One week I worked in a way that would look inefficient by most modern standards.
I wrote a short document by hand — 442 words. It took about eight hours. Each sentence stayed only if it felt necessary. If a line didn’t justify its existence, it was removed.
The next day I wrote another document, around a thousand words. That evening I filled two pages in my journal after weeks of writing only one line per entry.
The pace felt unusually calm.
Writing slowly exposes how incomplete many thoughts are when they first appear. When there is no autocomplete, no instant editing, and no ability to quickly rearrange paragraphs, every sentence has to be formed more deliberately.
Most of our work now happens inside fast digital systems. Messages arrive constantly, documents evolve in real time, and tools are designed to keep us moving.
But thinking itself often requires the opposite condition.
Slowness.
As I build software using AI tools, this tension keeps coming up. The same systems that accelerate output can also make it harder to notice whether a clear thought has actually formed.