as an act of accomplishment early in the day. We sleep on a foldable mattress on the floor and every day we make the bed when waking up, which includes folding it. This opens space in the room, and things look tidier;
- Mindful practice: we use an app to set up 10 minutes of mindful practice, following the time to inhale and exhale. We are currently doing a Buteyko breathing exercise;
- Body exercise: Mondays and Thursdays we to a Bodyweight HIT for 30 minutes. The rest of the week we do stretching exercises;
- Walk and swimming in the ocean: we are Brazilizians that used to live in São Paulo, the capital, and thanks to remote work, we were able to move to Espírito Santo and live at 5 minutes walking from the beach. Every day we go for a walk. From Friday to Sunday we swim, so we walk for 15 minutes to where the ocean is flat and swim for a few minutes, around 5:30 am. This routine was similar in São Paulo, with exception of the beach. We used to walk in the neighborhood for at least 15 minutes after the body exercise. When the quarantine came we used the 640 stairs of the building to exercise — going up and down twice;
- Cold shower: every day the first shower of the day is cold, no matter if its winter or summer;
- Prepare and eat breakfast: we have followed a whole food plant-based diet since 2017 and eat oatmeal with bananas and sunflower seed every day. We sit in front of the living room window to eat our breakfast looking outside, in silence. It is our moment of mind wander;
- Households chores: anything there is pending I do at this time or the end of my day;
- Journaling and morning checklist: I use Logseq* to do my journal, brain dump, and morning checklist (e.g. check email, answer WhatsApp, pay bills, read or study). This is also the moment where I plan the day and my week;
*Thanks to Cali, a sommelier of tools, that introduced me to Logseq. :)
Working time:
At Bunny Studio we are fully remote, and I can choose the best time for me to work, aligned with the team's agenda. By having a routine, I know the trade-offs I'm making if I choose to overwork.
I start at 7h30 am and here is how the morning follows:
- 10 minutes break: in the middle of the morning, around 9 am I take a break from the computer. I go to the bathroom, drink a tea, put some potatoes for lunch into the microwave and chat with Cali;
- Lunchtime: we eat the same thing every day. It is the potatoes prepared in the middle of the morning (they take less than 3 minutes to prepare and 25 minutes in the microwave).
- Breathing exercise: after eating and cleaning, we walk to the beach and do a 3-minute breathing exercise. It is been an important pause in the day, even though it takes only 15 minutes total;
Then I continue working until 5 pm, sometimes 5:40 pm. I rarely pass that time as I feel exceptions can easily become the rule and it won’t be sustainable long term for me.
I wrap up my work time doing a brain dump and putting due dates for pending tasks.
Evening routine, after work:
- Take a shower: it is a ritual that besides cleaning, it helps me to refresh myself and change from the work mindset;
- Have dinner and connect with my husband: we prepare dinner, eat together, talk, watch TV series;
- Read and sleep: around 7 pm we go to bed and I read until I fell asleep, which can be around 8 or 9 pm.
Subtracting to minimize cognitive load and decision fatigue
There are some pre-made decisions in areas of my life that facilitate the process of saying no and being consistent with the path I want to be on, having that routine is one of them.
I highly recommend this short video about quitting making hard decisions.
And it can be curious to think about subtracting when people often prefer to add things instead of getting rid of them. But designers are more used to following some principles for reducing cognitive load.
Here are some areas of my life where I apply these principles to avoid decision fatigue and minimize my daily cognitive load:
- Clothing/shopping
- Eating habits
- Self-care
- Social life
Clothing/shopping
People tend to think that by having more things we'd become satisfied or happier at some point, but that's not the case long term thinking.
The hedonic treadmill explains that we tend to adjust our mood to the level of happiness we felt before a terrible or a great event in our lives, for example, a lottery winner.
We would expect those people to be much happier than the rest of us, but that's not what a study showed: "lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events."
Still, we are strongly persuaded to buy more, and as Melanie Barne shares in her book Seeking Slow, in our society the consumerism gives us a sense of identity and self-worth, and this is even more apparent for women:
“… women are marketed to, as magazines are good at showing them impossibly perfect ideals, and with the turn of a page, showing them products that will help them attain this unrealistic definition of “beauty”, wether it is clothing, beauty product or home decor” — Melanie Barne
When Cali and I traveled abroad in 2017, we quit our jobs, donate some things (clothes and utensils), sold other belongings (bed, car, etc) and the trip lasted around 4 months. During this period we lived in a hostel and a farm exchanging work for sleeping, then went to some friend's house, all with only our backpacks.
When we came back to Brazil, we decided to keep the same amount of clothing.
Our house is filled with borrowed stuff, thanks to our family. Our living room and bedrooms have the right amount of stuff for us to live well. Still, we believe there is room to have less.
We buy clothes around once a year or longer. Things last shorter as we use them more often, so we substitute if they get holes, stains, or become too large. When buying, we usually think:
- Do we really need this? Why? What is the best cost-benefit long-term thinking? What other options we could explore?
When we are too much in doubt, we like to open a spreadsheet to write the criteria involved and how each product fulfills them.
Sometimes we ended up not buying or postponing, researching until we feel more certain.
As most of our clothes are comfortable and look the same, we use them for everything, sleep, and go out, no matter the event. It could be a wedding or just going to the supermarket.
This simplifies the daily decisions and makes me value what I have, considering its impact.
"Happiness is not about more, is about enough." — Unkown source
When eating…
I became a vegetarian at 14 years old, and switched to a whole food plant-based diet, in 2017. This diet is of minimally processed foods.
It excludes animal-based foods like meat, dairy, eggs, and fats, such as margarine, coconut oil, or any other type of oil. I eat what I cook 99% of the time.
I won’t trust myself to walk into a bakery and let that “me of that moment”, with all the smell and beautiful appearance of the desserts, decide if I’m going to eat them or not. This would trigger me to think short-term and buy them.
So having found a diet that is aligned with my beliefs of less negative impact for myself and the planet, reduces the problem of deciding what to eat. Those self-imposed restrictions of the diet are the rules that became automatic for me (with time), and I don’t think of them anymore. It is a pre-decided decision.
In this study, psychologists found that people who agreed to be good at resisting temptations were actually those that reported fewer temptations. This means they were hardly using self-control!
"The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying." — Source
In the beginning, I loved to vary my food. I loved sweets with dairy products, and I was addicted to cheese. It took me a few months until I readapt my palate.
To continue the variety of foods I used to eat, I learned how to substitute the previous ingredients. I learned to bake cakes or bread without eggs, oil, and refined ingredients. It was exciting so I created a food-related blog to share those experiments and learnings.
When the pandemic started, Cali and I decided to leave the big city, São Paulo, we stayed for 3 months in some family’s house, leading us to simplify our eating habits.
Since October of 2020, we've been eating basically the same things every day:
- Oatmeal with banana and some seeds for breakfast
- Potatoes and salad for lunch with fruit for desert
- Oatmeal with tomato for dinner with plantain for desert
Sometimes we vary with whole rice or lentils.
Years ago I could think that this would prevent me from having pleasure or that it is torture like Sean Parish writes on the FS blog:
"A lot of extraordinary things in life are the result of things that are first-order negative, second order positive."
These eating habits were an accomplishment for me and after going through this experience, I see how important it was to think long term, knowing why I was doing it.
The pleasure became the same once I got used to the new flavors. Now, my reference of pleasurable foods is different. It is like people that live in a new culture with different eating habits, and get used to it.
By decreasing the number of ingredients, and variety of foods, we waste almost zero food, as we know the quantity we eat and simplified our daily decisions at the market. The pleasure went back to the same level as it used to be when I eat brigadeiros, but now with simpler and healthier (from my perspective) things.
The flavor of a mango, a banana, or a caqui are sweeter now, as I have no other sweeter reference, and my memory of the pleasure I had eating as I used to, now it is the same when I eat the fruits.
My guilty pleasure is not close to what it used to be in terms of sugar, and fat but I still have one. It is a whole wheat bread that I make with no sugar, then I add one tablet of 70% chocolate cocoa inside of it and heat it in the microwave to melt the chocolate. My rule is to eat it only on Fridays to Sunday.
In self-care…
It is been around 4 years since I stopped using makeup and painting my nails, which was an uncomfortable process that helped to increase my self-confidence. Cutting my hair short was a gradual process that came after that.
Besides the sense of freedom and the process of helping me to build my self-confidence, it helped me to simplify my routine in many ways:
- Using only shampoo to wash it
- No need to brush
- No need to moisturize
- No worries about hairstyles
- No need to go to a hairdresser, I cut it
- Dries quickly
It has been 3 years and the trade-off I would say is the cold sometimes. I didn't realize how much my hair used to warm me. And, in the beginning, I had to deal with some people's disappointment, which was a learning journey for me.
In social life…
It is been 4 years since I quit social media, except LinkedIn. In this experiment, I also stayed 2 years without a smartphone. In 2019 I went back to using my smartphone but since then I turned off all the notifications, except the bank app.
I feel more detached from my phone and I actually forget to check it sometimes. I do it three or fewer times a day. The nonstop notifications used to prevent me from moments of silence and mind wandering, increasing my anxiety.
Without social media and a phone with limited memory (8GB), I minimized my daily cognitive load and started feeling more present.
Conclusion
My life is a permanent work in progress, and these sharings are valid for the time I’ve lived and written about it, but it all can change at any time. Also, I don't believe any of it is right, wrong or that someone else should follow it as a recipe. Those things work for my current context and each person can find their way of living, integrating work and life if it makes sense.
When I questioned what I want by working longer hours, it reminds me of the Parable of the Mexican Fisherman. A summary of it is that an American investment banker goes to a coastal Mexican village asking the fisherman why he didn’t stay longer to catch more fish. He answered he already had enough to support his family’s needs and would not stay there for the rest of his time because he sleeps late, fish a little, plays with his children, and friends.
The banker insisted on how much money he could make if he buys bigger boats, creates a distribution unity, and grow the business, and that it would take him around 15 to 20 years.
— But what then? asked the fisherman
— Well, then you could announce an IPO, sell the company and become very rich. Said the banker.
— Then what?…
— Well, then you could retire, move to a coastal fishing village, fish a little, plays with his children, and friends.
That's exactly what he was already doing and I believe it requires contentment and discipline to want and live with less, maybe even more difficulties than following the status quo, working to have more.
As Henry George wrote, a human is “the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied”. And those practices above are my attempt to live more of the way I value today, having time to nurture my partnership, studying, reading, drawing, talking to people I love, working, feeling bored, and doing nothing.
Those are the two questions I've read from James Clear newsletter's that I leave open:
What happens if I slow down? What happens if I speed up?
